Playing fields

Abstract

Sporting connections to Asia in the inter-war years are best understood against the wider background of responses to Asia from the late nineteenth century. This article reviews the essays that comprise this collection and in doing so notes that sporting connections to Asia are more numerous and diverse than is generally recognized by either sport's historians or in mainstream histories. Where some contributors to this collection speculate that because the discipline of sport's history is frequently overlooked by historians it is unsurprising that sporting contacts with Asia should have attracted scant attention. This article argues that while there may be marginalising factors specific to sport's history, including a tendency to focus on the empirical and the particular at the expense of larger themes, the failure to address sporting connections to Asia mirrors a more widespread failure to see Australia's engagement with Asia as a subject with a history worth examining. This neglect is particularly true of the period before World War Two. Yet the collection demonstrates that key themes of race, identity, belonging and gender are raised in Australia's multiple sporting connections to Asia in the decades between the wars.

Notes

¹ Walker, Anxious Nation; Walker, ‘The “Flow of Asia” – Vocabularies of Engagement’.

² Nevius, China and the Chinese.

³ ‘Sketcher’ [William Lane], ‘White or Yellow? A Story of the Race War of 1908’, Boomerang, February 18, 1888 –May 5, 1888.

⁴ Pearson, National Life and Character.

⁵ Walker, ‘Energy and Fatigue’.

⁶ Quoted in Roe, Nine Australian Progressives.

⁷ McKay, Yellow Wave.

⁸ McKay, Yellow Wave, 66.

⁹ Sydney Morning Herald, June 10, 1905.

¹⁰ Kirmess, Australian Crisis.

¹¹ See Gems, Athletic Crusade.

¹² See Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race.

¹³ See Morris, Marrow of the Nation.

¹⁴ Walker, ‘Shooting Mabel’.

¹⁵ Queenslander, February 27, 1936.

¹⁶ Sydney Morning Herald, May 19, 2010.

¹⁷ See, for example, Collins, ‘Julius Caesar versus White Australia’.

¹⁸ Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, Vol. 206, March 23, 1950, 1159.

¹⁹ NAA Series A1209/100, Item 1960/925.

²⁰ NAA Series A1209/100, Item 1960/925

²¹ Sydney Morning Herald, December 19, 1938/February 4, 1938.

²² Mercury, June 5, 1937.