Reconciliation within the National Rugby League: where art and sport intersect

Abstract

Annually, the National Rugby League (NRL) hosts a week of matches called the Indigenous Round that highlight Indigenous athletes’ contributions to RL and includes Indigenous ceremonies, designated speeches, merchandise, and player jerseys adorned with Indigenous art that are worn during the matches. It has been identified as part of reconciliation efforts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia. In this paper, we use postcolonial theory and critical discourse analysis to closely examine six of the sixteen Indigenous Round jerseys produced by the NRL teams for the 2019 season, focusing on the use of sport merchandise as symbols of reconciliation, and assessing the practices of various NRL teams in employing (or not) Indigenous artists and utilizing Indigenous art and designs in the creation of the 2019 NRL Indigenous Round jerseys.

Keywords:

• Indigenous
• rugby
• reconciliation
• art
• appropriation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Importantly, we acknowledge that there are other race relations at play in RL. Please see Hughson (1998) for a review of a ‘riot’ at a RL game that overlapped with a multicultural festival. See Lakisa, Adair, and Taylor (2014) and Lakisa et al. (2019) for an analysis of the increasing number of Pasifika players in the NRL and their experiences.