Murray G. Phillips

Women's recreational surfing: a patronising experience

Research analysing the operation of power within sport and physical activity has exposed the marginalisation and exclusion of womens 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 womens 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 this. In the final section, we employ a Foucauldian analytic lens to explore the subtle normalising practices in which women are incited to recognise and undertake the practices of the valued masculine ideal of the ‘good surfer’ through caring acts and advice offered by male surfers. This post-structuralist perspective offers space to think outside of simple resistance and reproduction, instead considering a complex space where women and men negotiate power in a range of ways from contextual, subjective positions. In conclusion, we argue that women recreational surfers are enacting alternative ways of operating within the power relations that circulate in the waves, creating ever-changing spaces for new ways of doing and knowing surfing to emerge.

Losing Control of the Ball: The Political Economy of Football and the Media in Australia

This article examines the political economy of one of Australia’s prominent football codes: Rugby League. A Marxist-influenced political economy approach is used to emphasize processes of domination, subordination, and resistance in the production and reproduction of power relations within capitalist sporting relations and structures. Analysis, framed around the concepts of MediaSport and the media sport cultural complex, shows how Rugby League is bound up in both national and global media processes. Key areas under examination include the historical development of the commodification of Rugby League, the growth of the media sport cultural complex, the role of pay television and the control of Rugby League vested in the transnational company News Corporation, and the supporter resistance to corporate media control in the sport.

Gender, sport and the body politic: framing femininity in the Golden Girls of Sport calendar and The Atlanta Dream

This article compares the Golden Girls of Sport calendar, which was ostensibly launched to provide Australian women competing in the 1996 Olympic Games with greater access to the media, with a special issue of black+white magazine, titled The Atlanta Dream, which featured Australian men and women competitors at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. The two publications are analysed in the context of gender theory, with particular focuses on the social construction of gendered bodies and the different ways that femininity and masculinity are represented in the mass media.

‘Putting up your Dukes’: Statues social memory and Duke Paoa Kahanamoku

Public statues that commemorate the lives and achievements of athletes are pervasive and influential forms of social memory in Western societies. Despite this important nexus between cultural practice and history making, there is a relative void of critical studies of statuary dedicated to athletes. This article will attempt to contribute to a broader understanding in this area by considering a bronze statue of Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian Olympian, swimmer and surfer, at Waikīkī, Hawaii. This prominent monument demonstrates the processes of remembering and forgetting that are integral to acts of social memory. In this case, Kahanamokus identity as a surfer is foregrounded over his legacy as a swimmer. The distillation and use of Kahanamokus memory in this representation is enmeshed in deeper cultural forces about Hawaiis identity. Competing meanings of the statues symbolism indicate its role as a ‘hollow icon’, and illustrate the way that apparently static objects representing the sporting past are in fact objects of the present.

'The bloke with a stroke' - Alick Wickham, the 'crawl' and social memory

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 Wickhams 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 — Wickhams 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 nations contribution to world swimming, and as a discernible dimension in the construction of Solomon Islander identity after independence.

From Suburban football to international spectacle: The Commodification of Rugby League in Australia, 1907-1995

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 sports 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.

‘Look at that kid crawling’: Race, myth and the ‘crawl’ stroke

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. Wickhams contribution constitutes a popular, celebrated and enduring legend. While there is some factual basis to the legend, Wickhams 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.

Sport history as modes of expression: material culture and cultural spaces in sport and history

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.

Enveloping the Past: Sport Stamps, Visuality and Museums

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, Australias 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 represent cricket history? How did the gallery curate an exhibition based around cricket stamps? What curatorial philosophies and approaches provided a particular logic of representation and plausible coherence for visitors? And what narratives were generated by exhibiting stamps in a broader context of the relationship between cricket and national identity? Through these questions, this article reflects on the nexus of stamps and museums in visually narrating sports history.

An athletic Clio: sport history and television history

Sport historians have largely avoided television history even though several series, like Ken Burns Baseball and the BBCs 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 Munslows 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 history. In some ways this article is a personal journey, but more significantly it addresses key ‘moments’ in sport history as different methodological, epistemological and ontological positions have been adopted by practitioners.