Reg Date: Australia's Greatest Goalscorer You've Never Heard Of

Sokkah scholar Ian Syson once described football in Australia as "the invisible game" — a sport that has always been here, always been played with passion and skill and community, yet somehow managed to stay hidden in plain sight, crowded out by the louder codes and the louder politics. If that's true — and it is — then Reg Date is the invisible game's greatest invisible genius. The greatest goalscorer in the history of Australian football — any kind of football — a bloke who reportedly knocked a kid clean out of a tree with one of his shots, and who the selectors of his era couldn't handle because he was, in the immortal words of Joe Marston, "too much of a larrikin."

Let's fix that, shall we.

Reg Date (far right) — the most prolific goalscorer in Australian football history.

* The 1,616 career goals figure is Date's own claim; the Australian Dictionary of Biography notes it is unverified. The 72-goal season figure is widely reported but not confirmed by primary sources.

Born in Coal Country

Reg Date arrived on 26 July 1921 in Wallsend, a working-class suburb of Newcastle built on coal and community. His father, John "Mick" Date, was a fisherman at Lemon Tree Passage, and the young Reg spent his earliest years there before moving back to Wallsend at eight to live with his maternal grandparents. It was a move that would shape everything. Coal-mining Wallsend had been a centre of football since the 1880s, and the game was practically in the soil.

At Plattsburg Public School, the boy was already supernatural. Nine hundred and fifty-two goals across junior school and club teams over eight seasons — a figure so absurd it almost sounds like a typo, but witness after witness confirms it. By the time he was sixteen, playing senior football for Wallsend FC in 1938, he was beginning a career of destruction that Australian football had never seen and has never seen since.

Reg Date in his Wallsend years — a goalscoring machine in the NSW State League.

The Player They Couldn't Stop

What made Date extraordinary wasn't just the volume — it was the manner of it. The Australian Dictionary of Biography describes him as playing centre or inside forward, with "ferocious and accurate goal shooting" and the ability to strike with both feet "from any angle." Bewildering pace. Changes of direction that left defenders groping at air. Exceptional positional awareness that made close marking effectively pointless.

He stood 180cm and weighed around 80kg — physically imposing for his era, and capable of combining power with artistry in a way that mesmerised both opponents and teammates. His mentor, the legendary Alf Quill — Wallsend's greatest goalscorer of the inter-war years, who himself bagged 868 senior goals — shaped Date's game, drilling into him the instincts that would make him, in the words of goalkeeper Ron Lord, "so fast… with a bullet-like shot. An absolutely bullet-like shot."

The Canterbury Years and the Astounding 1947

In 1943, Canterbury Club reformers Andy Burton, Roy Crowhurst, "Tugger" Bryant and Alf Brinkley relaunched the club, and by 1945 Date had officially signed to Canterbury-Bankstown in the NSW State League — the club reportedly paying an astounding £200 just to secure his signature, followed by around £8 per match — a salary that, across the season, exceeded £550 annually. In an era when most footballers were amateurs by necessity, Date was a professional in everything but name.

The peak of his Canterbury period came in 1947. Reportedly seventy-two goals in a single season — a figure not verified by primary sources but repeated across multiple football records of the era. Think about that number regardless. In any context — any era, any code — seventy-two goals in one season is extraordinary. In post-war Australian football, it was other-worldly.

The Canterbury years — where Date's career reached its dazzling peak, reportedly scoring 72 goals in the 1947 season.

The 1947 South Africa Series

That same year, 1947, saw Reg Date reach his international zenith. South Africa toured Australia for a five-match series, and Date was not merely selected — he captained Australia in three of the five tests. He scored eight goals across the official fixtures, including a hat-trick in Australia's most emphatic victory: a 5–1 demolition of the tourists in Newcastle, the biggest winning margin of the series. He was at home, in front of his people, and he was unstoppable.

He had also scored three goals in the two warm-up matches for the 'B' side leading into the series. Eleven goals across the South African visit. For context: Australia lost the series three-one with one match drawn. Date's individual brilliance was, in essence, keeping Australia competitive.

Date captained Australia three times during the 1947 South Africa series — the peak of his international career.

The Larrikin and the Selectors

Here's where it gets complicated, and also where it gets very, very Australian. Because for all his brilliance — and it was brilliance, unquestionable and voluminous — Reg Date spent significant portions of his career being frozen out by the national selectors. Not for lack of goals. Not for lack of form. But because Reg Date was, by all accounts, a magnificent larrikin who loved a drink and didn't especially care what the suits thought of him.

He was not selected for the Australian tour of New Zealand in 1948. More bewilderingly, he was omitted from the 1950 tour to South Africa — the very country he had terrorised just three years earlier from the captain's armband. The Australian Dictionary of Biography is blunt about it: "petty politics by selectors, ruffled by Date's larrikin manner, combined with interstate rivalries to ensure he was denied national selection between 1948 and 1950."

Joe Marston, the first Australian to play in an FA Cup Final and one of the most respected figures in Australian football history, was absolutely unambiguous: Date was "the best Australian player he ever played with, or against." Full stop. And yet the selectors, their feathers ruffled by a bloke who was too alive, too loud, too himself — kept looking the other way.

It's one of the great injustices of Australian sporting history. A man who was targeted by Manchester United, Cardiff City, and Glasgow Celtic — English and Scottish professional clubs who came sniffing around and were rebuffed — couldn't get a consistent run in the green and gold because he liked a beer and had opinions. Code wars, culture wars, the timeless war between talent and bureaucracy. Australian football has always been fighting on multiple fronts.

Date remained a Wallsend man through and through — loyal to his roots, regardless of the bigger stages available to him.

A man of extraordinary talent who, in another era, would have been a professional footballer of international standing.

A Career in Numbers: The Full Record

The Hotel Years and the Man Himself

There's something poetic about the fact that Australia's greatest goalscorer spent much of his post-football life as a publican. He became licensee of the Queen's Arms Hotel in Maitland in 1947, moved to the Ocean View Hotel in Dudley the following year, and in 1954 took over the Albion Hotel in Wickham — where he'd work until retirement in 1980. The Albion, by all accounts, drew a clientele that reflected the man perfectly: colourful, sporty, and fiercely working-class.

His teammates remembered him with extraordinary warmth. Harold "Pippy" Wilkinson, who played alongside him at both Wallsend and Canterbury, said simply: "Every moment of playing behind Reg was sheer pleasure." His wife, Ellen Millicent "Milcie" Wilson, whom he married at St Thomas Church of England, Cardiff, on 29 October 1947, was beside him through all of it — the goals, the hotels, the fishing, the boxing. He died on 11 August 1995 at Waratah. His funeral at St Andrew's Anglican Church, Mayfield, drew around two thousand people.

The Team of the Century — Two of Them

In 2000, the RSSSF conducted the first serious attempt at naming an all-time Australian football XI. Date was in it. In 2022, Football Australia released its official Socceroos Team of the Century to mark 100 years of Australian soccer — and Date was in that one too, named in the forward line alongside Tim Cahill, Mark Viduka, John Aloisi, and Judy Masters. The man who the selectors of the 1940s couldn't handle is now formally recognised as one of the foundational figures of the entire Australian game.

That feels right. It also feels like it took too long. But then, Australian football has never done anything the easy way.

Why Reg Date Still Matters

We talk about the 2006 World Cup a lot in this country, and rightly so — Guus Hiddink, Cahill in the 54th minute against Japan, Kewell's equaliser against Croatia, Aloisi's wild run after the penalty shootout against Uruguay. We talk about the Matildas and Sam Kerr and the 2023 summer that changed everything. These are our football touchstones, and they deserve their place.

But there was a game happening in this country long before Wembley and Westfield — in coalfields and harbour towns and on muddy parks where the men came straight from the pit in their boots. Reg Date was the best of them. A centre-forward of the highest order, a man who hit balls hard enough to dislodge twelve-year-olds from trees, a larrikin who the suits couldn't handle and history couldn't ignore.

He's been dubbed the Don Bradman of football. But in our eyes, he's more akin to Shane Warne. Our Shane. Get to know him.