Sisterhood, pleasure and marching: Indigenous women and leisure

ABSTRACT

For Australian Indigenous women, especially those who lived on settlements and missions, participation in the male preserve of sport was doubly shaped by colonization and by Western notions of women’s bodies. In this paper, we will discuss the Cherbourg Marching Girls, who competed in precision marching from 1957 to 1962, to explore how, as young Indigenous women growing up on a settlement in mid-twentieth-century Queensland, the Marching Girls were able to use their participation in what could be viewed as a Western, militarized, disciplined activity to access the joys and pleasures of sport and to strengthen connections with other Indigenous Australian girls and women. These connections and pleasures continue 60 years later through their memories of marching. In this article, we draw on Moreton-Robinson's Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint theory to truly listen to how the Marching Girls continue to make sense of their lives in the past and present.

KEYWORDS:

• Cherbourg
• feminism
• gender
• Indigenous Australia
• Indigenous research methodologies
• Indigenous women’s standpoint theory
• Marching
• sport
• yarning

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Cherbourg Marching Girls for sharing their memories. Particular thanks to Aunty Lesley Williams, Aunty Sandra Morgan and Aunty Ada Simpson for inviting us to listen and trusting us with their stories. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous and encouraging feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Olive

Dr Rebecca Olive is an ARC DECRA Fellow in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at The University of Queensland, where her work has focused on women’s experiences of recreational lifestyle sports.

Gary Osmond

Dr Gary Osmond is an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor in sport history in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at The University of Queensland.

Murray G. Phillips

Professor Murray G. Phillips is a historian of sport and the Interim Head of the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at The University of Queensland.