Aboriginality, Racial Discourse and Football Media in 20th-century Queensland

This article analyses media reportage of rugby league games between inmates from the Cherbourg, Palm Island and Woorabinda Aboriginal settlements and white teams in Queensland from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. During this period, Aboriginal footballers were represented in strategic ways that reflected the key tenets of settler colonialism. At the core of this representation were dramatically contrasting yet coexisting images of "primitivism" and "transformation". Aboriginal footballers were represented in "primitivist" mode through racialised public performances and essentialist discourses of animalism, infantilism and savagery. Simultaneously, the Aboriginal capacity to "transform" was depicted through the adoption by footballers of appropriate virtues and athletic skills on the sporting field. These constructions helped entrench settler colonial dominance and practices, including the continued dispossession and removal of Aboriginal people to government settlements.