Caricature artefact Wednesday - Steve Kalogeros WEG caricature

The bloody things people have tucked away! I was doing my 100th daily refresh of smfcfans.net the other day, when I saw someone post a screencap of this, which was originally posted on Facebook.

Scene from I Play Soccer, a children's book
by Lorraine Wilson (best known for her
"Footy Kids" series. WEG illustrated the scene
which was partnered by the text:
"Soccer is better than football because it's not
as rough. Only the supporters fight."

Stratos "Steve" Kalogeros was a right-sided fullback who played with South Melbourne Hellas from 1961-1966, making him a member of the great Hellas sides which won four Victorian State League championships in five seasons (1962, '64, '65, '66). According to the discussion in that Facebook group, Kalogeros also coached juniors at South in the 1970s.

Dated apparently to about 1962, what's interesting about this caricature - apart from the appearance of the club's original red vee jersey and the original (?) club badge - is that it's by the cartoonist William Ellis Green. Better known by the handle WEG, with which he signed his illustrations, Green became famous for his posters celebrating the premiership sides of the VFL and later AFL. 

Beginning in 1954 and going all the way up to WEG's death in 2008, these posters became synonymous with Aussie rules in Victoria, which must have struck WEG as somewhat ironic, as I've been informed that he otherwise had no interest in sport. But for fans of the Victorian VFL/AFL clubs especially, the WEG poster was as much proof of your club's success as the unfurling of the premiership flag at the first home game of the following season; the kind of thing that would appear quaint to outsiders, but which was nevertheless intrinsic to the culture of the VFL and its supporters. 

(another Australian sporting example is painting the SANFL premier's colours on top of the West End brewery in Adelaide)

Thus, to have WEG produce a drawing of a soccer player, especially at this time, raises some interesting questions. Like, first of all, how and why did this come about? Also, how big was soccer in Melbourne at that time that any soccer player or club would warrant this treatment? Yes, it's true that South Melbourne Hellas, George Cross, and Juventus were pulling some very big crowds at this time, but it's still hard to imagine that any of them would have broken the mainstream sporting barriers back then, even if the popularity of WEG's posters hadn't really taken off completely until the mid-1960s.

Also, why Kalogeros of all players? There were surely more stylish and attacking players in that squad, like John Margaritis, or one of the Anglo-Australians like Ted Smith who'd also represented Australia in the past. I wonder if there were drawings produced for other soccer players of the time? Since the caricature lacks any Herald branding - the newspaper that WEG worked for - it's plausible that this drawing is from a private commission.

Having then contacted the WEG estate, his son-in-law John Enright got back to me, and suggested that this was indeed likely to have been a private commission - a not uncommon example of the kind of freelance work cartoonists would do outside their newspaper jobs. Unfortunately, WEG wasn't much of an archivist, and most of his drawings (and the stories behind them) are now lost to the aether. As for reproducing the work... Enright seemed to indicate that if we could get hold of the original (or I assume at least a good scan of it) we could reproduce this caricature - we'd just need to get the estate's permission, which Enright seemed to indicate would be pretty straightforward.

See also this Steve Blair caricature, by a different artist.