Book review - A double dose of Knox City

Knox City is an unremarkable club. That's not a slur, but merely a statement of fact. They are not and never will be a household name, or even a cult name in Australian soccer. Being unremarkable does not mean however that the club is unimportant. Socceroos have come from this club. Knox played in Victoria's top-tier. Knox even had a brief a stint in the National Youth League. And if nothing else, Knox City is important to the people who continue to attend and support the club, as they have done in the club's various guises since 1951 - remarkable longevity for any club in Victoria, but especially for one not tied to a major ethnic community, and especially one situated in the far-eastern suburbs.

What is remarkable about Knox City however is that where most clubs in Australia have managed to produce nothing in print about their history, Knox is able to say that there are two published works about the club in circulation.

Covering the first 50 years, some 18 years ago Chas Collison put out From Basywater to Knox City: The history of a soccer club, 1951-2001, a small booklet discussing the first 50 years of the Knox City Soccer Club. The A4 booklet runs to no more than about 20 pages, but within those pages it does its job admirably. Augmented by photographs, the booklet briefly covers the origins of the club within the local community of German members of the Temple Society; a list of office bearers; brief decade-by-decade narrative summaries of the club's first 50 years; a divisional history; some stuff on the club's juniors; and a page on the off-season All Nations Cup tournament, which Knox hosts on an annual basis.

It's well presented, and is the kind of thing that most clubs should be able to produce without too much effort. An interesting element of Collison's booklet, and one which might otherwise go overlooked is that it was completed with a small government grant given during the International Year of the Volunteer. It's the kind of thing that more clubs should be aware of: that not only do these kinds of grants exist to help clubs compile, preserve and present their histories, but that Football Victoria also offers assistance in winning these grants (though in Collison's case I assume it would've well pre-dated such federation assistance).


Bruce Darnell's Knox City FC: An Updated History from 2017 is by the author's own admission not an attempt to re-write Collison's work, but rather to make note of what's happened since; namely a sharp decline after a brief flirtation with the Victorian top-flight, and the eventual steadying of the ship and the club's status in the Victorian third and fourth tiers.

But Darnell also goes back in time and tries to fill in gaps that perhaps didn't occur to Collison. Thus Darnell also provides space to Knox's women's teams, its juniors and veterans teams, and also about 20 pages of photographs. About 100 of the 180 pages on offer are dedicated to the statistical history of the club. This includes divisional histories, league and cup information, as well as information about office holders, record holders, and an updated list of All Nations Cup winners.

The centrepiece of Darnell's statistical summary is his cataloguing of the results of 1,432 of 1,440 of Knox's senior men's league matches up until the end of 2017. The fact that Darnell has been able to achieve that level of detail for a predominantly lower league club is incredible. Darnell's summary also provides a kind of snapshot for the state of Victorian soccer records. Mainline federation (that is the not the amateurs or church leagues) results for senior men's are usually available if you look hard enough; scorers for those games are much rarer, and line-ups rarer still; and for women's teams all but impossible to get, especially before the mid-1990s. Darnell's work also highlights the collaborative nature of soccer historiography as practised by Victorian amateur soccer historians. Darnell pays credit to the many historians and stats collectors who have come before him, including John Punshon and Mark Boric.

One disappointing thing about both of these publications is that neither appears to have made it to the State Library of Victoria's collections. It'd be a safe bet that few people outside publishing circles are aware of the concept of "legal deposit" - that is, the legal requirement of sending in copies of your publication to a state or national library. It's not just a matter of legal obligation; it also makes good preservationist sense. Australian soccer clubs are notoriously poor record keepers when it comes to history, and thus having a copy of a text published on this or any other club in the safe hands of a state library is a good idea/ And apart from helping researchers and the curious have a safe, easy to find copy, it also takes some of the pressure amateur collectors and archivists from having to preserve and somehow promote all of this material on their own.

Copies of Darnell's book are reportedly still available from Knox City. For those who want to peruse a copy of Collison's book, I have scanned it and made it available here.