Duelling paradigms: Australian Aborigines, marn-grook and football histories

Abstract

The Australian Football League (AFL) boasts a significant over-representation of players from Indigenous Australian backgrounds. On this basis the AFL has come to represent itself as a leading national authority on anti-racism in sports and as a key supporter of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. In contracting an official history of Australian football, the AFL's volume reveals the limits of a historical analysis that presents itself as neutral and objective, but is epistemologically constrained and axiologically tilted within a whitestream view of both Australia and Australian football. We explore the limits of the official history, the debates surrounding it a..