ABSTRACT
Soccer is not allowed the privilege of ‘emerging’ or belonging as an Australian game in the way that Australian Rules, the rugby codes (strangely enough) and cricket have been allowed to mature into residence as naturalised Australian games. It has, rather, been initially absent, then ‘brought here’, ‘introduced’ or ‘newly imported’ in wave after wave after wave of migration and exile. Yet ‘soccer’ has been in Australia for as long as any other code, in precodified forms and subsequently as advocations and expressions of its codified form. Pre-codified forms of football played around Australia are necessarily prior to all forms of codified football and should not be retrospectively colonised by the advocates of those forms that eventually attained regional hegemony. This shadowy presence of Association rules obtained a more definite outline in Australian shortly after its codification in 1863. Other codes may have been embodied more often in action, or retrospectively constructed as dominant by mythologisers, or even anachronistically identified by origin hunters concerned to find their own images mirrored in the past. But soccer was always there, even if sometimes only barely at the edge of the campsite, looking on.
