About This Blog

Ipswich, Queensland, has a long relationship with soccer.

The earliest public game reported in 1886.

In Ipswich Knights, the city has a soccer club whose oldest constituent root stretch back to 1888.

Ipswich clubs won 30 of the 50 Brisbane soccer seasons in which they competed from roughly 1895 to 1960, with the other 20 seasons accounted for by self-exclusion to its own competition, or the two World Wars.

More Brisbane titles were won in the late 70s and mid-80s, and most recently by Western Pride in securing the 2017 NPL Queensland title.

In short, there a lot of soccer history in the fabric of this city. 

This blog is my attempt to make notes about it all.

The last history of Ipswich soccer was by Reg Erskine at the start of the 1980s. Erskine predicted his book would include errors and omissions due to a lack of records from the earlier years of Ipswich soccer.

Now, almost 40 years after the publication of his book, many lost records have become available on the National Library's Trove database of digitised newspapers.

This blog is to update our soccer history with these new revelations, using Erskine's book and historic issues of the Queensland Times as a starting point.

While I make no promises in creating such an encompassing work as Erskine, I hope some of my research may be of interest to someone someday. 

I will also touch on Australian soccer history more broadly, as the whims of my research take me to some unexpected diversions which happened around the country. 

I may also write some articles regarding contemporary Ipswich soccer.

As for myself, I recently completed 3 years as media manager of Western Pride, a role I previously held at Palm Beach SC. I've been keeping an eye on Ipswich teams since moving to the city 12 years ago.

I once wrote about music, and was on radio. Those were the days...

Garry McKenzie (tw: @garrymck), updated August 2019.

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