Reflecting on Race, Politics and Sport1
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1 Reflecting on Race, Politics and Sport 1 Colin Tatz is Visiting Professor in Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University and founding director of the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney. Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT: This essay is a reflective overview of Aboriginal and Islander sport, locating their sporting achievements across the decades and in the contexts of several policy eras: the genocidal period, the protection- segregation regime, the assimilation and integration ages, the present era of ‘autonomy’. The essay focuses on the obstacles in the way of sporting success to the point where these minorities have not only become predominant in the ‘stadium sports’ but have come into their own in sports either previously closed to them or not readily accessible. While sport has done much for individuals, sport as such has had little impact on many communities now in states of distress. KEYWORDS: Aboriginal history, Aboriginal life on reserves, discrimination in sport, sporting triumphs 1 Revised version of a keynote address presented at Sporting Traditions XX: Old Stories — New Histories, Darwin, 1 July 2015. Sporting Traditions, vol. 32, no. 2 (November 2015), pp. 1–11. © Australian Society for Sports History, www.sporthistory.org 2 VOLUME 32 no 2 NOVEMBER 2015 Colin Tatz Reflecting on Race, Politics and Sport 3 Just over three decades ago I wrote the opening article in the first volume to discover just how bad it could be in the allegedly more enlightened state of this journal — ‘Race, Politics and Sport’. It was almost identical to the of Victoria, where I had the good and bad fortune to become a member text of my inaugural professorial lecture at Macquarie University in Sydney. of the unlamented Aborigines Welfare Board, then with the power of life That was considered a brave topic for a Politics professor. At the time I was and death over a small Aboriginal population. I explain all this in my 2015 the only full professor writing about sport (as well as other agendas), and memoir, Human Rights and Human Wrongs.2 the Australian Society for Sports History (ASSH) elders believed my status I came to learn about and then to disseminate evidence about might give greater credence to what sports historians had to say. Perhaps. Aboriginal legal status, special ‘protective’ laws, isolated reserves, settlement Sports history, sociology and culture have come a long way since then, and and mission life, employment and wages, housing, health, nutrition, developed much more intellectual muscle and heft. None of us foresaw the education, social service benefits, sanitation and water availability, political durability of ASSH or its journal, Sporting Traditions, or that distant Darwin and voting rights, and interaction with our criminal law system. The only would be the venue for the XXth ASSH congress. I am honoured to be asked sporting knowledge that emerged (for me) was some vague talk about to publish my keynote address to the Darwin gathering. While the 1984 essay Reuben Cooper in the post-World War I days and his breaking the colour was a comparative study, this one focuses on Australia. bar in senior football and cricket, Ted Egan and the St Mary’s football story, I was still in South Africa early in 1960 when I was awarded a PhD the talents of Tiwi Islander David ‘Soapy’ Kantilla who was allowed to play scholarship by the Australian National University in Canberra. The head Australian Rules football in Adelaide, and Ted Egan taking me with him as of Politics, Leicester Webb, asked what topic I was interested in. Then he drove his Yuendumu team to play an Aussie Rules match at Warrabri, completing my Master’s thesis on ‘Native Policy’ and race politics in South now called Ali Carung, late in 1961. Africa, I immediately replied, ‘Aboriginal Policy’ — but expected that the What an amazing transformation there has been these past 54 years. subject had been truly done over. ‘No’, came the reply, ‘it hasn’t been and Aside from the immense knowledge gains, it is the emergence of Aboriginal that’s what we’d like you to do’. voices and faces that has turned a doomed and dying ‘Stone Age’ people Arriving in Australia in January 1961, it took me two to three days to read into a vigorous presence in the history books which began addressing their all there was to read on contemporary Aboriginal affairs. But there were past and present from the mid-1970, their achievements in literature, the art libraries of material on the physical and social anthropology of a quaint world, music, theatre, dance, film, television, clothing design, environment species of Australoids, a people designated a doomed race whose primitive care and, of course, sport. Today, it would seem, the Aboriginal and Islander culture needed to be captured and recorded before it disappeared. It was presence is mandatory. Certainly it is embraced as the quintessential also an era in which Aborigines simply didn’t appear in the history texts, ‘national product’ when it comes to promotions and major events. Fifty, even even of such men as Manning Clark and Sir Keith Hancock. It was to be thirty years ago, who could have envisioned an Aboriginal woman athlete as another eight years before Bill Stanner, the anthropologist, was to publicly the centre-piece of Australian triumphalism and achievement at the 2000 talk about ‘the great Australian silence’. But Aborigines did rate a chapter in Olympics? Who would have imagined Indigenous Teams playing in national books on Australian fauna and flora. football competitions and in Test match arenas or especial Indigenous So began my work exploring the various policies that governments Rounds in the Australian Football League? Or a South Sea Islander and had adopted towards Aboriginal people in northern Australia. More an Aborigine as coaches, respectively, of the State of Origin rugby league importantly, I looked at the way those policies were administered and why matches? Or that those two former league champions would have their so many fine-sounding policy aims never came to fruition, let alone got to sculptures or names on sports stands at major arenas? first base. I found a great many answers; politicians, however, suggested To simply celebrate Aboriginal and Islander sporting achievement is easy changing the policy slogans rather than addressing the efficiency and lack enough: the riches are there, and we can now point readily to champions of appropriate skills among the bureaucrats administering those policies. In across the sporting alphabet from athletics through to vigoro and wrestling. short, my work was an anthropology of the white tribe of officialdom. It was a But athletic ability can’t be left sitting there in the centre stage spotlight as vivisection of living bureaucratic organs, conducted not with anger but huge if by the waving of a magic wand. It has a history and a context, and it has to disappointment in what I believed should be, or was touted to be, Australian fairness, humaneness, good will, and competence. A sad and defective tribe 2 Colin Tatz, Human Rights and Human Wrongs: A Life Confronting Racism, it was, both in the Northern Territory and in Queensland. I was subsequently Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, 2015. 4 VOLUME 32 no 2 NOVEMBER 2015 Colin Tatz Reflecting on Race, Politics and Sport 5 be presented that way if it is to have more than a fleeting film-clip moment that time — sporadically, episodically, in small numbers but effectively, on television, or a nice still pic on a poster or in a glossy sports magazine. reducing some tribes in the Mossman area of north Queensland from 3,000 Sport — as we know but what much of the public doesn’t know, or to 100. So gross were the atrocities that from 1897 through to 1911 each state doesn’t want to know — is not separate from society. Nor is it separable from and territory had to legislate to protect Aborigines from the predators who the normal world of ambition, greed, power, politics, good and evil, as Mr wanted to kill them, or take their women and children, or sell them opium. Blatter and his big round FIFA ball have shown the world so graphically When these legal cocoons were found to be insufficient protection, these past months. Sports analyst John Hoberman in Austin, Texas and governments began isolating Aborigines geographically, attempting to investigative journalist Andrew Jennings in Britain have been writing about place them well outside the reach of genocidal predators. Most Aboriginal 3 this for decades, but few have listened, or have wanted to listen. We know a reserves, missions and settlements were not what one would call native great deal now about the serious exploiters of sport, but not enough about habitats: poor agriculturally and bereft of adequate water, they were, to use the exploited. To help with that, we need to look to such works as that of one missionary’s language, ‘splendidly secluded’ unnatural domains. In African-American historian Jeffrey Sammons. His 1987 book Beyond the such isolation they would be safe, and in a secure locations suited to their Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society, is, in my view, the best insight conversion to Christianity, hygiene and civilisation, free of the prying eyes of we have — not of the ring, but what surrounds and underpins it. I tried to do the public, the media and the curious. 4 something like that in my Obstacle Race book in 1995. The special protective laws infantilised them: they pauperised all As in the United States and elsewhere, so too with Aboriginal and Aborigines by deeming them incapable of managing themselves or their Islander sport.