'Genus Barracker': Masculinity, Race, and the Disruptive Pleasures Of

‘Genus Barracker’: Masculinity, Race, and the Disruptive Pleasures of Rowdy Partisanship in 1880s Melbourne This is the Published version of the following publication Klugman, Matthew (2019) ‘Genus Barracker’: Masculinity, Race, and the Disruptive Pleasures of Rowdy Partisanship in 1880s Melbourne. Australian Historical Studies. ISSN 1031-461X The publisher’s official version can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1031461X.2018.1561733 Note that access to this version may require subscription. Downloaded from VU Research Repository https://vuir.vu.edu.au/38398/ Australian Historical Studies ISSN: 1031-461X (Print) 1940-5049 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rahs20 ‘Genus barracker’: Masculinity, Race, and the Disruptive Pleasures of Rowdy Partisanship in 1880s Melbourne Matthew Klugman To cite this article: Matthew Klugman (2019): ‘Genus barracker’: Masculinity, Race, and the Disruptive Pleasures of Rowdy Partisanship in 1880s Melbourne, Australian Historical Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2018.1561733 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2018.1561733 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 14 Apr 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 360 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rahs20 ‘Genus barracker’: Masculinity, Race, and the Disruptive Pleasures of Rowdy Partisanship in 1880s Melbourne MATTHEW KLUGMAN This article uses the emergence of the cultural category of barrackers in 1880s colonial Melbourne to examine the way a spectator sport became a site of intersecting discourses around emotions, health, science, class, citizenship, masculinity, and partisanship. Drawing on suburban newspapers it traces those aspects of barracking that were disturbing and thrilling enough to occasion the popularisation of a new noun and verb. The article also explores how barracking became a middle-class behaviour, as well as a middle-class concern, and the way popular reactions to barrackers in the 1880s differed to responses to another much more studied cultural category: larrikins. In 1890, while others worked to detail the emergence of an Australian national type, a writer going by the name of ‘JEB’ wrote an essay on the emergence of a local phenomenon in Melbourne: the Australian Rules football barracker.1 JEB began by observing that ‘For an Englishman to visit Australia, and go home without having seen an Australian football match, with its attendant mul- titude of ardent barrackers, would be as unintelligible as for a Colonial to see London and omit the tower’.2 The only thing to do if you missed out was to ‘come back and see one’. ‘For what an experience it is to be at one of the big matches! What a babel of sound! What a magnificent uproar! What a glorious cloud-shattering eruption of profanity!’ Writing in the tone of a popular naturalist describing the latest wonder, JEB intimated that this noise was generated by partisanship. The greatest roars came when a barracker gave a ‘sublime and glorious effort’ to ‘save his party from I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article along with the editors and staff of Aus- tralian Historical Studies, together with Warwick Anderson, Leigh Boucher, Joy Damousi, Esther Faye, Rob Hess, Fiona Kerr, Louis Magee, Nicholas Marshall, Alex McDermott, Louis Moore, Gary Osmond, Robert Pascoe, Murray Phillips, Jordy Silverstein, Sarah Pinto, Melissa Walsh, Tao Bak and Athas Zafiris, for their conversations, advice and support. I am also very thankful for the research assistance of Athas Zafiris. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [ARC DECRA Fellowship DE130100121]. 1 JEB, ‘Football and Barracking (An Essay)’, South Bourke and Mornington Journal, 9 August 1890, 3. 2 Ibid. © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1 2 Australian Historical Studies, 50, 2019 defeat’.3 Yelling in such a one-sided manner was not only ‘a fine art’, it was so ‘enthralling’ as to be addictive, ‘as intoxicating as the use of opium’.4 And it led to a ‘natural state of wild abandonment’ wherein the barracker demonstrated the ‘marvellous strength of the Australian lung’, beside which non-barrackers necessarily appeared ‘feeble’.5 I begin with this sardonic celebration of colonial howling because I am intri- gued by the development of the cultural category of the ‘barracker’ in Melbourne in the 1880s – a cultural category that at its height extended to New Zealand and England, and which remains current (if substantially transformed) in Australia.6 JEB’s sketch captured the way the minds and bodies of exuberant football spectators became a site of intersecting discourses around emotions, health, science, class, citizenship, and masculinity, where the pleasures of barrackers troubled optimistic notions of (white) racial progress. This article focuses on the emergence of these discourses around the passions of barrackers in colonial Melbourne. Drawing on Melbourne’s suburban newspapers – where these discourses first emerged – I trace how barrackers came to threaten the association of Australian male health, strength, fairness, and sport, which was so powerful in Melbourne during the 1880s.7 At issue are questions of race, pleasure, partiality, masculinity, bodies, minds, and degeneration.8 At a time when public displays of emotions were viewed with suspicion as well as fascination in the Anglophone world, the prejudiced shouting of spectators was of particular concern to many observers.9 As George Lacon James advised prospective English migrants and businessmen in 1892, the so-called 3 Ibid., my emphasis. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Searches of the New Zealand National Library’s DigitalNZ on 10 January 2018 indicate that ‘barrackers’ and ‘barracking’ were common terms in New Zealand during the period from 1890 to 1913. Likewise searches of the British Library’s British Newspaper Archive on 10 January 2018 indicate that both ‘barrackers’ and ‘barracking’ were relatively common terms in Britain during the interwar years. ‘Barracking’ continues to be occasionally used in Britain in a pejorative manner that reflects the early usage of the term, rather than its contemporary meaning in Australia. 7 Although it was not feasible to survey all of the 120-plus newspapers published in Melbourne during this time, the National Library of Australia’s Trove database provides access to a substantial number of papers around Melbourne in the 1880s. On 10 January 2018 Trove provided 478 results in Victorian newspapers in the 1880s for the search ‘fulltext:barracker*’, and 208 for ‘fulltext:barracking’, many of which overlapped. For more on the use of Trove see Murray Phillips and Gary Osmond, ‘Australia’s Women Surfers: History, Methodology and the Digital Humanities’, Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 2 (2015): 285–303; and Matthew Klugman, ‘The Passionate, Pathologized Bodies of Sports Fans – How the Digital Turn Might Facilitate a New Cultural History of Modern Spectator Sports’, Journal of Sport History 44, no. 2 (2017): 306–21. 8 My focus here is on men and masculinity because the women who barracked were barely men- tioned in the newspaper coverage of the 1880s, and never in the critiques of barracking that I draw from in this article. For more on female barrackers see June Senyard, ‘The Barracker and the Spectator: Constructing Class and Gender Identities through the Football Crowd at the Turn of the Century’, Journal of Australian Studies 62 (1999): 46–55; and Matthew Klugman, ‘Female Spectators, Agency, and the Politics of Pleasure: An Historical Case Study from Australian Rules Football’, International Journal of the History of Sport 33, no. 17 (2016): 2086–104. 9 Tiffany Watt Smith, On Flinching: Theatricality and Scientific Looking from Darwin to Shell Shock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Klugman: ‘Genus barracker’ 3 ‘barrackers’ in ‘football mad’ Victoria were defined by their ‘rowdy partisanship’.10 Both JEB and James were implicitly contrasting the behaviour of barrackers with the dominant code of English manliness in the late 1800s.11 John Tosh has observed that the ideal (middle-class) English man maintained self- control at all times, and behaved in a rational manner.12 He resisted the dangerous pleasures of addictive vices like opium, choosing virtue over effemi- nacy.13 He was also white, although often only implicitly so. Indeed, the ‘com- pelling fantasies of mastery’ which drove the formation of the British empire were based on the purported self-control of civilised white men. ‘Again and again control of the passions, restraint of the appetites and moderation in sex were emphasized. A man who would have authority over others must first master himself’.14 Yet JEB’s account highlighted not only the ‘wild abandonment’ of football barrackers, but also their strength and the one-sided nature of their bellowing. In so doing JEB was also contrasting the behaviour of football barrackers with the emerging ideal Australian man. The notion of this ‘Australian

Load more