Sport in Australian History (review)

This book is brief, breezy, and combative. It supports its generalisations with equal measures of anecdote and statistics. It is part history, part propaganda. It jumps and glitters, postures and performs—very sportslike. It is less a book than a collection of essays which sometimes overlap, even to the multiple use of phrase and example. It fulfils its stated purpose admirably in that it provides an honest, non-hagiographic, informative portrayal of the life of Australian sport since white settlement. (There is a dutiful, perfunctory paragraph or two on pre-1788 Aboriginal sport, but much more on the variable sporting fate of Aboriginals since then.)

Most of what one would expect is here, but presented afresh, as if the old verities had been reexamined. The origins and development of Australian sport as part of a derived culture is a case in point. Australia is a Hartzean fragment: British and Irish society was so concerned with sporting invention and practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that their colonies were perforce incorporated in that development. A continuing stream of migration came from a society whose most enduring contribution to world civilisation may well turn out to be that of sport. Most Australian sport, then, was imported. Its own major creation, an expansive and rambunctious code of football, has not, like gridiron, prospered beyond its native shores. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the authors are sceptical about Australia as a great sporting nation, and about Australia being sport-obsessed. As they point out, the country does well at much of what it does; but has (like the United States) a limited range. Its record at the world game, soccer, is puzzlingly abysmal, given the identity of its founding society and its post-Second-World-War European immigration. Furthermore, participation rates, whether of participants or couch potatoes, do not provide evidence of maniac devotion.

The title is something of a misnomer. As a summary of the chapters indicates, there is as much sociology and economics here as history. The first chapter, “Sporting Belief, Historical Record,” places myth ahead of the record. “The Sports Industry” and “Political Football,” which follow, are strongly contemporary, although something is said, adversely, about my own published views on the role of sport in the development of Australian nationalism. But the serve (to use an Australian and sporting metaphor) that I get is nothing to what is given Marion Stell in the next chapter, “Sporting Women.” The authors deny her elevation of women’s contribution to Australian sport (in Stell, Half the Race, 1991), question her statistics, doubt her sources, and offer only the politically correct wish that things might be in the future what Stell has claimed they were in the past. Such politically correct attitudes also pervade the next chapter, “Groups on the Margins,” which details the undeniably racist treatment of Aboriginals and the struggles of the old, the disabled, homosexuals, and non-Anglo-Celtic ethnics to gain a place in the Australian sporting arena. The final three chapters, “Stretching the Limits: Sports Performance,” “Not Playing the Game: Problems in Sport,” and “State of Play” place sport not so much in Australian history, or even society, as transfer it onto a global stage of drugs, technology, violence, corruption, and sports law. In these concluding chapters, although Adair and Vamplew provide Australian examples, their focus and concern are the nature and difficulties of recent and contemporary sport at large. Australian sport, for reasons they clearly explain and illustrate earlier in the book, has always sought an international dimension: Wimbledon, Lord’s, Forest Hills, and wherever the Olympic Games are held are as important to Australian sport as the Melbourne Cricket Ground (for both football and cricket) and Royal Randwick (for horseracing).

Globalization comes as no new thing for Australian sport, but it is now at a level of intensity that our authors seem only unconsciously to discern. Australian sport is becoming (and maybe always was, though deciding that issue would need another, different book...