Gary Osmond
Biographic Data
| ID | 3079890 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gary Osmond |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gary |
| FAMILY NAME | Osmond |
| SIGNATURE | OSMOND G |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4866-3765 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 65 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Aboriginal Australians, Identity and Activism: (Re)Assessing the Impact of Jack Johnson’s Visits to Australia, 1907–1908
The African American boxer Jack Johnson visited Australia twice, in 1907 and 1908. Johnson’s time in Australia is best remembered for his defeat of Tommy Burns in 1908 to claim the world heavyweight title and for the racial animus sparked by this victory. Scholars have also analysed these visits from other perspectives, including Johnson’s impact on Australian Aboriginal people, an effect generally interpreted as positive and inspirational. We re…
More than Just an Extra: Peter Felix, a Caribbean Boxer and Actor in Australia
Peter Felix (ca. 1866–1926), an African Caribbean man from the Danish West Indies, was a prominent heavyweight boxer in Australia for two decades. Less known is Felix’s even longer theatrical career as an extra in musicals and plays. Boxing and acting were not an unusual combination in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, especially for Black men, yet the activities of figures like Felix are under-recognized. Race and racial issues …
The “Sensory Turn,” Smell, and Sport History
An emerging “sensory turn” in history and heritage studies emphasizes the role of the senses and emotions in understanding the past.1 While sport historians have engaged to some degree with this sensory turn, particularly with emotions, there is little sport history research focusing on sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch (and other senses). This article considers this absence, focusing on smell. My argument, following the line of historian Mar…
Trudgen’s stroke: Swimming, Indigenous South Americans, and cultural appropriation
Public First Nations Sport History Projects
In this article, we discuss principles of co-design for sport historians who wish to engage in public histories with First Nations communities. Co-design is an emerging scholarly practice that has generated a body of knowledge about working equitably, appropriately, and respectfully with First Nations communities and that offers mutually benefiting outcomes for First Nations communities, historians, and the public. We evaluate co-design principle…
The Micronesian Games as Microcosm: Sport, Culture, and Diplomacy in Oceania
The Micro Games have been held in the Oceanic sub-region of Micronesia every four years since 1990. Participants include five small states (Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Naura, Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia) and two non-sovereign territories (Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands). These comprise seven of the fifty smallest states in the world, with a combined population of roughly half a million people. The Micro Games represent a …
Beyond Professor Starlight’s Sporting and Stage Career: Race, Self-Representation and Caribbean Legacies in Australia
Sport, race and African-Caribbean migrants in Australia: Evaluating Jack Dowridge, the ‘Black Diamond’ boxer
In 1876, the African-Caribbean boxer Jack 'Black Diamond' Dowridge sailed from London to Brisbane aboard the Osseo-not to step out in the boxing ring, but as an assistant cook on the passenger ship's crew.It was not Dowridge's first time in Queensland's capital city, having sailed to Brisbane as a cook on board the Royal Dane in 1872 and 1874.In London, Dowridge was a fighter in the stable of the famed boxing promoter Nat Langham, but it seems hi…
Sport, Identity, and Self‐Determination: Aboriginal Rugby League in Brisbane after the Second World War
This paper investigates the relationship between self‐determination and sport through the exploits of the Brisbane All Blacks, an Aboriginal rugby league football club established in Brisbane after the Second World War. When the club was formed, the government policy of “Protection,” which legalised the forced removal of Aboriginal peoples to government settlements, was giving way in Queensland to the policy of assimilation. Aboriginal people in …
Concussion's Past: An Introduction
There is little doubt that one of the major issues facing contemporary sport is concussion. Actions by federal, state, and provincial governments in several nations over the last decade are one prominent indicator of the public concern about sport-related concussion among athletes, parents, politicians, coaches, spectators, and sporting organizations. Scientific and medical specialists have played a critical role in the research, practice, and pu…
The Double Folds of Racism and History
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men have been overrepresented proportionately in specific sports—boxing, rugby league, and Australian rules football—that have been associated with concussion, but there is little written material, research, scholarship, commentary, or understanding about how they have been affected by traumatic brain injuries related to their participation. This article addresses this silence by examining two overlapping fol…
Indigenous Public History: Cherbourg’s Marching Girls
This paper explores the challenges and opportunities inherent in the co-creation of public histories involving Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous researchers. We focus on our work with the Aboriginal community of Cherbourg in southeast Queensland and our work with women Elders to research and tell the story of the Cherbourg Marching Girls, teams of young women who represented their community in competitive and exhibition marching from 1957…
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sport: Sporting Literacy, Attenuated Agency, and Survivance
In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have a long history of involvement in Western sports. Many of these physical activities emanated originally from Britain, Europe, and the United States of America, and some were distinctly Australian. In order to understand this involvement, the concept of sporting literacy is introduced as a way to capture their motivations, the decision-making processes involved, the attenuated agency …
Too Deadly
I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of this land: the Piscataway, Anacostan, and Pamunkey peoples. I would also like to thank the NASSH Distinguished Lectures and Honor Awards Committee—Dave Wiggins, Jerry Gems, Ornella Nzindukiyimana, Russell Field, and Vicky Parashak—for their invitation to deliver the 2023 Maxwell L. Howell and Reet Howell International Honor Address. This is a great privilege, and I hope I don't disa…
Through a long lens: Racism, protest, memory and sovereignty in Australian sport
Protests against racism in Australian sport have a long history, with many notable actors, agents and incidents. Of these, the on-field protest against racial abuse in Australian rules football by an Aboriginal player, Nicky Winmar, produced Australia’s most famous image of race and sport. While the moment was captured in 1993, it has reverberated throughout the intervening three decades, and the image of Winmar lifting his jersey to point proudl…
Bending the Ball: Racial Policy and 1930s Sport on Thursday Island
In 1933 the Kookaburra Football Club, a ‘half-caste’ team on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, attempted to negotiate a tour of major Queensland centres. The trip did not occur, in part because of resistance from the Chief Protector of Aboriginals who prohibited some players from travelling and investigated others. Beyond simply challenging the protectorate’s control, the episode offers insight into the arbitrary nature of race, the mechanics…
Tensions, Complexities, and Compromises
Researching and writing about Aboriginal sport history is one of the most challenging, and rewarding, opportunities of our scholarly careers. It is challenging because non-Aboriginal people must engage with ontological, epistemological, theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues and ideas that often exist outside traditional Western conventions. Challenges for male scholars escalate in attempting to represent the experiences of Aboriginal …
The Trials of Sala Bogi: Race, Racism and Resistance in Sport
Acts of resistance to racism in Australian sport are associated mainly with the 1990s and onwards, especially in Australian rules football. A century earlier, however, on the running tracks of Victoria and in the swimming baths at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, a Fijian athlete called Sala Bogi stood up to racism on several occasions. This article analyses the personal and legal trials of Bogi in his encounters with, and resistance to, racism. Wh…
Sport and the Torres Strait: Thursday Island, Island Studies, the Archipelagic Turn, and Identity
From the late 1950s onward, sport contributed to racial integration on Thursday Island, the administrative and commercial capital of the Torres Strait in northern Australia. Following their exclusion from the capital prior to, during, and immediately after the Second World War, Islanders began to move to Thursday Island in this period. As a homogenizing force, sport also helped to build a new local identity by connecting Thursday Island not only …
A Forgotten Picture: Race, Photographs and Cathy Freeman at the Northcote Koori Mural
A dramatic photograph, published in 1994, depicted Australian athlete Cathy Freeman running at Northcote's Koori Mural in inner-north Melbourne, beneath scenes of Aboriginal elders in chains in the late nineteenth century. Two months later, she famously posed for photographs carrying the Aboriginal flag in a victory lap following her win in the 400 metres at the Commonwealth Games. While the flag photographs remain an iconic image of sport and ra…
Aboriginality, Racial Discourse and Football Media in 20th-century Queensland
This article analyses media reportage of rugby league games between inmates from the Cherbourg, Palm Island and Woorabinda Aboriginal settlements and white teams in Queensland from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. During this period, Aboriginal footballers were represented in strategic ways that reflected the key tenets of settler colonialism. At the core of this representation were dramatically contrasting yet coexisting images of “primitivism…
Sisterhood, pleasure and marching: Indigenous women and leisure
For Australian Indigenous women, especially those who lived on settlements and missions, participation in the male preserve of sport was doubly shaped by colonization and by Western notions of women’s bodies. In this paper, we will discuss the Cherbourg Marching Girls, who competed in precision marching from 1957 to 1962, to explore how, as young Indigenous women growing up on a settlement in mid-twentieth-century Queensland, the Marching Girls w…
Yarning about Sport: Indigenous Research Methodologies and Transformative Historical Narratives
Indigenous research methodologies prioritize community voices, perspectives, and stories. In Australia, yarning has emerged as a promising Indigenous oral history research methodology. Taking many forms for different purposes, common features of yarning include un-structured or semi-structured research interviews and discussion, flexible time schedules and Indigenous facilitation. Yarning is valued as a culturally appropriate and safe research co…
The View from the Office, the View from the Field: Sport in Queensland Aboriginal Reserves
Sport played an important role in Aboriginal reserves that were established throughout Queensland, Australia, in the colonial era and continued into the 1980s. Despite the historical prominence of sport in these government-run settlements and church-based missions, little is known about either the role of sport as a mechanism of official control or its meanings to Aboriginal inmates of the reserves. The general administration of the reserves has …
Decolonizing Dialogues: Sport, Resistance, and Australian Aboriginal Settlements
This paper seeks to extend understandings of Australian Aboriginal sport history by arguing that sport constituted a site of resistance for Aboriginal athletes in controlled settlements. While examples of overt resistance are rare, opportunities for covert, everyday resistance abounded. For activities performed beyond the notice of settlement administrators provided safe spaces for identity assertion and for expression of anger, dissatisfaction, …
Putting up your Dukes’: Statues social memory and Duke Paoa Kahanamoku
Public statues that commemorate the lives and achievements of athletes are pervasive and influential forms of social memory in Western societies. Despite this important nexus between cultural practice and history making, there is a relative void of critical studies of statuary dedicated to athletes. This article will attempt to contribute to a broader understanding in this area by considering a bronze statue of Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian …
Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives, and Aboriginal Australia
In this collaborative article, we seek to unsettle the dominance of Western, reconstructionist accounts of Indigenous Australian sport history through reflections on our past research in the Queensland Aboriginal community of Cherbourg. That research focussed on a statue of legendary 1930s cricketer, Eddie Gilbert, and on sport exhibitions in Cherbourg's Ration Shed Museum. Here, we are less concerned with unveiling the ‘true’ account of Australi…
Aboriginal Rules: The Black History of Australian Football
This paper is interested in the significance of Australian football to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia. In particular, this paper is interested in the cultural power of football and how it has foregrounded the struggle and highlighted the contribution that Indigenous people have made to the national football code of Australia. This paper also discusses key moments in Indigenous football history in Australia. It quest…
Enveloping the Past: Sport Stamps, Visuality and Museums
Postage stamps are a significant but largely overlooked item of visual culture. This article examines how sports stamps represent the past and the ways that museums package the sporting past through philatelic exhibitions. Using the concept of the historical ‘story space’, we focus on the textual representation of cricket stamps and an associated philatelic exhibition in Australia. These representations of the past will be examined through a comb…
Photographs, Materiality and Sport History: Peter Norman and the 1968 Mexico City Black Power Salute
This article considers the ways in which Australian athlete Peter Norman is presented and represented through the famous photograph of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic games “Black Power” salute. Photographic images are not simple, neutral, or objective records of the past; various material acts influence and affect the ways images are interpreted and read. This article will explore the materiality of the 1968 photograph with particular reference to …
Look at that kid crawling’: Race, myth and the ‘crawl’ stroke
Australia and, more specifically, a Solomon Island schoolboy named Alick Wickham, are credited with creating the swimming racing stroke, the crawl, or freestyle as it is known in contemporary parlance. Wickham's contribution constitutes a popular, celebrated and enduring legend. While there is some factual basis to the legend, Wickham's contribution is a sport creation myth. The myth offers an example of the intersection of sport and construction…
A Bird’s-Eye View of the Past: Digital History, Distant Reading and Sport History
Advances in computer technologies have made it easier than ever before for historians to access a wealth of sources made available in the digital era. This article investigates one way that historians have engaged with the challenges and opportunities of this ‘infinite archive’: distant reading. We define distant reading as an umbrella term that embraces many practices, including data mining, aggregation, text analysis, and the visual representat…
Reflecting materiality: Reading sport history through the lens
If historians have been reluctant to engage seriously with photographs as evidence, the problem is even more pronounced in sport history. This article examines two photographs of Solomon Islands' divers in order to consider the larger idea of photographs as historic documents. The focus is less on the content of the pictures and more on ways of reading photographic images as material objects. Materiality as a methodological tool for considering p…
Modest Monuments’: Postage Stamps, Duke Kahanamoku and Hierarchies of Social Memory
The postage stamp issued by the USA in 2002 to commemorate Hawaiian athlete and cultural icon, Duke Kahanamoku, represented the culmination of a 30-year plus lobbying campaign involving a wide cross-section of interest groups. Via this prominent example, this paper examines postage stamps as an under-explored form of social memory and historical evidence and questions the weight and importance of stamps relative to other types of social memory. I…
Sisterhood, pleasure and marching: Indigenous women and leisure
For Australian Indigenous women, especially those who lived on settlements and missions, participation in the male preserve of sport was doubly shaped by colonization and by Western notions of women’s bodies. In this paper, we will discuss the Cherbourg Marching Girls, who competed in precision marching from 1957 to 1962, to explore how, as young Indigenous women growing up on a settlement in mid-twentieth-century Queensland, the Marching Girls w…
Yarning about Sport: Indigenous Research Methodologies and Transformative Historical Narratives
Indigenous research methodologies prioritize community voices, perspectives, and stories. In Australia, yarning has emerged as a promising Indigenous oral history research methodology. Taking many forms for different purposes, common features of yarning include un-structured or semi-structured research interviews and discussion, flexible time schedules and Indigenous facilitation. Yarning is valued as a culturally appropriate and safe research co…
Decolonizing Dialogues: Sport, Resistance, and Australian Aboriginal Settlements
This paper seeks to extend understandings of Australian Aboriginal sport history by arguing that sport constituted a site of resistance for Aboriginal athletes in controlled settlements. While examples of overt resistance are rare, opportunities for covert, everyday resistance abounded. For activities performed beyond the notice of settlement administrators provided safe spaces for identity assertion and for expression of anger, dissatisfaction, …
Where Cassius Clay Ends, Muhammad Ali Begins’: Sportspeople, Political Activism, and Methodology
Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the United States Army in June 1967 led to a conviction for draft evasion, exile from boxing, and a complex response from the newspaper press. Although press reactions to Ali’s draft resistance were overwhelmingly negative, his refusal to fight in Vietnam sowed the seeds for journalists to celebrate him as a hero upon his return to the ring four years later. Press reactions to Ali’s two names (Cassius Cla…
Pink Tea and Sissy Boys’: Digitized Fragments of Male Homosexuality, Non-Heteronormativity and Homophobia in the Australian Sporting Press, 1845–1954
Researching the gay sporting past is difficult because of the dearth of written evidence. This article employs digital history techniques, specifically the distant and close reading of newspapers, in an attempt to locate references to male homosexuality in the Australian sporting press. The focus is not on finding references to homosexual athletes, but rather on locating attitudes, innuendo and inferences concerning homosexuality, non-heteronorma…
Myth-making in Australian Sport History: Re-evaluating Duke Kahanamoku's Contribution to Surfing
This article argues that the foundation story of Australian surfing history, the claim that Hawaiian swimming champion Duke Paoa Kahanamoku introduced surfboard riding in 1914-15, is a mythunderstood not as an outright falsehood but as an accentuation of one version of the past over others for culturally determined reasons. Overlooked in the exaggerated emphasis on Kahanamoku's contribution is prior surfboard riding in Sydney. This article examin…
The Surfing Tommy Tanna: Performing Race at the Australian Beach
A Pacific Islander known only as Tommy Tanna, who was employed as a servant in Sydney in the late 19th century, is widely credited with introducing body surfing to Australia. Along with the better-known Alick Wickham and Duke Kahanamoku, Tanna represents the contributions of Pacific Islanders to the development of Australian aquatic sport and is racialised and mythologised in memory. This paper examines Tanna via the lenses of race and performanc…
Filmic Sports History: Dawn Fraser, Swimming and Australian National Identity
Among a multitude of social memory representations of Australian swimming legend Dawn Fraser are several films, including a 1979 biopic, Dawn! This paper considers this feature film alongside other examples of filmic history, most particularly a 1964 documentary, The Dawn Fraser Story. While documentaries are generally valued more highly by historians than movies because of the perceived similarity of endeavour between documentary makers and writ…
The bloke with a stroke’: Alick Wickham, the ‘crawl’ and social memory
Solomon Islander swimmer Alick Wickham is a celebrated figure in Australian, Solomon Islander and international sport history. His iconic status is inextricably linked to the myth that he introduced the crawl stroke, commonly known as freestyle, to Australia and hence the wider world. The focus of this paper is not the mythic qualities of Wickham's contribution to the crawl stroke, but rather how this myth has been enmeshed in a range of discours…
A Forgotten Picture: Race, Photographs and Cathy Freeman at the Northcote Koori Mural
A dramatic photograph, published in 1994, depicted Australian athlete Cathy Freeman running at Northcote's Koori Mural in inner-north Melbourne, beneath scenes of Aboriginal elders in chains in the late nineteenth century. Two months later, she famously posed for photographs carrying the Aboriginal flag in a victory lap following her win in the 400 metres at the Commonwealth Games. While the flag photographs remain an iconic image of sport and ra…
The View from the Office, the View from the Field: Sport in Queensland Aboriginal Reserves
Sport played an important role in Aboriginal reserves that were established throughout Queensland, Australia, in the colonial era and continued into the 1980s. Despite the historical prominence of sport in these government-run settlements and church-based missions, little is known about either the role of sport as a mechanism of official control or its meanings to Aboriginal inmates of the reserves. The general administration of the reserves has …
Clay vs. Ali: Distant Reading, Methodology, and Sport History
Muhammad Ali’s name is one of the most significant yet understudied aspects of the great boxer’s extraordinary life. Throughout his career, journalists used Ali’s birth name (Cassius Clay) and his Islamic name (Muhammad Ali) to transmit their attitudes toward him. This study interrogates trends in newspaper usage of Ali’s two names during the 1960s and 1970s as a way to understand changing public attitudes toward him during this period. It does s…
Remembering the rejection of Muhammad Ali: Identity, civil rights and social memory
When Muhammad Ali died in June 2016, he was remembered by the media as a hero in the fight for racial equality. Tributes for the great boxer were meaningful in many respects, but they were also incomplete, sanitised and misleading. This paper aims to re-complicate our understanding of Ali's portrayals in the media by analysing newspaper discourse in the years immediately following his conversation to the Nation of Islam. Specifically, this invest…
Tweet Out? Twitter, Archived Data, and the Social Memory of Out LGBT Athletes
The allure of Twitter data for historical analysis is heady. The volume of tweeted posts since the microblogging service was launched in 2006 represents a wealth of recent historical data as well as a deep pool of social memory offering insight into how the past circulates in the present. This article considers the promise, possibilities, and problems of accessing and analyzing Twitter data. To help illuminate the broader issues of method and met…
Australia's Women Surfers: History, Methodology and the Digital Humanities
The emerging field of digital humanities offers many potential innovations for historians, but also generates a host of methodological and philosophical challenges and issues. This article focuses on one feature of digital humanities, distant reading, to analyse the history of women's surfing in Australia in the early twentieth century. As a form of quantitative analysis involving data mining and visual representations, distant reading is used in…
Indigenous sport and heritage: Cherbourg's Ration Shed Museum
So much has been lost about the culture of Australia's Indigenous people. Their languages, traditions and heritage were dissipated under the process of white colonization from 1788. This paper investigates the actions of the people from Cherbourg, an Aboriginal settlement in southeast Queensland, Australia, to reclaim their culture, identity and heritage. The focus is specifically on the Ration Shed Museum (RSM), which officially opened in Cherbo…
The bloke with a stroke’: Alick Wickham, the ‘crawl’ and social memory
Solomon Islander swimmer Alick Wickham is a celebrated figure in Australian, Solomon Islander and international sport history. His iconic status is inextricably linked to the myth that he introduced the crawl stroke, commonly known as freestyle, to Australia and hence the wider world. The focus of this paper is not the mythic qualities of Wickham's contribution to the crawl stroke, but rather how this myth has been enmeshed in a range of discours…
Putting up your Dukes’: Statues social memory and Duke Paoa Kahanamoku
Public statues that commemorate the lives and achievements of athletes are pervasive and influential forms of social memory in Western societies. Despite this important nexus between cultural practice and history making, there is a relative void of critical studies of statuary dedicated to athletes. This article will attempt to contribute to a broader understanding in this area by considering a bronze statue of Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian …
Look at that kid crawling’: Race, myth and the ‘crawl’ stroke
Australia and, more specifically, a Solomon Island schoolboy named Alick Wickham, are credited with creating the swimming racing stroke, the crawl, or freestyle as it is known in contemporary parlance. Wickham's contribution constitutes a popular, celebrated and enduring legend. While there is some factual basis to the legend, Wickham's contribution is a sport creation myth. The myth offers an example of the intersection of sport and construction…
Reflecting materiality: Reading sport history through the lens
If historians have been reluctant to engage seriously with photographs as evidence, the problem is even more pronounced in sport history. This article examines two photographs of Solomon Islands' divers in order to consider the larger idea of photographs as historic documents. The focus is less on the content of the pictures and more on ways of reading photographic images as material objects. Materiality as a methodological tool for considering p…
Mixing Race The Kong Sing Brothers and Australian Sport
Little research exists on the participation of Chinese in Australian sport in the colonial or Federation periods. This article examines the involvement of three, hitherto-unknown, amateur sportsmen in late nineteenth-century Sydney*the Kong Sing brothers. Otto, Ophir, and George Kong Sing, sons of a Chinese shopkeeper and white Australian mother, participated in several sports over two decades, enjoying varying degrees of success and recognition.…
Modest Monuments’: Postage Stamps, Duke Kahanamoku and Hierarchies of Social Memory
The postage stamp issued by the USA in 2002 to commemorate Hawaiian athlete and cultural icon, Duke Kahanamoku, represented the culmination of a 30-year plus lobbying campaign involving a wide cross-section of interest groups. Via this prominent example, this paper examines postage stamps as an under-explored form of social memory and historical evidence and questions the weight and importance of stamps relative to other types of social memory. I…
Forgetting Charlie and Tums Cavill: Social memory and Australian swimming history 1
This article explores the concepts of forgetting and remembering in the context of two Australian swimmers, brothers Charlie and Arthur (Tums) Cavill, who died in the USA while performing swimming stunts in 1897 and 1914, respectively. While eulogised as notable Australian athletes, today they are effectively forgotten. Forgetting is understood as an ineluctable facet of memory, a partner with remembering in the creation, expression and dissemina…
Filmic Sports History: Dawn Fraser, Swimming and Australian National Identity
Among a multitude of social memory representations of Australian swimming legend Dawn Fraser are several films, including a 1979 biopic, Dawn! This paper considers this feature film alongside other examples of filmic history, most particularly a 1964 documentary, The Dawn Fraser Story. While documentaries are generally valued more highly by historians than movies because of the perceived similarity of endeavour between documentary makers and writ…
Photographs, Materiality and Sport History: Peter Norman and the 1968 Mexico City Black Power Salute
This article considers the ways in which Australian athlete Peter Norman is presented and represented through the famous photograph of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic games “Black Power” salute. Photographic images are not simple, neutral, or objective records of the past; various material acts influence and affect the ways images are interpreted and read. This article will explore the materiality of the 1968 photograph with particular reference to …
Myth-making in Australian Sport History: Re-evaluating Duke Kahanamoku's Contribution to Surfing
This article argues that the foundation story of Australian surfing history, the claim that Hawaiian swimming champion Duke Paoa Kahanamoku introduced surfboard riding in 1914-15, is a mythunderstood not as an outright falsehood but as an accentuation of one version of the past over others for culturally determined reasons. Overlooked in the exaggerated emphasis on Kahanamoku's contribution is prior surfboard riding in Sydney. This article examin…
Reading Salute: Filmic Representations of Sports History
The Black Power Salute protest by athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal dais during the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, supported by silver-medallist Peter Norman, has been recognised as a seminal moment in sports history, Olympic history and race relations. This article examines the filmic history of this event as represented in Salute, a 2008 film documentary. We argue that understanding contemporary films requires more than an ana…
Enveloping the Past: Sport Stamps, Visuality and Museums
Postage stamps are a significant but largely overlooked item of visual culture. This article examines how sports stamps represent the past and the ways that museums package the sporting past through philatelic exhibitions. Using the concept of the historical ‘story space’, we focus on the textual representation of cricket stamps and an associated philatelic exhibition in Australia. These representations of the past will be examined through a comb…
The Surfing Tommy Tanna: Performing Race at the Australian Beach
A Pacific Islander known only as Tommy Tanna, who was employed as a servant in Sydney in the late 19th century, is widely credited with introducing body surfing to Australia. Along with the better-known Alick Wickham and Duke Kahanamoku, Tanna represents the contributions of Pacific Islanders to the development of Australian aquatic sport and is racialised and mythologised in memory. This paper examines Tanna via the lenses of race and performanc…
Clipped histories: Representing the Cavill family of swimmers in historical feature articles
This article explores representations of the internationally recognised Cavill family of swimmers in historical feature articles in Australian newspapers and magazines. While historical features are commonplace in publications, saved by libraries in clippings files and useful to researchers, they have received scant scholarly attention. The features on the Cavill family themselves represent a significant biographical source and a repository of me…
Swimming Her Own Course: Agency in the Professional Swimming Career of Alice Cavill
Alice May Cavill (1874–1945) worked in and around water for three decades as a professional swimming performer and teacher, based largely in Australia but travelling throughout the Pacific Rim. Alice was a member of the famous Sydney-based Cavill family of swimmers, but as a woman her exploits have been overlooked in the same way that the sporting experiences of many other colonial-era sportswomen have been marginalised and ignored. This article …
Developing the recognition and response skills of student nurses
Acute deteriorations in health occur in all healthcare settings. Every health professional must therefore have the knowledge and skills to recognise and respond effectively to acute illness, in order to avert further deterioration. It is widely acknowledged that a robust understanding of physiological observations, in addition to effective interpretation and clinical decision-making skills, is required for this task ( Odell et al, 2009 ; Steen, 2…
Broadening Readings of Sport Monuments: The Arthur Baynes Memorial Obelisk
Monuments to past and present sports performers are increasingly commonplace. Despite the potential for analyses of sports monuments to provide new and valuable insights into past and present sociocultural practices, studies of monuments and other forms of material culture have, until recently, received limited attention in sports historiography. In addition, new scholarship has tended to focus on sporting statues over other, non-figurative, monu…
Wicked Wikipedia? Communities of Practice, the Production of Knowledge and Australian Sport History
Academic responses to Wikipedia since its inception in 2001 have shifted from scepticism and hostility to serious critique. Wikipedia is a project driven by a community of amateur, and sometimes professional, scholars and it is this community – and associated rules and practices – that shapes the site's publicly viewable content. Despite the centrality of egalitarianism and communal wisdom to the Wikipedian ethos, the encyclopaedia is not filled …
Indigenous sport and heritage: Cherbourg's Ration Shed Museum
So much has been lost about the culture of Australia's Indigenous people. Their languages, traditions and heritage were dissipated under the process of white colonization from 1788. This paper investigates the actions of the people from Cherbourg, an Aboriginal settlement in southeast Queensland, Australia, to reclaim their culture, identity and heritage. The focus is specifically on the Ration Shed Museum (RSM), which officially opened in Cherbo…
Australia's Women Surfers: History, Methodology and the Digital Humanities
The emerging field of digital humanities offers many potential innovations for historians, but also generates a host of methodological and philosophical challenges and issues. This article focuses on one feature of digital humanities, distant reading, to analyse the history of women's surfing in Australia in the early twentieth century. As a form of quantitative analysis involving data mining and visual representations, distant reading is used in…
A Bird’s-Eye View of the Past: Digital History, Distant Reading and Sport History
Advances in computer technologies have made it easier than ever before for historians to access a wealth of sources made available in the digital era. This article investigates one way that historians have engaged with the challenges and opportunities of this ‘infinite archive’: distant reading. We define distant reading as an umbrella term that embraces many practices, including data mining, aggregation, text analysis, and the visual representat…
Crossing Lines: Sport History, Transformative Narratives, and Aboriginal Australia
In this collaborative article, we seek to unsettle the dominance of Western, reconstructionist accounts of Indigenous Australian sport history through reflections on our past research in the Queensland Aboriginal community of Cherbourg. That research focussed on a statue of legendary 1930s cricketer, Eddie Gilbert, and on sport exhibitions in Cherbourg's Ration Shed Museum. Here, we are less concerned with unveiling the ‘true’ account of Australi…
Aboriginal Rules: The Black History of Australian Football
This paper is interested in the significance of Australian football to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia. In particular, this paper is interested in the cultural power of football and how it has foregrounded the struggle and highlighted the contribution that Indigenous people have made to the national football code of Australia. This paper also discusses key moments in Indigenous football history in Australia. It quest…
Pink Tea and Sissy Boys’: Digitized Fragments of Male Homosexuality, Non-Heteronormativity and Homophobia in the Australian Sporting Press, 1845–1954
Researching the gay sporting past is difficult because of the dearth of written evidence. This article employs digital history techniques, specifically the distant and close reading of newspapers, in an attempt to locate references to male homosexuality in the Australian sporting press. The focus is not on finding references to homosexual athletes, but rather on locating attitudes, innuendo and inferences concerning homosexuality, non-heteronorma…
Blown out of the Water: The 1933 New Caledonian water polo visit to Australia and demise of a racial stereotype
In March 1933, a water polo team from New Caledonia, composed mainly of Melanesians, arrived in Sydney to compete against a New South Wales representative side in a series of three test matches. It was the first international team from that sport to arrive in Australia. While the 1930s marked a high point in the globalisation of sport, the significance of the tour lies less in its international precedence and more in its racial dimensions. This p…
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