Towards a new understanding

Australia’s Indigenous people embraced the code of football developed in Melbourne and Victoria in the middle of the nineteenth century and made it their own. This began in the most difficult circumstances as a few remaining Indigenous people found ways of infiltrating and eventually overcoming the manifold barriers to their participation. The game of the invader was mastered by the invaded. They brought knowledge to the game from their own cultural practices and eventually gave it a deeper meaning. They innovated and expressed the game’s potential. What follows is an attempt to develop a new understanding of Australian football’s long and contested Indigenous history.

In the winter 2016 issue of Meanjin, Jenny Hocking and Nell Reidy tried to resuscitate a common popular misconception that Australian rules football had Aboriginal origins. They claimed to have produced new evidence that changes everything, but the single piece of new information they discovered only confirmed something that has been known for some time—that Indigenous games were played in the Western District of Victoria. These games had strong cultural significance, sometimes used as ice breakers when different groups met and held corroborees. Some of them involved women as well as men, and members of different totems played as separate groups or teams.