Abstract 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 principles through our experiences conducting historical projects with several Australian First Nations communities: in the Torres Strait Islands, Papunya and Yuendumu in central Australia, and the Queensland communities of Barcaldine, Cherbourg, and Yarrabah. These projects have produced, or are producing, outcomes for communities and public audiences that extend beyond academic journal articles to include books, museum exhibitions, and community databases. We advocate that sport historians who research with First Nations communities consider co-design principles to help ensure that outputs are culturally responsive, responsible, and beneficial.

Historians have paid scant attention to the origins of the trudgen stroke, a now obsolete but once prominent swimming stroke. The style is attributed to an Englishman, John Trudgen, whose inspiration is vaguely given as South America, Buenos Aires or South American Indians. This article explores Trudgen's life and locates the most probable source of his style to indigenous Paraguayans, with whom Trudgen lived and worked as an engineering apprentice in the 1860s, prior to and during the War of the Triple Alliance, as part of an English contingent employed to arm the Paraguayan national forces. The imprecise attribution of Trudgen's stroke and elision of South American swimming cultures in the historiography of the stroke constitute a form of cultural appropriation. Drawing from the work of Hochan Kim, this article analyses the mechanics of this process through specific actions that dismiss, obscure, denigrate and crowd out the South American antecedents that inspired Trudgen. It draws parallels to similar cultural appropriation that has occurred with other swimming stokes and calls for renewed attention to the existence of global indigenous swimming cultures and their contributions to modern sport.

Edward William Rollins (c. 1852-1939), '' Professor Starlight '', was a noteworthy boxer and entertainer in Australia for three decades from the 1880s. A dapper gentleman and consummate storyteller, he was celebrated by the sporting press well beyond his fighting days. Born in British Guiana, he offers a valuable opportunity to extend the historiography of African Caribbean migrants in Australia at a time of growing interest in British imperial dynamics, legacies of slavery and Black migrant histories. As the author of a published memoir and the subject of several interview-based newspaper articles, Rollins is a rare example of a Black public figure in Australia who left notable personal accounts. We triangulate these writings with press reporting and archival records to examine Rollins's life, as well as to assess the carefully curated inclusions and omissions contained in his written accounts and interviews. We argue that the fact of his achievements and claims not always being exactly true was beside the point. Rollins was a raconteur and entertainer as much as he was a boxer and, as Mark McKenna has posited in relation to the historian Manning Clark, to "keep his audience entertained, it was sometimes necessary to be flexible with the facts".

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 microcosm of sport history in wider Oceania. It is a modern multi-sport event in the Olympic tradition, yet there are traditional games in the programme (e.g., coconut tree climbing or va'a canoeing). It is a space for cultural exchange, the maintenance of regional identity, and the building of collaborative diplomatic relations. And it exemplifies island societies in the midst of the twin existential crises of climate change and cultural homogenization. Through an island studies approach, this article will use the Micro Games to contextualize what sport is and is not in the small island states of Oceania.

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 Brisbane, including members of the Brisbane All Blacks, were expected to renounce their Aboriginality under the assimilation policy and culturally absorb into white society. Oral history and archival research show, however, that the Brisbane All Blacks actively pushed back against these expectations. The footballers strategically navigated their settler colonial environment in ways that allowed them to exploit the assimilation policy for their own needs and purposes. The All Blacks' football activities and associated Boathouse dances facilitated the emergence of a distinctly Aboriginal community in Southeast Queensland. This community demonstrated a sense of pride and empowerment, as well as forging strong social networks, which enabled Aboriginal initiatives in the following decades. The All Blacks are a meaningful example of self-determination by Aboriginal peoples before formal self-determination emerged federally on the political landscape or internationally at the United Nations.

Abstract 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 folds of history. The first fold explores the general silences about sport concussion that existed until recently. The second fold is centered on the traumatic consequences of colonization on the health and well-being of Australia's First Nations peoples. While the first silence is being addressed in a multitude of complex ways, the second silence remains a disturbing feature of contemporary sport. We argue that for the recognition, diagnoses, and treatment of concussion and brain injuries in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, there needs to be an appreciation of the continuing consequences of colonization and significant changes in the Western health system.

Traditional games are often situated in counter distinction to modern sport forms and are not well understood in Western society or scholarship. However, from these games, we have the opportunity to learn much about local play and physical culture. This article focuses on traditional Indigenous games in Oceania and how they can be used as a lens for the development of environmental stewardship or ecological sensibilities. The aims of this study are twofold: (1) to lay a foundation for future research in this area and (2) to situate traditional games within the broader sport ecology conversation. By deconstructing the embodied nature of traditional games and overviewing the histories of environmentalism in Oceania, a more grounded claim can be made for the relevance of traditional games within sport and leisure studies scholarship, including sport history, sport sociology, sport anthropology, and sport ecology. The nature games of Oceania yield diverse insights into Indigenous epistemologies, ecological sensibilities, and how outdoor play can be understood as a form of climate action.

The sociology and history of sport have neglected Pacific swimming cultures and their impact on global recreational and sporting cultures. This chapter explores the potential for deeper analysis of Pacific contributions to aquatic recreational practices via Solomon Islands swimming. The focus is on the contributions and representations of Alick Wickham(1886-1967), a Solomon Islander wholived in Australia during the first three decades of the 20th century. Wickham, who was a champion swimmer and diver recognised nationally and internationally for his abilities, is popularly credited with introducing the crawl, or freestyle, stroke to swimming competition. While some commentators acknowledge that Wickham's crawl stroke was a practice called tapatapala in his home, Roviana, on New Georgia in the western Solomons, and that some of his other techniques and styles had Solomon Islands origins, little attention is paid to these Pacific cultural antecedents. This chapter examines Wickham's styles, reflects on their Roviana influences, and asks why these Pacific dimensions of his aquatic practices were, and continue to be, overlooked. This marginalisation of Pacific swimming cultures is analysed through the lenses of prevailing racial hierarchies and whiteness as a dominant discourse that continues to privilege white Australia development of the crawl stroke over its Solomons origins and elides other water practices that influenced Wickham.

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 to 1962. This multi-faceted project led to the publication of a book - Marching with a Mission: Cherbourg's Marching Girls (2022). We reflect on the ways that we strove throughout the project to adhere to ethical protocols, moral obligations, and Indigenous research methodologies. The lens for this analysis is the Research Ethics Framework published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in 2020. This framework is based on four interwoven principles that emphasize responsibilities on researchers and projects to help ensure the ethical integrity of Indigenous research and outcomes: Indigenous self-determination, Indigenous leadership, Impact and value, and Sustainability and accountability. We conclude that the Research Ethics Framework provides important guidelines to help non-Indigenous scholars privilege Indigenous community ways of being, doing and knowing in collaborating about their sporting pasts.

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 his frequent trips 'down under' had inspired him to open his own boxing saloon in Brisbane.Perhaps the semitropical climate reminded him of his childhood in Barbados?Maybe he felt welcome in a young, energetic city where a talented black pugilist with London connections could make a name for himself?By all accounts, Australians considered Dowridge an intelligent, educated and well-dressed 'gentleman', as much admired for his business acumen as a boxing hall, hotel, theatre and restaurant proprietor as for his boxing prowess.Nevertheless, his negotiations of race and racism in Queensland reveal intriguing episodes and elisions alongside instances of outright prejudice and hostility, pointing to the difficult and marginalised spaces occupied by the African-Caribbean diaspora in colonial Australia.A growing body of historical scholarship examines migrants of African ancestry to Australia.Among these works, Cassandra Pybus pioneered research on convicts of African heritage transported aboard the First Fleet in 1788, Richard Waterhouse analysed the impact of minstrels and vaudevillians of African ethnicity, and Bill Egan chronicled the lives of black entertainers and boxers. 1 Much of the available research in this area has concentrated on descendants of African slaves born in the British Isles, the United States and Canada.The transportation and migration of African-Caribbean individuals to Australia has received less attention overall, which is consistent with a broad lack of research on the Caribbean diaspora, as well as research on the African diaspora that 'privileges' the Atlantic over other regions of 1 Cassandra Pybus, Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black

Rugby league flourished in the Aboriginal settlements run by the Queensland government in the 1920s and 1930s, as officials relaxed policies of segregation and isolation to allow Aboriginal teams to travel within the state. Revenue from the games, at times significant sums, went to government trust accounts and not directly to the settlements. Available data on this sporting income and government spending policies reveals an exploitative system, ethically comparable to Stolen Wages and reflecting the dispossession of Aboriginal Queenslanders in this era. While sport bolstered community pride, these exploitative dimensions qualify its contribution to Aboriginal wellbeing.

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 they possessed, and how sport was a forum for resistance used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to mitigate the power imbalances of settler colonialism. Four examples are examined - written correspondence about sporting opportunities, a strike by Aboriginal footballers, the sport of marching girls, and a rugby league competition organized by Aboriginal people. These case studies are analyzed and understood as what Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor describes as survivance stories.

Arthur "Tums" Cavill was an Australian swimmer and swimming instructor who lived in Portland, Oregon, from 1909 to 1913, where he influenced local sport and recreation in various ways. The scion of an aquatic dynasty that was honored by the International Swimming Hall of Fame as swimming's most influential family, he was one of several siblings who had illustrious careers in the United States. Although he was an employee of the Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club (now Multnomah Athletic Club), his significance in Oregon extended beyond the sphere of this elite, private institution. His initiatives and activities in encouraging swimming, organizing public events, and attracting women to the water were widely reported, and supported, in Portland. This article analyzes Cavill's contributions to the Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club, to Portland, and to Oregon, bookended by an overview of his early life and swimming achievements and by his untimely death at age thirty-six while attempting to swim across Seattle Harbor.

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 proudly to his chest retains powerful currency. The Winmar protest is both an Australian precursor to the Black Lives Matter movement and remains a potent touchstone in the current debates around the topic. And while Winmar's stance remains a moral compass point towards racism-free sport, it also highlights continuing tensions around race, racism and memory. We explore these dimensions through a discussion of the intersection of the global Black Lives Matter movement with Australia, a revisiting of Winmar's 1993 protest and its representations, reverberations and relevance, and an analysis of the meanings and issues surrounding the placement of a statue commemorating Winmar in Perth, Western Australia. These episodes occurred against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement, revealing intersections with, and unique dimensions of, racial issues in Australian sport.