(Un)Social Club Artefact Wednesday - The Maverick

The Maverick was the newsletter published by the then South Melbourne Supporters Group, a little of whose experience you can read about here, in an article we've reproduced from the old Studs Up magazine.

From my understanding - and I'm by no means an expert - the South Melbourne Supporters Group that existed at the time (a more low key version came into existence for a couple of years during the VPL era) seemed to be a collective of mostly young, progressively minded South fans. What seemed to unite them was:

• That they were fed up with the way the club was being run
• They were fed up with the idiots on the terraces who kept messing up
• Their desire to see the club brought into the modern age and closer to mainstream Australia.
• In addition to that, they wanted to and did contribute to the club as volunteers.

I don't know what happened to this group, its members and whether the people involved deemed their efforts a success. I think it's a story worth telling. If any member of this group has more information, and especially if they have old copies of The Maverick, or at least the rest of this one, I'd love you to get in touch. As part of my abstract goal of documenting and preserving South related articles and missives from independent, non-mainstream South and non-South related sources, I'd love to be able to add further depth and breadth to that history.

I'm not sure when or where I sourced this lone scan of the first page of The Maverick's first (only?) edition, but my suspicion is that I somehow got it off Damian Smith, the Australian soccer historian and creator of the first South website, among many, many other things.