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.

Smartphone technologies and prominent marketing campaigns continue to contribute to the growth of sports betting in contemporary Australia, shifting the practice from pubs and clubs into the domestic and intimate lives of young bettors. This article seeks to build on prior studies of sports betting in the lives of young Australian men by focusing on how gambling shame and stigma is navigated by bettors and their romantic partners. Data collected from 20 interviews with young sports bettors and their intimate partners is used to highlight and contrast how men and women perceive and engage with modern sports betting. Drawing on the work of Elspeth Probyn, we show how shame directed by betting men towards problem gambling behaviours and perceived illegitimate forms of gambling, such as betting alone or betting on racing, helps legitimise men's own betting practices and position them favourably in masculine betting hierarchies. In contrast to men's shaming responses, women who have been romantically involved with sports bettors instead show feelings of understanding and indifference towards the practice, provided their partners bet at a recreational level. These findings illustrate the ways young Australian gamblers use 'betting shame' to navigate and justify their engagement with a rapidly transforming, stigmatised leisure practice.

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.

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 this paper, we use the field of Health and Physical Education (H/PE) to explain the limitations, nuances, and inconsistencies of three global, digitally available, and regularly updated systems: library holdings, metrics, and altmetrics. We understand these systems through the analogyof seeing different vistas of a landscape when driving a car: looking in the rear-view mirror (i.e. library holdings as past indicators of quality) and out the side windows (i.e. metrics and altmetrics as current indicators). Before examining these measures, we acknowledge the neoliberal audit culture and outline our understanding of the H/PE 'field'. To identify H/PE journals, we searched databases, websites, and literature, generating a list of 202 potentially relevant journals. After three rounds of refinement, 13 journals remained that: (1) focused on health and/or physical education as a school subject (including H/PE teacher education), (2) had official metrics, and (3) self-identified as 'Social Sciences - Education' and had more than 20% of the papers in the last two volumes focus on H/PE. For each of these journals, we provide the WorldCat library holdings, metrics (i.e. Journal Impact Factor, Journal h-index, CiteScore, SCImago Journal Rank, and Source Normalized Impact per Paper), and altmetrics. We explain how to understand these measures, as well as their contested, problematic and, often, confusing dimensions. Overall, we argue that it is crucial for scholars to understand these measures so that they can critically reflect on how measurement shapes their research and professional lives.

Introduction: Health inequities reinforce intergenerational trauma and poor health for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. These poorly understood health inequities lead to physical activity and health promotion programs that fail to meet the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Targeted socio-emotional learning has been shown to empower children through school preparedness, promoting prosocial behaviour, building identity, and developing self-confidence. New research, untested with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, highlights that movement-based educational practices can better facilitate socio-emotional learning in the fight against health inequities. Methods: This research involves community co-design, delivery and evaluation of a movement-based program aiming to improve socio-emotional learning and physical literacy, overall impacting health equity outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Utilising Indigenist Research Methodologies Dadirri (deep listening) and Yarning, this research privileges and empowers the voices of the Yarrabah community. Each stage of the co-design, program implementation and evaluation is embedded with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing, being and doing and Aboriginal leadership. Results: The current research will link the use of movement-based education practices and subsequent physical activity participation to the development of socio-emotional learning. The inclusion of this pedagogical practice will target outcomes of long-term socio-emotional learning benefits as well as enhance physical literacy outcomes. The aim of the current research is to investigate the importance of embedding movement-based programs with culture for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Discussion: This research discusses the processes of co-design, program and evaluation framework development that are established through continuous and ongoing community partnership (co-design). This discussion will include linkages from the Cultural determinants of Health for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and how (through partnership and co-design) effective culturally responsive health promotion programs can be co-developed. Impact/Application to the field: This innovative work seeks to link movement-based learning and socio-emotional learning for positive impact on health and wellbeing through physical activity ultimately seeking to close the gap in health inequities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Declaration: My co-authors and I acknowledge that we have no conflict of interest of relevance to the submission of this abstract.

Metrics, and increasingly altmetrics, are a pervasive aspect of academic life. A proliferation of digital tools available have seen greater emphasis on the quantification of the ‘performance’ of individual journals. Although metrics and altmetrics are justified in terms of increased accountability and transparency, there are significant inequities in the ways they are deployed. Key among these is the unsuitability of many popular metrics for assessing publications in the humanities and social sciences, as the data, algorithms and systems which support them cater to authorship and citation practices of the various science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. These issues are amplified for journals in the sociology of sport, which publish research by humanities and social science scholars whose work is quantified according to the standards of the health science departments in which they frequently work. In this discussion, we critically examine how common forms of metrics and altmetrics, including those produced by Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Altmetric.com, are applied to available sociology of sport journals. We analyse and critique how different metric algorithms produce variable measures of performance for each of the journals in the field and reveal how other information available on these databases can augment our understanding of the sociology of sport publishing ecology. Far from advocating the value of metrics and altmetrics, our analysis is intended to arm scholars and journals with the information required to critically navigate the entanglement of metrics and altmetrics with neoliberalism, audit culture and digital technologies in universities.

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.

Australian Aboriginal boxer Adrian Blair was one of three Indigenous Australians to compete in the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. To that point, no Indigenous Australians had ever participated in the Olympics, not for want of sporting talent but because the racist legislation that stripped them of their basic human rights extended to limited sporting opportunities. The state of Queensland, where Blair lived, had the most repressive laws governing Indigenous people of any state in Australia. The Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement, a government reserve where Blair grew up as a ward of the state, epitomized the oppressive control exerted over Indigenous people. In this article, we examine Blair's selection for the Olympic Games through the lens of government legislation and changing policy toward Indigenous people. We chart a growing trajectory of boxing in Cherbourg, from the reserve's foundation in 1904 to Blair's appearance in Tokyo sixty years later, which corresponds to policy shifts from “protection” to informal assimilation and, finally, to formal assimilation in the 1960s. The analysis of how Cherbourg boxing developed in these changing periods illustrates the power of sport history for analyzing race relations in settler colonial countries.

The Routledge Handbook of Sport History is a new and innovative survey of the discipline of sport history. Global in scope, it examines the key contemporary issues in sports historiography, sheds light on previously ignored topics, and sets an intellectual agenda for the future development of the discipline. The book explores both traditional and non-traditional methodologies in sport history, and traces the interface between sport history and other fields of research, such as literature, material culture and the digital humanities. It considers the importance of key issues such as gender, race, sexuality and politics to our understanding of sport history, and focuses on innovative ways that the scholarship around these issues is challenging accepted discourses. This is the first handbook to include a full section on Indigenous sport history, a topic that has often been ignored in sport history surveys despite its powerful upstream influence on contemporary sport. The book also reflects carefully on the central importance of sport history journals in shaping the development of the discipline. This book is an essential reference for any student, researcher or scholar with an interest in sport history or the relationship between sport and society. It will also be fascinating reading for any historians looking for fresh perspectives on contemporary historiography or social and cultural history.

Researching and writing about Aboriginal sport history is one of the most challenging, and rewarding, opportunities of our scholarly careers. It is challenging because non-Aboriginal people must engage with ontological, epistemological, theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues and ideas that often exist outside traditional Western conventions. Challenges for male scholars escalate in attempting to represent the experiences of Aboriginal sportswomen. Not only do we need to engage with racial theories and gender analysis, as Susan Birrell has done throughout her career, but it involves consciously creating narratives from the outside as non-Aboriginal men with all the boundaries and limitations this situation imposes. The final layer of complexity is that Aboriginal history-making involves appropriate recognition of, and involvement with, Aboriginal people, and creating reciprocal relationships and practices that are community-driven. We address these issues through a case study of the Marching Girls from the Aboriginal settlement of Cherbourg in Queensland, Australia.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of part III of this book. The book captures the dynamic essence of the field of sport history as they engage with and feature emerging ideas, topics, approaches, and cross-disciplinary directions. It discusses the ways in which historians of sport have utilized technologies such as statistical software, spreadsheets, the Internet, and social media, pointing to the ways some sport history scholars have embraced digital technologies. The book suggests that teachers and learners will both need to grapple with new technologies to produce and share digital histories, but they will also need to develop new methodological skills to contend with the ways sport engagement is transforming and is mediated through virtual, augmented, and simulated environments. It traces the histories of online competitive gaming and esports to the 1950s, suggesting that only recently have virtual sports taken a more prominent place in the global sports landscape.

This chapter outlines the key issues associated with representations of the sporting past under four headings: reflexivity, narrative, authorial choices, and ethics. As a prerequisite for understanding the different ways in which historians subconsciously and consciously present the past, reflexivity refers to a heightened state of self-awareness in which practitioners make continual references to their own involvement in their histories. A reflexive historian explains how they represent the past as history and the different ways they unavoidably influence their presentation of the past; the reflexive historian enters into dialogues with other viewpoints. Much of the impetus for recent perspectives and conceptualizations in the history of sport derives from a paradigmatic shift in the humanities and social sciences known as the cultural turn. The place of theory in history has been a source of endless debate within the discipline and no less so than among historians of sport and, in particular, between sport historians and sport sociologists.

Sport has been, and continues to be, a very significant component of Indigenous lives. Sport was central to life on missions, reserves, and settlements in Australia, and at residential, boarding, and industrial schools and on reserves in Canada and the United States of America. The denial of basic human rights, including very limited educational opportunities that focused on non-academic education with a low ceiling for employment, followed by chronic underinvestment in secondary and higher education, resulted in delayed entry of Indigenous scholars to universities. The challenges continue with reframing the concept of sport history. The vast majority of sport historians work through the lens of post-contact sport without acknowledging physical activities that were inseparable from life prior to settler colonial states and continue to have cultural influence into the present. Indigenous methodologies demonstrate how many sport historians have pigeon-holed their work into one dimension of the grand narrative of settler colonialism.

The North American Society for Sport History (NASSH) instituted its Book Award in 1989, Edited Book Award (Anthology) in 2007, and Journal Article Award in 2015. Journals are a critical forum of scholarly discourse, particularly in the digital age with online, pre-publication access that accelerates distribution and circulation. The relatively quick publication process for journal articles has helped junior untenured scholars and emerging scholars gain tenure or secure positions, particularly in departments, such as kinesiology and sport management, which do not prioritize single-authored monographs. The gender breakdown in sport history journals almost 50 years later in 2020 reveals three notable changes. Sport history journals, nevertheless, have proved to be quite resilient, with 17 of the 19 continuing to publish. Sport history journals peaked in the last two decades of the twentieth century, although the recent creation of two new journals and other existing online scholarly forums is a positive sign for the future.