Australian Football: A Sacred Contest by Martin Davey

From the blurb:

“One of the favourite games is football, in which fifty, or as many as one hundred players engage at a time. The ball is about the size of an orange, and is made of opossum-skin, with the fur side outwards. It is filled with founded charcoal, which gives solidity without much increase of weight, and is tied hard round and round with kangaroo sinews. The players are divided into two sides and ranged in opposing lines, which are always of a different ‘class’ – white cockatoo against black cockatoo, quail against snake. Each side endeavours to keep possession of the ball, which is tossed a short distance by hand, and then kicked in any direction. The side which kicks it oftenest and furthest gains the game. The person who sends it highest is considered the best player, and has the honour of burying it in the ground till required next day.

The sport is concluded with a shout of applause, and the best player is complimented on his skill. This game, which is somewhat similar to the white man’s game of football, is very rough; but as the players are barefooted and naked, they do not hurt each other so much as the white people do; nor is the fact of an aborigine being a good football player considered to entitle him to assist in making laws for the tribe to which he belongs.’

The passage above is lifted directly from “Australian Aborigines”, published in 1881 by James Dawson, the most ardent whitefella advocate for the Aborigines of Victoria. … The extract is a description of Aboriginal football witnessed by Dawson – it is the same game which is portrayed on the front cover where children are kicking a ball to each other, not contesting each other like adults in the above description. These adults lived in the western district, the people on the cover lived on the Murray River. Another description of football inside this book is that played by people from around Port Phillip Bay.

However, this game has no connection to the Australian football which was formulated in Victoria during the 1850s. This book examines such a claim. But it is fully connected to Aboriginal religion as a re-enactment of their genesis myth, the narrative which describes the beginning of their world when two competing ancestors made their foundation journey on the earth and established order and balance of their conflict. The meaning of this myth is interpreted herein.

Specifications:

Publisher: Self-published

Year: 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 50pp

ISBN: N/A

$12.00

2 in stock