Indigenous Women's Sporting Experiences: Agency, Resistance and Nostalgia

Abstract

Australian sports historiography, in privileging Western, reconstructionist approaches to narrating histories of Aboriginal sport, has overlooked Indigenous research methodologies that privilege Aboriginal voices. This paper adopts the Indigenous research methodology of yarning in a collaborative project with former sportswomen from the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement in Queensland. Yarning, as a culturally respectful way of eliciting memories and valuing expression of Indigenous voices, was used to explore their experiences, memories and meanings of competitive marching, a popular sport for young women in mid‐twentieth century Australia. The yarning sessions revealed insights into sport that are missing from the empirical, archival record, and allowed the exploration of agency and autonomy, acts of resistance, and complex intersections of nostalgia and trauma. This paper offers specific and broader insights on sport in Australian Indigenous communities and on the entanglement of the sporting past with the histories and politics of race and gender in Queensland. In repositioning researcher and researched in Aboriginal sport history, this paper demonstrates the potential of transformative narratives about the experiences of Indigenous Australians.