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Journals, and the articles they publish, make a significant contribution to the field of knowledge in the humanities. Journals in the humanities, like the sciences, are ranked through qualitative evaluations conducted by scholarly communities, national research assessments and expert panels, and they are also ranked through quantitative evaluations generated by bibliometrics (metrics) which often involves a complex mix of databases and algorithms. The use of metrics to evaluate journals, and more broadly to appraise scholars, in the humanities is contested terrain. The application of metrics as they apply to journals in sport history, sport humanities, and mainstream history mark disputed territory in these domains and require critical assessment. Using the Scopus database and three related metrics–SCImago Journal Rank, Source-Normalized Impact per Paper, and CiteScore–over a five-year period (2014–2018), Sport in History emerges as the premier sport history journal in two of these metrics. More significantly for sport history is that the field has three journals, Sport in History, The International Journal of the History of Sport, and the Journal of Sport History, that regularly rank in Quartile 1 (top twenty-five percent) journals in the discipline of history.

This article analyses media reportage of rugby league games between inmates from the Cherbourg, Palm Island and Woorabinda Aboriginal settlements and white teams in Queensland from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. During this period, Aboriginal footballers were represented in strategic ways that reflected the key tenets of settler colonialism. At the core of this representation were dramatically contrasting yet coexisting images of "primitivism" and "transformation". Aboriginal footballers were represented in "primitivist" mode through racialised public performances and essentialist discourses of animalism, infantilism and savagery. Simultaneously, the Aboriginal capacity to "transform" was depicted through the adoption by footballers of appropriate virtues and athletic skills on the sporting field. These constructions helped entrench settler colonial dominance and practices, including the continued dispossession and removal of Aboriginal people to government settlements.

Indigenous research methodologies prioritize community voices, perspectives, and stories. In Australia, yarning has emerged as a promising Indigenous oral history research methodology. Taki...

For Australian Indigenous women, especially those who lived on settlements and missions, participation in the male preserve of sport was doubly shaped by colonization and by Western notions...

Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the United States Army in June 1967 led to a conviction for draft evasion, exile from boxing, and a complex response from the newspaper press. Although press reactions to Ali’s draft resistance were overwhelmingly negative, his refusal to fight in Vietnam sowed the seeds for journalists to celebrate him as a hero upon his return to the ring four years later. Press reactions to Ali’s two names (Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali) act as a lens for scrutinizing this attitudinal shift. This investigation involved macro and micro analyses of 12 United States newspapers. First, distant reading techniques were used to reveal distinct temporal patterns in the usage of both names. In September 1967, journalists from these publications began to use Ali’s two names far more interchangeably than they previously had. By March 1971, they had fully embraced Ali’s Muslim name over his birth name. Close reading then revealed how and why these patterns developed: changes to Ali’s persona, as well as broader cultural and political forces, prompted newspaper journalists to accept his chosen name and identity in early 1971.

The historiography on Aboriginal sport history has grown significantly over the last four decades, but there is little scholarship on the Protection Era, and particularly on the role of sport in mi...

Advances in computer technologies have made it easier than ever before for historians to access a wealth of sources made available in the digital era. This article investigates one way that historians have engaged with the challenges and opportunities of this ‘infinite archive’: distant reading. We define distant reading as an umbrella term that embraces many practices, including data mining, aggregation, text analysis, and the visual representations of these practices. This paper investigates the utility of distant reading as a research tool via three newspaper case studies concerning Muhammad Ali, women’s surfing in Australia, and homophobic language and Australian sport. The research reveals that the usefulness, effectiveness, and success of distant reading is dependent on numerous factors. While valuable in many instances, distant reading is rarely an end in itself and can be most powerful when paired with the traditional historical skills of close reading.

It is hard to ignore the changes that have occurred to history-making in the digital age. Historians in the academy have observed, critiqued and, in some instances, engaged in the different forms of contemporary history that are related to the integration of the internet and related technologies into everyday lives. While digital history takes many forms, this paper examines Wikipedia as a mode of historical expression in the context of a project on the history of the Australian Paralympic Movement. Wikipedia’s key core content policies of verification, no original research, and neutral point of view (NPOV) as well as the collaborative premise that underpins the online encyclopaedia are the focal points of analysis. This analysis demonstrates that Wikipedia challenges historians who have traditionally produced the professionally approved artefacts of monographs and journal articles. In essence, Wikipedia requires historians to produce knowledge as part of a collaborative community of practice and,...

In this collaborative article, we seek to unsettle the dominance of Western, reconstructionist accounts of Indigenous Australian sport history through reflections on our past research in the Queensland Aboriginal community of Cherbourg. That research focussed on a statue of legendary 1930s cricketer, Eddie Gilbert, and on sport exhibitions in Cherbourg's Ration Shed Museum. Here, we are less concerned with unveiling the ‘true’ account of Australian Aboriginal sporting history, or even a ‘true’ Indigenous representation of events. Rather, we are interested in analysing various perspectives in order to generate a more inclusive and complete account of Aboriginal sport history and the narrative implications of these for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. Central to this endeavour is the positioning of Indigenous knowledge and understanding at the centre of history-making. The article is in two sections: reflections on our past work from the perspectives of the researchers themselves and an Aboriginal academic colleague, followed by a discussion of how those experiences and reflections will inform our pending project on the 1950s and 1960s Cherbourg marching girls teams.

The emerging field of digital humanities offers many potential innovations for historians, but also generates a host of methodological and philosophical challenges and issues. This article focuses on one feature of digital humanities, distant reading, to analyse the history of women's surfing in Australia in the early twentieth century. As a form of quantitative analysis involving data mining and visual representations, distant reading is used in tandem with traditional historical research methods to deconstruct the mythology of early Australian surfing. The article argues for the value of blending digital technologies with traditional qualitative methods to reveal new historical insights.

The emergence of Pacific Island (PI) ethnicities in the National Rugby League (NRL) over the past 18 years is widely acknowledged. At present, participants who have PI or Maori heritage represent 38% of the NRL's senior roster plus 37% at the National Youth Competition (NYC) level. This paper will examine the complex personal and ethnic biographies, and the process through which these athletes create their identities as a minority group within the culture of professional rugby league. In particular, the theoretical concept of ethnic persistence provides a way to understand the identity formation of PI athletes currently in the NRL. Rather than being assimilated into Western culture, the cultural discourses that are inextricably linked to ethnic PI identities are crucial to understanding the experiences of footballers in the NRL. The experiences of the footballers, characterised by a lack of understanding and acknowledgement of PI traditions, suggest that national identities, rivalries and conflict that ha...

So much has been lost about the culture of Australia's Indigenous people. Their languages, traditions and heritage were dissipated under the process of white colonization from 1788. This paper investigates the actions of the people from Cherbourg, an Aboriginal settlement in southeast Queensland, Australia, to reclaim their culture, identity and heritage. The focus is specifically on the Ration Shed Museum (RSM), which officially opened in Cherbourg in 2004. The RSM is a particular type of Indigenous museum, a community museum, in which those who curate the museum are simultaneously its subjects. Through a combination of ideas drawn from new museology, critical heritage and cultural geography, the relationships between the three buildings of the museum – the Ration Shed, the Superintendent's Office and the Boys’ Dormitory – and the displays of sport are examined via the voices of Cherbourg people. The buildings evoke stories of surveillance, discipline, punishment and control and, in many ways, sport mirr...

Academic responses to Wikipedia since its inception in 2001 have shifted from scepticism and hostility to serious critique. Wikipedia is a project driven by a community of amateur, and sometimes professional, scholars and it is this community – and associated rules and practices – that shapes the site's publicly viewable content. Despite the centrality of egalitarianism and communal wisdom to the Wikipedian ethos, the encyclopaedia is not filled equitably with historical knowledge or topics. This article addresses the role of Wikipedia in the production of knowledge in a sport history context. An analysis of 115 Wikipedia articles written about notable Australian sportspeople revealed a disproportionately large group of high-quality cricket biographies. Further investigation revealed that a small group of Wikipedians were responsible for writing these articles. The work of this community of practice is indicative of the influence that dedicated special interest groups can have over the production of knowl...

Research analysing the operation of power within sport and physical activity has exposed the marginalisation and exclusion of women's sport in explicit and institutionalised ways. However, for women in recreational and alternative physical activities like surfing, sporting experiences lie outside institutionalised structures, thus requiring alternative surfing of conceptualising the processes of exclusionary power. In this paper, we focus on the voices of women recreational surfers to explore the changes which may or may not be occurring at smaller, more localised levels of women's engagement with surfing culture. An ethnographic methodology was employed to ask women how and why they engage in surfing and what it means for them, rather than asking questions based on existing assumptions. In presenting the data we draw upon the double meaning afforded by the term ‘to patronise’ as a means of framing the complex ways that women continue to be differentiated in surfing culture, and the ways they respond to t...

This themed issue explores how material culture directly influences the interpretation of sport and history, with an emphasis on various ways the sporting body expresses values, beliefs, ideals and attitudes in the past. Artifacts, the built environment and cultural spaces in sport form a significant element in the approaches to understanding historical experiences in the scholarly essays in this volume. Material culture, the human imprint on the environment, cultural landscapes and waterscapes illuminate sport history over time and in diverse contexts. The importance of artifacts, cultural spaces and the body, as depicted in these essays, show that material culture matters in interpreting the sporting past.

The Black Power Salute protest by athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal dais during the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, supported by silver-medallist Peter Norman, has been recognised as a seminal moment in sports history, Olympic history and race relations. This article examines the filmic history of this event as represented in Salute, a 2008 film documentary. We argue that understanding contemporary films requires more than an analysis of on-screen representations and is vastly enriched through embracing the ways in which films are circulated between producers, directors, advertisers, merchandisers and audiences. Accordingly, this article combines a textual analysis of Salute with an exploration of how new media influence the dissemination, reception and consumption of the film. The textual analysis explores Salute as a documentary film biography through dominant narratives and documentary strategies that characterise this genre of filmic history. Associated new media are considered from t...

Postage stamps are a significant but largely overlooked item of visual culture. This article examines how sports stamps represent the past and the ways that museums package the sporting past through philatelic exhibitions. Using the concept of the historical ‘story space’, we focus on the textual representation of cricket stamps and an associated philatelic exhibition in Australia. These representations of the past will be examined through a combination of both semiotic theory and the ‘new museology’. As case studies, we focus on three individual cricket stamps and the depiction of these and other stamps in an associated philatelic exhibition: ‘A Summer of Cricket: An Exhibition of Art, Stamps and Stories’ curated by the Post Master Gallery, Australia's national philatelic museum, in 2005–6. Via such exhibitions, stamps extend beyond their initial utilitarian purpose and become important representations of the sporting past. To critique how this is achieved, this article asks: How do stamps semiotically r...

Historians often evaluate sport exhibitions as simply transplantations from the pages of books to the walls of a museum. Not surprisingly, on this basis many sport exhibitions fall short of the criteria demanded by historians. This paper specifically explores this issue by examining the exhibition, Between the Flags, that traveled around Australia as part of the centenary celebrations of Surf Lifesaving Australia. Pedagogy, and more specifically the concept of pedagogical work, is utilized to understand representations of the past in museums and to compare and contrast with written history. Pedagogy and pedagogical work reveal that the Between the Flags exhibition, like many other museum displays, was purposely and explicitly linked to educational curricula, unlike the written history of Surf Lifesaving Australia which was not aligned to formal education. Equally importantly, museum exhibitions primarily provide tacit knowledge through objects and artifacts while, in contrast, written history mostly relie...

The last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the new millennium were very significant in Australian sport as many of the major sports celebrated their centenaries and sesquicentenaries. A wide range of celebrations were testament to Morris-Suzuki's view that 'our visions of history are drawn from diverse sources',1 and de Groot's assessment that investigating popular culture provides insights into the ways in which the past is sold, presented, transmitted and experienced.2 Historians, like me, were involved in these events, most commonly contributing to written commissioned histories of sporting organisations. In essence we crossed the divide between history as produced within the academic discipline and those recognised by Jordanova as of a different genre—public history3 —by contributing to 'the overlapping sites where history is produced, notably outside of academia'.4 One prominent dimension of the celebrations, and the focal point of this essay, was the travelling museum displays on Cricket, Rugby League and Surf Lifesaving.5 Museum exhibitions like the sporting displays, as cross-cultural research has indicated, are important forms of public history as they are accessible, popular and considered trustworthy representations of the past.6 In recognition of the value of museums as public history and out of a sense of obligation to these sporting organisations, I attended several of these museum displays as they travelled around Australian major cities and smaller towns. What was evident during my attendances was the desire to compare and contrast the relationship between how museum displays and historians represent the past in the present. I recognised the obvious similarities as both were dealing with comparable content material, but the overwhelming sense was the differences between how museums represent the past and what historians produce in written histories. In this essay, I look to explain some of the similarities and differences between representations of Australia's sporting past in museum exhibitions and written histories.

Among a multitude of social memory representations of Australian swimming legend Dawn Fraser are several films, including a 1979 biopic, Dawn! This paper considers this feature film alongside other examples of filmic history, most particularly a 1964 documentary, The Dawn Fraser Story. While documentaries are generally valued more highly by historians than movies because of the perceived similarity of endeavour between documentary makers and written historians, in this case the biopic is more compelling because its narratives resonate more strongly with Fraser's role in swimming history, her connection with major national stereotypes and her position as a living sporting icon. In particular, Dawn! encapsulates a dominant, yet mythical, feature of Australian identity – the larrikin – through representations of Fraser as an anti-authoritarian, working-class ‘battler’. Simultaneously, however, the movie disrupts this larrikin portrayal through its depiction of Fraser's sexuality, and in particular a lesbian ...

Sport historians have largely avoided television history even though several series, like Ken Burn's Baseball and the BBC's More Than a Game, have reached large audiences. Only one journal, The Journal of Sport History, regularly reviews mediated forms of sport history, while the other journals only sporadically engage with television history and film. This article evaluates the documentary The Original Mermaid: The Amazing Story of Annette Kellerman by creating three fictitious reviews using Alun Munslow's tripartite model of historical inquiry: reconstructionism, constructionism and deconstructionism. These reviews of The Original Mermaid are intended to encourage sport historians to move beyond the view that television sport history is not worthy of serious consideration and to stimulate a critical appreciation of sport history on television. As part of this process of critiquing television history, there is an implicit critique – to employ a sporting metaphor – of the rules of the game of sport histor...

Australia and, more specifically, a Solomon Island schoolboy named Alick Wickham, are credited with creating the swimming racing stroke, the crawl, or freestyle as it is known in contemporary parlance. Wickham's contribution constitutes a popular, celebrated and enduring legend. While there is some factual basis to the legend, Wickham's contribution is a sport creation myth. The myth offers an example of the intersection of sport and constructions of Pacific islanders in the racial discourse of the Federation period. As a cultural discourse, the myth reflects how Wickham was accommodated as an exoticised islander and socially acceptable ‘black’ sportsman.

Solomon Islander swimmer Alick Wickham is a celebrated figure in Australian, Solomon Islander and international sport history. His iconic status is inextricably linked to the myth that he introduced the crawl stroke, commonly known as freestyle, to Australia and hence the wider world. The focus of this paper is not the mythic qualities of Wickham's contribution to the crawl stroke, but rather how this myth has been enmeshed in a range of discourses. Through the lens of postcolonialism and by focusing on the creation of social memory — in literature, postage stamps and documentaries — Wickham's contribution to the crawl stroke has been represented in three dominant ways: as a racial discourse centring on the social construction of the ‘nimble savage’, as part of Australian nationalism in terms of the nation's contribution to world swimming, and as a discernible dimension in the construction of Solomon Islander identity after independence.

(2000). Conflict, tensions and complexities: athletic training in Australia in the 1950s. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 17, Sport in Australasian society Past and Present, pp. 206-224.

Rugby league was established as a modern sport in Australia in 1907 and has always functioned as a commodity. This article examines the forces that have contributed to the commodification of the game and their impact on three key elements of the sport's culture: the internal structure of rugby league, its administrative and organisational structures, and conditions for players. In the process, the article engages with postmodernist emphases on contradiction and disjuncture and concludes that the transformations wrought in rugby league cannot be characterised either as simple continuities or as abrupt discontinuities.

(1998). From independence to a reconstituted hegemony: Rugby league and television in Australia. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 22, Everyday wonders, pp. 134-147.

(1994). The champion boxer Les Darcy: a victim of class conflict and sectarian bitterness in Australia during the First World War. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 102-114.