If the Socceroos are now nationally iconic, it was not always so as Association depending on the location at first struggled to co-exist with with at least one of Australia's three other forms of football, the rugbys, Union and League and Aussie Rules. Nor was it or is it still helpful to have to overcome Sydney's Anglophilic tendencies with the first iteration of Australian soccer organisation named the New South Wales English Football Association or its desire a to claim everything as its own including the Antipodes' first soccer match. But the reality is that first encounter probably took place deep in the bush of New South Wales as early as 1878 and between a town and essentially a Scottish farming-family and its employees, whilst the game, albeit latter, itself had four injection-points, three of them mining communities, one Balgownie by Wollongong in southern NSW, another Newcastle in northern NSW, the third the towns around Brisbane in Queensland, the fourth being the port of Fremantle in Western Australia and all had obviously massive indeed crucial Scots input.

And the game seems to have arrived in two of the above locations, Brisbane and Balgownie, at more or less the same time, the early 1880s. In the former from 1884 would see the formation of the Anglo-Queensland Football Association, mis-named since its initial three clubs were St. Andrew's, Rangers and Queen's Park. This was whilst in the latter its principal early club would also bear the same Rangers epithet when founded in 1888, formalised two years later and still in existence, whilst the same year would also see the formation in Adamstown, now a suburb of New South Wales's second city, of the also still extant Rosebuds.

However, in all three places it was really the arrival from the turn of the century and before and to The Great War of the next generation of still British immigration that would see the full implantation of the game, on the one hand strengthening it in its existing strongholds and on the other extending its reach. The Perth British Football Association was founded in 1896, its future leading club, Bassendean Caledonians formed in 1913 out of the Fremantle Caledonian Society, with the South Australian British Football Association coming into being in 1902, noting in both cases the use of "British" not "English".  

And this consolidation would be manifested post-Great War. An Australian national team would play a first game in 1922 on tour to New Zealand, its first home internationals taking place the following year, the opposition being the same and the initial venue in Brisbane at the Cricket Ground.

General
Pioneers by Default

The First Socceroos

Queensland

Cumberfords and Gibb

Sammy Ross