Almanac History: Don’t mention the war – teaching history through sport.

 

 

by Roy Hay

 

Good history teachers the world over start from what their students know and love and lead them through things they don’t know to a better understanding of the society they and their ancestors lived in. That is one of the reasons why the history of sport can contribute to an approach that allows many elements of light and shade to be shone on the impact of outsiders on the Indigenous people of Australia. The effects of the current COVID pandemic can be compared to the demographic disaster that befell the First Nations of Australia when the outlanders arrived. Here in Victoria in the Western District the population was reduced to a tiny proportion, perhaps as little as one per cent, of those who inhabited the area prior to the invasion. Yet within a generation or two the survivors were taking on the invaders at their own sports—athletics, boxing, cricket and football. The first two sports were easier to enter as individuals and Europeans encouraged them because there was money to be made by exploiting them. Soon after, Indigenous players were taking part in local teams at cricket and then football. Then they formed teams of their own, joined local leagues and eventually began winning them. They were unable to progress further thanks to bans on their playing against teams from the top levels of metropolitan football. What happened in regional Victoria was a triumph of the human spirit and shows that the survivors were not just victims but actors in their own story. As in other aspects of the relationships between the original inhabitants and the incomers, Indigenous people took what they thought useful and adapted it to fit their own needs, to help them survive in an alien world.

 

How do we know and find out about this story? Perhaps surprisingly, significant parts of it can be found in an unlikely source, the sports pages of the newspapers of the day, particularly those in regional areas of what became the colony of Victoria in 1851. Around the periphery of Victoria a number of missions and stations were set up and many of the surviving Indigenous people were encouraged or forced to live there. They included Coranderrk in the Upper Yarra Valley, Framlingham and Lake Condah in the Western District, Ebenezer in the Wimmera, Lake Tyers in Gippsland and Cummeragunja, just over the Murray River in Southern New South Wales. The Murray valley was orientated much more to Melbourne than Sydney in those days, so the locals took up footy rather than rugby. In each of these places Indigenous people played for local teams or formed their own or took part in both.

 

The first and best-known group of Indigenous sportsmen came from Gariwerd around the Lake Wallace area. Encouraged by local squatters, they took up cricket. A group of them formed the first Indigenous cricket team to play against the Melbourne Cricket Club on Boxing Day in 1866. Later the nucleus of that side with some later additions became the first Australian cricket team to tour England in 1868. They had a more intense itinerary than modern-day Ashes tourists. They took part in matches on 99 of the 126 days they were in England (Sundays excluded as no games were played on the sabbath). That early extraordinary success led nowhere as the gatekeepers of the domestic game excluded Indigenous players for the next century or more.

 

Australian football had an almost equivalent bar to entry, particularly in Victoria. Poorne Yarriworri, Albert Pompey Austin, from Framlingham, played a single game for Geelong in 1872. Dick Rowan from Coranderrk should have followed him in 1892 but when South Melbourne wanted him the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines of Victoria refused permission. ‘If he is allowed to go others will want to follow’, they wrote. It was not until the 1930s that the next Indigenous player broke through to play at the top level in the state. Even today only just over 40 Indigenous Victorians have played with Victorian AFL clubs since 1897. Jamarra Ugle-Hagen, the number one draft pick in 2020 from Framlingham via Scotch College, is the exception that proves the rule. The situation is very different in the West where the Noongar nation provide star players to the AFL. The Northern Territory and the Tiwi Islands also supply many players to the top-level competition.

 

All this can be taught to illustrate and help explain the continuing impact of colonialism, racism, exclusion and other forms of discrimination on Indigenous people throughout Australian history. But it also restores Aboriginal agency to the story and the ways in which Indigenous people refused to accept the role of victim and became actors in their own history, beginning within a few years of the arrival of the Europeans. This was a triumph of the human spirit and a story to lift the spirits of a modern student.

 

 

Roy Hay is the author of Aboriginal People and Australian Football in the Nineteenth Century: They Did Not Come from Nowhere, shortlisted for the Lord Aberdare Prize of the British Association for Sports History in 2020. An Australian edition will be published this year. Read more about the book HERE

 

 

 

 

Read more articles and reviews by Roy Hay HERE

 

 

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