Goodall, John Edwin

1. John Goodall’s wife Kathleen (Fanning) presented the inaugural Gower Cup for senior women's interstate competition. The soprano gave away her stage career when they married but returned to public performance during the Great Depression, playing right through the heyday of theatre — over 3,500 performances — then breaking into radio.

2. After a five-year absence, Goodall returned to head the VIHA in 1930 following the death of its president, Peter Ross Sutherland. In the depths of the Great Depression, he presided over the re-organisation of the VIHA clubs, aiming to give "young players a better chance to improve themselves". In the 1931 season, the association dropped St Kilda and restructured Hawthorn, Brighton and Essendon to include junior teams for the first time in history. Seniors played on Monday nights, and juniors on Thursdays. Goodall created the first inter-club juniors and inter-school competition that year. These were the first true, age-delimited junior ice hockey leagues in Australia.

3. Melbourne Grammar won the inaugural VIHA Junior Public Schools under-16 ice hockey competition. The league included Scotch College and Wesley College, with games played at the Glaciarium on Saturday mornings. Although schoolboys had competed in team races in Victoria since before 1924, the Victorian speed skating championships under the control of the same association were simultaneously redefined in 1931, enabling boys and girls to compete in under-sixteen and under-eighteen junior age divisions.

4. A well-known member of the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria, Goodall owned a rare 1923 Aston Martin Sports in the mid-1920s. He began racing the following year, and four years later, on 31 March 1928, he entered his 1923 Aston Martin-Anzani in the 100 Miles Road Race at Phillip Island. Today, this race is known as the inaugural Australian Grand Prix. The Aston Martin remained in the Goodall family for over fifty years. John and Kathleen had children, including a son named John, who had a son named John.

5. Family connections with great uncles in North America helped John Goodall to position Australian ice sports at the forefront of developments occurring worldwide, not so long after entrepreneurs built the first wave of engineered ice rinks in the world in the 1890s. Capt Charles Miner Goodall and his brothers, Harry and Samuel, had also inherited considerable wealth and influence. Both were well-established on the east and west coasts, in San Francisco, New York and elsewhere, long before skating and ice hockey became mainstream sports.



6. From 1877 to 1916, the vessels of their new Pacific Steamship Company plied the Pacific all along the West Coast, between California, British Columbia, Washington, and Alaska, and it was mainly these centres that influenced Australian ice sports. The Goodall shipping line and its related coal and railway companies was a pioneering arm of a loosely defined trade alliance sailing trans-Pacific routes during the formative years of organised ice sports worldwide. Incidentally, but quite literally, it connected ice sports in America and Canada, then straddled the Pacific to Australia.