Sporting Chance: Indigenous Participation in Australian Sport History

Sean Gorman

doi:10.5130/ccs.v2i2.1526

Abstract

For many non-Indigenous Australians the only time they have any engagement with Indigenous peoples, history or issues is through watching sport on television or being at a football match at the MCG. This general myopia and indifference by settler Australians with Indigenous Australians manifests itself in many ways but perhaps most obscenely in the simple fact that Indigenous Australians die nearly 20 years younger than the rest of Australias citizens. Many non-Indigenous Australians do not know this. Sport in many ways has offered Indigenous Australians a platform from which to begin the slow, hard process for social justice and equity to be actualised. This paper will discuss the participation of Indigenous Australians in sport and show how sport has enabled Indigenous Australians to create a space so that they can speak out against the injustices they have experienced and to further improve on relations going into the future. The central contention is that through sport all Australians can begin a process of engaging with Indigenous history as a means to improve race relations between the two groups.

Highlights

History has shown us that many relationships, friendships or unions between first Australians and settlers has been fraught with danger, and in many cases doomed
Until the early 1980s that the Victorian Football League (VFL)/Australian Football League (AFL) saw an influx of Indigenous players with the arrival of the Krakouers to North Melbourne and Maurice Rioli at Richmond, which added to the playing stocks of Phil Egan (Richmond), Robbie Muir (St Kilda) and Kevin Taylor (South Melbourne)
Can one imagine for a moment what the status of Houli’s welfare would have been given the anti-Muslim sentiment following the terrorists attacks in a Australia post 9-11?2 It has taken these and other problematic moments concerned with racism in the AFL to reconsider the way we think about race and ethnicity in Australia and how it relates to sport and society more broadly

Summary

Background

History has shown us that many relationships, friendships or unions between first Australians and settlers has been fraught with danger, and in many cases doomed. Because of Australian football and Indigenous Australians’ love of for it Indigenous participation in football has become a highly celebrated aspect of the Australian game It is because of players like Nicky Winmar, Barry Cable, Michael Long, Chris Lewis, Byron Pickett, Polly Farmer and the Krakouer brothers that football is a space where one can investigate both positive and negative historical issues regarding race relations in Australia. In this way football ceases to be just a game but becomes a teacher, and through its lessons we may become, as Australians, a better team. It seems incredible by today’s standards that such a thing would ever be uttered and hopefully measures to penalise vilification within sport can help break down these attitudes elsewhere

Football and History

Findings

Conclusion