THE MAHER CUP A Social History of Football in NSW's Group 9 Towns 1920-1971
This is not your fan-driven football hagiography; it seeks to detail and analyse rugby league’s most celebrated phenomenon in ‘the bush’. Politics, personalities, protests, punters, pugilists, police, potholes, pile drivers and poetry populate the pages ... as do topics introduced by other letters. Exploring the life of twelve small towns through the prism of football during half a century of rapid social and technological change - from the aftermath of the Great War to networked television and the Moon landing - the interests of rugby league researchers seeking encyclopaedic detail, genealogists tracing the lives of sporting forebears and local historians are all addressed.
876 pages, 250 photos & maps, 3,000+ players listed, all 729 matches described. ISBN 978-0-6450633-0-1
The book was launched at a centenary of Group 9 celebration at Wagga on Friday 28 April and is available now from distributors in eleven southwest NSW towns.
Neil Pollock (BA, Graduate Diploma of Libraryship, Master of Information & Knowledge Management, Master of Archives and Records Management). A librarian, teacher, and archivist, Neil was raised on farms in ‘Maher Cup country’ at Wyalong and Caragabal. Since discovering Maher Cup mania wasn’t normal, he became determined to both demystify its mythology and keep its memory alive. Starting in 2013 with a weblog, a 2,000 member Facebook group prompted this publication, so print could preserve its posterity.