This book will revolutionise the history of Indigenous involvement in Australian football in the second half of the nineteenth century. It collects new evidence to show how Aboriginal people saw the cricket and football played by those who had taken their land and resources and forced their way into them in the missions and stations around the peripheries of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. They learned the game and brought their own skills to it, eventually winning local leagues and earning the respect of their contemporaries. They were prevented from reaching higher levels by the gatekeepers of the domestic game until late in the twentieth century. Their successors did not come from nowhere.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, outdoor soccer was the second most popular organized sport for Australian children after swimming. It far outstripped the popularity of the three other football codes that are played in Australia – rugby league, rugby union and Australian Rules football. Yet the soccer participation phenomenon in Australia is matched neither by the media coverage of the game in these countries, nor by the academic interest in the game. With a few notable exceptions in academic sports history, the game of soccer remains understudied in comparison with the other football codes. And, apart from some interest that is generated by World Cup campaigns, the media coverage of soccer is largely marginalized, and becomes most emphasized when reporting on aspects of ‘hooligan’ crowd behaviour. This book investigates some of the ways that soccer has been maintained as marginal to Australian identity, and why the sport remains vitally important to some marginalized groups within these communities. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

The Indigenous peoples of Australia have a proud history of participation and the achievement of excellence in Australian sports. Historically, Australian sports have provided a rare and important social context in which Indigenous Australians could engage with and participate in non-Indigenous society. Today, Indigenous Australian people in sports continue to provide important points of reference around which national public dialogue about racial and cultural relations in Australia takes place. Yet much media coverage surrounding these issues and almost all academic interest concerning Indigenous people and Australian sports is constructed from non-Indigenous perspectives. With a few notable exceptions, the racial and cultural implications of Australian sports as viewed from an Indigenous Australian Studies perspective remains understudied. The media coverage and academic discussion of Indigenous people and Australian sports is largely constructed within the context of Anglo-Australian nationalist discourse, and becomes most emphasised when reporting on aspects of ‘racial and cultural’ explanations of Indigenous sporting excellence and failures associated anomalous behaviour. This book investigates the many ways that Indigenous Australians have engaged with Australian sports and the racial and cultural readings that have been associated with these engagements. Questions concerning the importance that sports play in constructions of Australian indigeneities and the extent to which these have been maintained as marginal to Australian national identity are the central critical themes of this book. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Sounding 7 begins with Echo 107 titled CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN EYES ON THE OZ CULTURE-CLASH FRONTIER followed by echoes on BUCKLEY REVISITED, AFTER THE PROTECTORATE CRUMBLED and WHAT OF PROTECTOR ROBINSON? Echoes follow on salvaging tribal ways, the Merri Creek black orphanage, ‘going round the bend’ at the Asylum and Echo 114: THE CELESTIALS OF VICTORIA, being the resented Chinese gold miners. Exploring the contrasting fate of Batman, La Trobe and Derrimut, leads into echoes on fringe-dwelling, cultural resistance and Oz racism, in particular the mass psychology of racist ideology that culminated with World War 2. After the gold rush era, life and right behaviour at the Healesville Coranderrk mission station and re-thinking William Thomas the Aboriginal Guardian lead to the pleasant notion of civilizing British colonies through sport. The life and exploits of Tom Wills is celebrated in Echo 122: THE MAKING & BREAKING OF VICTORIA’S FIRST SPORTING HERO. Turning to political history, Oz class struggles – convicts, capitalism and nation-building asks the question with Echo 124: WHITHER MARXISM [?] and then BRITISH EMPIRE POLICY REFORMS IN THE 1840s to contain a Chartist-led revolution. Facets of Victorian ‘quality of life’ since the land grab are followed by echoes on the astrology of the 1802 Port Phillip Crown possession claim and an echo titled TOWARDS AN ASTROLOGY OF CIVILIZATION. The Sounding concludes with approaches to researching Aboriginal society, an undergraduate essay on the Dreamtime and finally with Echo 130: A RAINBOW SERPENT BRIDGE. Today in the 21s century, I wonder how differently Oz would have developed if the then ruling British government in Sydney and London had not used censorship to delay the gold rush for almost 40 years! Sounding 8 begins with Echo 131: HISTORY DISTORTION & CENSORSHIP and is backed up with a critique of Britannia’s pirate empire that together spawn two more echoes of doubtful but controversial polemics in 1421 – THE YEAR CHINA DISCOVERED THE WORLD suggesting they were here in Oz many centuries before Captain Cook. Echo 135: THE KADAITCHA SUNG MEETS THE DRUID INHERITANCE pits Palm Islander Sam Watson’s 1990s fiction The Kadaitcha Sung [the ‘clever’ occult Oz Dreamtime] in occult war with the equally ancient European / Celtic / Druid magic in the psyche of the Aryan ‘race’, so to speak. Going even further out on a limb, the focus shifts to recent light shed on ‘dark ages barbarians’ now considered by some historians to have been more culturally refined than the modern city individual. Back in Oz with Echo 137: WHITE MAN’S LAW – BLACKFELLOW LAW and Echo 138: McLEOD’S BUCKET FROM SKULL CREEK brings Western Australia after WW2 into wider awareness with the Pilbara pastoral workers strike of 1946-49 that won half-decent wage rights for Aboriginal stockmen. Moving further north, Echo 141: RECENT ARNHEMLAND CONNECTIONS Part 1: Taming the NT is the stuff of White Australia’s race-based patriotism as depicted in Ion Idriess’s once-mainstream fascist fictions counterpointed by Part 2: James Gaykamangus’s Striving to bridge the chasm: my cultural learning journey. The final echo 142 talks treaty.

A history of the involvement of Indigenous Australians in the domestic code of football primarily in the second half of the nineteenth century. Excluded from the top level of the game in Victoria, they forced their way into it from the missions and stations around the periphery of the colony/state first of all as individuals then forming teams to compete in and eventually win local leagues. This book will revolutionise the history of Indigenous involvement in Australian football. It was short-listed for the Lord Aberdare prize of the British Society for Sports History in 2020.

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies is the first comprehensive overview of the rapidly expanding field of Indigenous scholarship. The book is ambitious in scope, ranging across disciplines and national boundaries, with particular reference to the lived conditions of Indigenous peoples in the first world. The contributors are all themselves Indigenous scholars who provide critical understandings of indigeneity in relation to ontology (ways of being), epistemology (ways of knowing), and axiology (ways of doing) with a view to providing insights into how Indigenous peoples and communities engage and examine the worlds in which they are immersed. Sections include: • Indigenous Sovereignty • Indigeneity in the 21st Century • Indigenous Epistemologies • The Field of Indigenous Studies • Global Indigeneity This handbook contributes to the re-centring of Indigenous knowledges, providing material and ideational analyses of social, political, and cultural institutions and critiquing and considering how Indigenous peoples situate themselves within, outside, and in relation to dominant discourses, dominant postcolonial cultures and prevailing Western thought. This book will be of interest to scholars with an interest in Indigenous peoples across Literature, History, Sociology, Critical Geographies, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Native Studies, Māori Studies, Hawaiian Studies, Native American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Race Studies, Queer Studies, Politics, Law, and Feminism.

This book explores the meanings, significances, and impacts of the complex identities that soccer fans, especially those of men's soccer, represent worldwide. The chapters in this volume construct and reconstruct fandom in terms of diverse fan affiliations from local to global level, and from national to transnational spaces. Soccer or (association) football is a game where fans come alive with one goal. It is soccer’s fanbase that has made it the most popular mass spectator sport in the world. Since the sport’s growth and its codification in the late nineteenth century, soccer and its followers became markers of varied identities. This volume is an attempt to understand the soccer fan’s tryst with such identities, mostly at the level of professional men’s football in different parts of the world. Fans create, represent, break, recreate, transcend, complicate and confuse diverse identities in their attachments with and loyalties to particular clubs, nations, continents, spaces, communities, races, ethnicities, and players. These identities are given shape through the display and observance of diverse forms of fandom and fan subcultures. Against this wider backdrop, the book brings out the commonalities, conflicts and tensions within these fan identities. Why Fans Matter? Fans and Identities in the Soccer World will be a fascinating read for anybody with an interest in sport and its intersection with disciplines such as sociology, political science, history, media studies, or cultural studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.