Where to Cazaly? Pass it to Judd! Guest post by Barry Judd

June 30

I write in belated defence of the article ‘Off the Ball’ published in Meanjin No 4., 2008. The critical response to ‘Off the Ball’ that appeared in ‘Spike’ suggests the immaturity that continues to colour almost all scholarly debate about Indigenous people in Australian Football. The critique of ‘Off the Ball’ in football parlance ‘played the man and not the ball’, with the personal integrity of Cazaly and the intent of her article unfairly represented. The ‘cheer squad’ mentality of the response ensured that the many serious questions about the relationship between academic inquiry and popular understandings of ‘our’ indigenous game of Australian Football were disregarded. Serious debate about the ideas Cazaly outlines in her article was abruptly rendered silent. While acknowledging some of the criticism of ‘Off the Ball’, I would like to defend the central issues that Cazaly raises in her article that I believe are worthy of further consideration in a way that moves beyond the immature responses put forward by the ‘cheer squad’.

Cazaly draws our attention to the fact that Australian historical writings concerning Australian Football are constructed within a cultural frame influenced by the History Wars that characterised the politics of the Howard era. As Cazaly rightly points out contemporary Australian historical writings must now be in part assessed in the context of the difficult and fraught questions the History Wars opened up about the role the discipline of history can and should play in a postcolonial Australia. The contribution of professional historian Gillian Hibbins to ‘The Australian Game of Football’ is used by Cazaly to press this important line of inquiry.

Hibbins utilising her authority as professional historian to reconstruct the ‘truth’ about Australian Football of the past does so in two short essays ‘Men of Purpose’ and ‘A Seductive Myth’. Cazaly offers a critique of Hibbins work that focuses on the narrow and non-reflective nature of history as an academic discipline. In making reference to ‘Men of Purpose’ Cazaly is able to point to the limits of Australian history. Hibbins vocation as a professional historian requires her to mine the historical archive: to locate the paper trail of written and ‘confirmed’ documentary evidence to which her academic discipline confers objective claims to ‘truth’. The primacy of paper evidence leaves little or no room for Indigenous remembrance of the past. Those familiar with Spivak will be aware that even when the ‘native’ does appear in the archive he or she does so as a construct of the imperial/colonial observer whose written observation provides them only a bit role in the ‘glorious history’ of Britain’s ‘benign’ Empire. The point Cazaly makes in respect to ‘Men of Purpose’ is that the archive utilised by Hibbins to tell us the ‘truth’ about the origins of Australian Football is drawn exclusively from the colonial archive and therefore reflects an exclusively colonial remembrance of the past. As an academic discipline, history does not allow Hibbins the necessary freedoms to speculate about possible Djabwurrung influence during Tom Wills formative years that may have impacted on his later contributions to the founding of Australian Football. Hence her essay ‘Men of Purpose’ is necessarily limited to the events immediately surrounding the formulation of the Melbourne Rules by Wills and fellow leading Victorian cricketers. This is the limit of what Australian history can contribute to discussions about the origins of Australian Football and it has little or nothing to say about possible Indigenous influence.

Cazaly next turns her attention to the second of Hibbins essays included in the ‘big red book’ that claims to be the ‘official history of Australian Football’. In ‘A Seductive Myth’ Hibbins again mines the colonial archive, this time to locate documentary evidence that founder of the game, Tom Wills, witnessed or perhaps even participated in Indigenous football games like Marn-grook. Not surprisingly the colonial archive remains silent on these issues and the professional historian Hibbins uses her academic authority to conclude that Indigenous people and their culture had no influence on Tom Wills and as a result no influence on his later contribution to the founding of Australian Football. Yet in drawing these categorical conclusions Hibbins, as Cazaly insists, oversteps the very limits of the discipline she has elsewhere fought so tenaciously to defend. Given the very real limits of Australian history as an academic discipline any serious scholarly investigation of Indigenous remembrance of the past requires a multi-discipline approach whereby academics from the field of Australian Indigenous Studies and the disciplines of Anthropology, Archaeology, Linguistics and others need to be consulted. It also requires the investigating scholar to climb out of the ivory tower and step into the field to engage with the collective knowledge of the past that is contained within Indigenous Australia. Quit often it requires the investigating scholar to work in partnership with a trusted ‘native informant’. Cazaly is right to ask the basis on which Hibbins draws her categorical conclusions. Cazaly asks on what authority Hibbins dismisses the playing of Marn-grook like games in the Grampians during the mid 19th century? On what authority is Hibbins able to conclude the Djabwurrung were a hostile ‘tribe’ who never interacted with those whom the colonial archive cites as football playing Aboriginal peoples? As I read it, in making these observations Cazaly once again draws our attention to the limits of Australian history. Hibbins, as far as I know, is not an Australian Indigenous Studies expert or an Anthropologist, Archaeologist, Linguist or even a Developmental Child Psychologist. Yet the categorical rejection that Wills might have witnessed a game like Marn-grook or even participated in one (and then recalled these events) is depended on claims to truth that can only be supported from knowledge bases outside of her own discipline of history. This is a key point Cazaly makes in her article and one that deserves far greater discussion.
Primarily concerned to show the limits of Australian history throughout her article Cazaly is successful in placing question marks over the ability of the discipline to provide all the answers in our search for the origins of Australian Football. As evidenced in the response to ‘Off the Ball’ contained in ‘Spike’, the football ‘cheer squad’ incorrectly interpreted the target of the article to be Hibbins and not the academic discipline to which her work is required to conform. In and of itself Hibbins scholarship might be regarded as constituting good and worthy historical writing. This is something that is not at issue. The limits of history which Cazaly alerts us suggest that history and even good historical writings must be willing to be honest about the kind of past it is able to reconstruct with authority. It is a colonial past that history is able to reconstruct, a past that says little or nothing about Indigenous experience or Indigenous remembrance of that same past carried into the present from the other side of the colonial frontier.

Although Hibbins was never the target of ‘Off the Ball’ as my above defence makes clear, I believe that Cazaly is correct in her strongly made assertion that the Australian Football League made a serious error of judgement in publishing Hibbins essays in ‘The Australian Game of Football’ because no space was provided for a counter argument. The response by Geoff Slattery of GSP in ‘Spike’ suggests that Cazaly finds her mark on this particular score. Slattery dismisses these claims by pointing out that Adam Goodes was provided space to respond to Hibbins historical analysis in his essay ‘The Indigenous Game’. Slattery therefore argues that both sides of the debate about origins and the contribution of Indigenous Australians to Australian Football was provided an equal and balanced space in the ‘official history’. That such a defence is used in 21st century Australia is an insult to Indigenous people recalling as it does an inherent paternalism reminiscent of the imperial heyday. The assertion of a fair and balanced debate in the ‘official history’ would have only worked if Slattery had approached Nathan Buckley, Shane Crawford or Michael Voss to write the non-Indigenous response to the Goodes article. With all due to respect to Adam Goodes he is a professional footballer. Adam Goodes is not a professional historian or academic of any persuasion. To claim Goodes essay constitutes proof of a fair and balanced response to Hibbins essays does the seriousness of the debate and the interests of Indigenous Australian in its outcome a great disservice. If Slattery had truly been interested in providing a balanced view of these issues in his ‘official history’ he would have commissioned scholars, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, whose work and expertise within the field of Indigenous Australian Studies would have engaged with Hibbins work in a serious and fairly fought out academic debate. It is the decision of Slattery not to do so that makes his ‘official history’ unworthy of such a title and the courage of Cazaly to engage with these issues that makes ‘Off the Ball’ a worthy, if imperfect, contribution to the study of Australian Football. Meanjin is to be congratulated for allowing those of us outside the ‘cheer squad’ the right to speak.

Barry Judd, Monash University, barry.judd@arts.monash.edu.au

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