The SANFL History Centre

BY NEIL J SMITH

The SANFL History Centre is a unique collection of nearly 150 years of South Australian football history.  Housed in Bowden, it contains a diversity of material – photographs, trophies, films, videos, badges, football budgets, scrap books, memorabilia…  The Centre was established in 2014 under the leadership of Christine Halbert and it thrives today thanks to the participation of an enthusiastic group of volunteers.

The volunteers generally gather once a week and set to work accessioning, cataloguing and preserving the material that has come to the Centre.  The History Centre has been fortunate to be able to use a very suitable program called Lucidea, which relies in the first instance on a skilled team working on the appropriate data entry.  These records can then be searched by names, clubs, categories, location, dates, etc. It is museum-based program, which has been adapted for football. It is supported by the AFL and is now in use by more football clubs.

Barbara Page has been particularly important to this project, with her detailed knowledge of Lucidea as well as her significant ties to local football.  Her family business, Peter Page Hyundai, have been major sponsors of Central District Football Club for more than 30 years.  Her contribution to the club has been acknowledged with the establishment of the Barbara Page Best Team Person Trophy:

“The future recipients of the Barbara Page Best Team Person Trophy will be chosen according to their “team first” actions, and these actions are exactly what Barbara is as a role model for our club.” – Greg Edwards, Central District Football Club

The photographic collection at the History Centre goes back to the late 19^th century; several of the team spend many hours identifying the players in some of the photos.  Another group has been working on the collection of SA Football Budgets, a collection that goes back to the original publications from 1914.

One of the more demanding jobs has been to work through the hundreds of scrapbooks donated by players and their families.  Some are incredibly valuable, such as the 28 scrap books immaculately compiled by the journalist, the late Gordon Schwartz; others are much more ephemeral but still worth a place on the shelves.

The extensive video collection has now been digitized, preserving thousands of hours of precious film & video thanks to being able to retrieve the broadcast videotapes of all of the local television stations.  One of the team is working his way through identifying more details of what’s been recorded.