Measuring Harmony, Multicultualism and Reconciliation: Australian Football League's Racial and Religious Vilification Laws
- Authors: Reeves, Keir , Gorman, Sean , Lusher, Dean , Cazaly, Ciannon , Leonard, Paul , Ponsford, Megan
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues Vol. 15, no. 2 (2012), p. 51-63
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: 2014100299
Neither home nor away
- Authors: Ponsford, Megan
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport in Society Vol. 22, no. 1 (2019), p. 97-112
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This article critiques the symbolism of the journey as a team of Australian cricketers voyaged to India in 1935 embarking on the first Australia cricket tour to the subcontinent. Travel and tourism theories explicate the reactions of the cricketers to the ambivalence of being neither home nor away. This article asks: what did the Australians learn about themselves, their home and their destination whilst in transit? The theme of transition, both physical and emotional, is the central focus of this study. The journey on the ship signifies the team’s last immersion (for the duration of the tour) within exclusively English structures and customs. The cricketers’ insecurity when faced with the looming unknown upon descending the gangplank into India is extrapolated from available sources. The influence of Frank Tarrant as leader and educator intensified in the artificial hermetic vacuum of the ship’s environment. The unceremonious departure scenes in Melbourne, Adelaide and Fremantle are described and contrasted with the formality of the arrival in Bombay; such contrasts epitomize and underpin the cultural differences encountered throughout the tour.
The atmosphere vibrated with triumphant joy
- Authors: Ponsford, Megan
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport in Society Vol. 22, no. 1 (2019), p. 185-196
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This article critiques the Indian material culture located in present-day Pakistan pertaining to the inaugural Australian cricket tour to colonial India in 1935/36. The historical voice of the Indians is evident in the images and it is over the shoulders of the hosts of the tour that new perspectives emerge. It is culturally inappropriate to assume and evaluate how the locals felt about the visit of the Australian cricketers and the raison d’être of the tour. However, archives located in Pakistan provide a deeply subjective perspective. Goodwill and amicability reverberate through the photographs challenging conventional scholarship, which argues that Australian-Indian cricket is based on acrimony. The article concludes that despite the obvious and significant differences between the competing teams the tour experience minimized the racial divide between the Australian and the Indian cricketers.
The launch of Indian-Australian cricket
- Authors: Ponsford, Megan
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport in Society Vol. 22, no. 1 (2019), p. 113-142
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: An analysis of the Australian cricket team’s experiences in India in 1935/36 reveals that many elements fulfilled clichéd colonial expectations of extravagance, privilege and hedonism. Yet, the cricketers simultaneously grew tired of conforming to the role of the colonial class. The team’s immersion in India encouraged the players to re-evaluate their attitudes towards racial inclusion, the legitimacy of colonization, Indian sovereignty and the pedagogical role of the white cricketer in the Orient. A close textual analysis of the writings of participating cricketers Wendell Bill, Ron Oxenham, Charlie Macartney and Jack Ryder details their responses to the social and racial codification they encountered, which it is argued was at times unexpectedly liberal. Australian batsman Hunter Hendry’s manuscript has not been critiqued elsewhere and provides valuable insight into his ambiguity towards the role of the white cricketer in India.
The has-beens and never will-bes
- Authors: Ponsford, Megan
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport in Society Vol. 22, no. 1 (2019), p. 53-72
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: The Australian team that toured India in 1935/36 comprised atypical cricket personnel. Their cultural and social unorthodoxy contributed to the tour being shunned by cricket officialdom in Australia. Tour manager, Frank Tarrant’s method of team selection was meritocratic unlike that of customary cricket practice where social and cultural hierarchy informed team composition. This article outlines the unorthodox team composition and argues that the official cricket body objected to the exercise because of the professional nature of the tour, social (particularly class) discrimination and preconceptions of racial prejudices. The Maharaja of Patiala’s generous financing of the tour identified it as a definitively professional exercise and encouraged participation considering the precarious status of the global economy following the Great Depression. The goodwill between Australia and India evidenced on tour challenged cricket protocol and reflects a pragmatic and growing recognition that diplomatic and economic unity was desirable in light of the imminent dissolution of the British Empire.
Codes Combined : managing expectations and policy responses to racism in sport
- Authors: Reeves, Keir , Ponsford, Megan , Gorman, Sean
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport in Society Vol. 18, no. 5 (2015), p. 519-528
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This article is a transnational comparative discussion that interrogates responses, particularly formal policy frameworks, to addressing racial vilification in sport. Themes interrogated include racism in sport, sport as an agent for social change, diversity in sport, sport and community harmony, sport and ethnicity, and sport and education. Emphasis is placed on the importance of education as a plank in formal policy responses to addressing on- and off-field racism in elite sport. The article also examines how education is important in enabling greater social participation among groups. National and transnational discussions about respective footballing codes are located within a broader international context by way of comparison with other elite sports. © 2014, Taylor & Francis.
Breaking down racial barriers? The Maharaja of Patiala's 1935 Australian cricket tour of India
- Authors: Ponsford, Megan
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Identities-Global Studies in Culture and Power Vol. 22, no. 2 (2015), p. 199-214
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: To a great extent, popular representations of Indo-Australian relations have been viewed through the lens of cricket - the national game in both countries. Despite a proliferation of writing on colonial Indian cricket, Australia's contribution to it has been largely ignored. In October 1935, a team of cricketers embarked on the first Australian tour to the subcontinent.(1) The tour was conceived and financed by the Maharaja of Patiala to assist preparation of an official Indian team to tour Britain in 1936. In this paper, I will draw upon primary sources and interviews to help articulate the complex colonial relationship between the East and the West, whilst locating the ambiguous position of Australia within this. Despite predominantly conforming to the Orientalist view that Westerners considered themselves a superior 'race', the Australian cricketers demonstrated an atypical cultural sensitivity to the Orient and the 'Other'.
Who are these Australian fellows with ‘Grim determination and astounding stamina’?
- Authors: Ponsford, Megan
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport in Society Vol. 22, no. 1 (2019), p. 73-96
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: In light of the absence of living participants, this article extrapolates what the Australian cricketers departing on the inaugural cricket tour of India in 1935 may have known about late colonial-era India. This article argues that the depiction of India by the British Empire was a consciously evoked and celebrated construct perpetuated by orthodox ideology and popular culture. Through a close analysis of press reportage it is determined that the Australian public, and the departing cricketers, were ignorant of accurate knowledge of Indian culture and politics. The Australian media’s portrayal of Kipling’s writings, Indian religious practices and Indian cinema is compared with the cricketers’ response to these themes. Correspondingly, the Indian communities’ knowledge of Australia through evaluating the, at times, propagandistic promotional material generated for the tour is also critiqued. It is argued that representations of the Australian cricketers and the populist depiction of Indian culture are correspondingly implausible and driven by idealized expectations and stereotypes of national identity.
Beer, banquets and a Patiala Peg : Food and drink on tour
- Authors: Ponsford, Megan
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport in Society Vol. 22, no. 1 (2019), p. 143-159
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This article critiques photographs and material culture pertaining to the consumption of food and alcohol during the first Australian cricket tour of India in 1935/36. The artefacts—menus, seating plans and food advertisements—enable the present-day researcher to interpret the rapidly transforming political, cultural and sporting landscape as well as the internal dynamics of the tour. The archival objects function as links to the cricketers and are pivotal in interpreting the 1935/36 tour in light of the absence of living participants. Food and beverages represent a significant ethnographic difference and the cricketers’ response to the customs of culinary consumption in late-colonial India exposes broader societal sentiments and reflects imperial politicking. The Australian cricketers encountered bicultural culinary influences comprising the vestiges of British hegemony in combination with a new nationalistic indigenous influence. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Frank and Bhupinder : the odd couple of Indian cricket
- Authors: Ponsford, Megan
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport in Society Vol. 18, no. 5 (2015), p. 565-576
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: In 1935-1936, a non-sanctioned group of cricketers embarked on the inaugural tour of India with the ambitious, unorthodox, professional Frank Tarrant employed as team manager. Maharaja Bhupinder Singh lavishly financed the tour motivated by his love of cricket, his political and economic aspirations, its recognition as a symbol of allegiance to the British and by the prospect of leaving a legacy as the guardian of the game. Primary source material reveals that xenophobic prejudice and discrimination were endemic during the 1930s and the relationship between Tarrant and the Maharaja challenged the imperial paradigm. This article interrogates the mutually advantageous relationship and the tour through Orientalist theory discourse. The role of Tarrant will be examined, specifically regarding the ethnographic discrepancy between his representation in India and the British World. The article assesses the mutually beneficial, amiable relationship between Tarrant and the Maharaja as a metonym for wider Australia-India transactions. © 2014, Taylor & Francis.
Bhupinder and Tarrant : Players of the game
- Authors: Ponsford, Megan
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport in Society Vol. 22, no. 1 (2019), p. 21-52
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Financier Maharaja Bhupinder Singh and tour manager Frank Tarrant are the two key protagonists of the inaugural Australian cricket tour to India in 1935/36 and the historical figures in this article. Their culturally atypical relationship was anomalous to the conventional imperialist paradigm and openly defied racist notions of Western supremacy and cultural incompatibility that informed and underpinned the initial expectations of the touring party. Despite their relationship being primarily driven by mutually beneficial professional and financial objectives, a genuine rapport that challenged the archetypal servant/master paradigm is evident. Press reportage from Australia, India and Britain supports the argument. The minute books of the Middlesex Cricket Club (1908–16) and the Melbourne Cricket Club (1907 and 1908) have been integral in locating information on Tarrant’s movements. Discovering the Tarrant scrapbooks (c.1918–51) at the Melbourne Cricket Club has answered many questions that have plagued previous research into the man who has remained an enigmatic mystery in cricket history. The post-colonial theories of Homi Bhabha (2012), specifically his analysis of mimicry, are employed to argue that the political agendas of the Indian royalty were evolving. Cricket, an English institution, was embraced and reconstructed by the Indian community. Indian society was rejecting the British template and opted to operate according to an increasingly nationalistic and indigenous ideology and through this process appropriated cricket, the bastion of Englishness, as its own. The Australians’ contribution to this process is interrogated, and the liberal influence of Tarrant and the Maharaja in minimizing the racial and social divide throughout the tour is evident.
Photographic reportage and the colonial imaginary
- Authors: Ponsford, Megan
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport in Society Vol. 22, no. 1 (2019), p. 160-184
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This article critiques the first Australian cricket tour of India in 1935/36 through a synthesis of history, theory and imagery, and argues that the photographic content provides invaluable and historically overlooked insight into the cricketers’ perspective. Employing this methodology is unorthodox in sports writing and is innovative in application. The photographs provide a rare and previously unobtainable glimpse into the everyday cultural life and practice of the tour, and deliver a subjective representation of the cricketers’ experience. The significance of the images is twofold: they function as proof to verify the Australians presence in India and they assist a cultural critique of the tour. The images reveal that the cricketers’ response to the colonial paradigm was multifaceted and hallmarked by ambiguity. Despite at times adhering to their anticipated civiliving and educating role as white touring cricketers, the Australian team also challenged colonial protocols and simultaneously demonstrated support for the nationalistic sentiments brewing in 1930s India.