Almanac Books: ‘Not Playing the Game’ – Xavier Fowler

 

 

After watching an Anzac Day clash between Essendon and Collingwood in 2002, and absorbing how ‘sport and war shared a unique relationship in this country, [and] one to be celebrated’ as promoted by the AFL and journalists, author and historian Xavier Fowler began to question this assumption. His questioning of war and sport eventually leads to the publication of his book Not Playing The Game: Sport and Australia’s Great War. Xavier explains some background details about his book leading up to its release on 1 November by Melbourne University Press.

 

 

 

 

 

I was mesmerised the day Collingwood overcome Essendon in the 2002 Anzac Day football ‘clash’. The Dons had vanquished the Pies in the previous three Anzac encounters, but not this day. In front of almost 85,000 screaming fans, a 17-year-old nobody named Mark McGough led the Pies to a famous victory over the old enemy. My lasting memory of the day was a jubilant Nathan Buckley, fists clenched in the air, rain pouring down, triumphant at last. Yet my awe for the occasion went deeper than just the triviality of a football match. As a series of AFL executives, players, coaches, and journalists had informed me all week, sport and war shared a unique relationship in this country, one to be celebrated. Both activities exuded qualities commonly associated with the Australian national identity: courage, teamwork, leadership, physical prowess, mateship, and loyalty. Both, too, provided a stage to showcase this national exceptionalism to the world. As Herald Sun writer Mark Robinson boasted the morning of the 2002 clash: ‘It’s not just a footy game. It’s bigger than that. It’s something that encompasses everything great about our country and its people.’ When it came time for me to undertake a doctorate in history many years later, I could think of nothing better than to explore this proud cultural bedrock of Australian life.

 

What I found, however, was nothing like the story previously sold to me. As I scrawled through the historical newspapers, journals, government reports, and the writings of sporting administrators, I found a glaring lack of patriotic unity over the place of sport in Australia’s Great War. Some voices, particularly the wealthy or those with close personal links to Britain, felt sport was justified only on the basis of its wartime utility. Yes, it had helped to harden young minds and bodies. But the time for training was over. Sport must be abandoned, so men could freely join the greater game being played on the battlefield! Others, particularly the poor and those with weaker ancestral connections to Britain, replied that sport provided employment in a time of economic uncertainty, as well as a tonic to sooth jaded nerves caused by an increasingly bloody war. The debate, which shadowed wider social division, became particularly volatile as the conflict dragged on. Sporting competitions split over the decision to continue with play, restructuring the sporting landscape in the process. State and federal governments, hoping to concentrate minds on the war, decided to curtail horse-racing and boxing fixtures, sending thousands into destitution. Disgruntled sports fans in turn began to confront and even physically attack recruiting agents in the stands of sporting arenas. As one distressed recruiter reported in 1917, ‘They absolutely refused to let me speak, and pushed me, and jostled me all over the place. They said I had no right to go there and spoil their sport, and I had to leave the ground, as they threatened to deal with me.’ These wounds cut deep and failed to fully heal even after the declaration of peace.

 

In 2015, Kevin Sheedy stated that Anzac Day football was the ‘vehicle’ to tell the story of Australia’s Great War. Yet it seems only half the story is being told. This book, through the relatable prism of sport, hopes to tell the other side: of conflict between competing national, class, and ethnic identities; between personal liberty and state power; between private obligations and civic duty; between the glory of warfare and the price of victory. I believe it is time to throw off the presumption sport walked hand-in-hand with the Australian war effort. By accepting this, we might also review the place of the Great War as an essentially patriotic, nation-building exercise and acknowledge its more complex impact on Australian society. It is certainly a story worth telling, not just because it is interesting, but because it allows us space to be proud of those who had the courage to stay, as well as those who chose to go to the front.

 

 

 

Details to purchase Not Playing the Game can be found HERE.

 

 

The media release about the book can be read HERE.

 

 

 

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