Australian Football

Trove Project

The section called ‘Treasure Trove’ showcases longer articles sourced from the vast, and growing, collection of digitized newspapers publically available through the National Library of Australia’s ‘Trove’ project. That project is awe inspiring in itself and promises to cast a new light on Australian history in general, and, for our purposes, Australian Football in particular, by making accessible to the public newspapers from the early 1800s through until 1954 (the last year before copyright holders can limit the availability of access).

In that respect, we have embarked on a massive project of our own - to text correct (newspaper text is often rendered illegible after digitizing) and collate the vast archive of football-related material available through Trove. That is a multi-year endeavour and at this stage we’ve barely scratched the surface, suffice to say we’ve started with the Melbourne Argus and will shortly branch out into other major metropolitan dailies, such as the Adelaide Advertiser and the West Australian. The fruits of this work will start to trickle through into the site over the coming months, in the form of articles and match reports.

In the same way we are sourcing longer articles through Trove, we are also collecting historic match reports of every VFL game through to 1956 (when the Argus closed its doors) and, over time, every game of the SANFL, the WAFL, and other significant matches. These reports will be added to the fixture component of the site to create a complete match summary page (including stats for V/AFL games) for as many games as we are able to complete – before old age or penury intervene!