High School Sports Houses as Identity Primers: Constructing Queensland and Australian Identities

ABSTRACT

Sport plays an important role in the conception of Australian national identity. Much of the scholarly work on this topic has concentrated on professional, high-profile sports and athletes. In this article, we draw attention to a highly symbolic aspect of popular sporting culture—school sports houses—and the prominent historical figures and motifs that they project through their team names, mascots and colours. School sports houses are potent examples of banal nationalism, whereby elements of Australianness are reinforced through the tradition of school athletics and swimming carnivals. Here, we highlight the overlap between the school-based agenda of encouraging group identity and the broader notion of the nation as an imagined community. Using a comprehensive dataset of Queensland high school sport houses in 1969 and 2023, we observe several trends, such as the persistence of houses named after colonial explorers and the disparity between houses with women’s and men’s namesakes. We consider the role of school sports houses as “identity primers”, or scripts, that encourage schoolchildren to identify with specific historic figures, landforms, animal totems, character traits and other qualities as indicators of the region and nation in which they live.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian identity
• Queensland
• school sports
• mascots
• banal nationalism

In recent decades, there has been significant academic interest in Australian national identity/ies, spanning quantitative studies, cultural histories of national icons and the politicisation and fragmentation of identity (understood here as the sense of belonging to a specific community based on a perceived set of shared traits, qualities or values) in Australia since colonisation.¹ Despite this wealth of existing work, opportunities for further study remain, particularly—as Tim Phillips, and Catherine Austin and Farida Fozdar note—with regard to the banal, casual “scripting” of Australianness that occurs in everyday settings.² Moreover, as Nola Purdie and Lynn Wilss observe, the majority of extant research on this subject has focused on adults and failed to consider how the formative years of childhood—and the Australian education system—might contribute to what Benedict Anderson famously termed the “imagined community” of the nation.³ In this article, we draw attention to the highly symbolic nature of school sports houses in Australia, particularly with regard to the totemic qualities of their names, colours and mascots. The public figures (e.g. colonial explorers, sportspeople, educators), objects and motifs (e.g. animals, landscapes) that are commonly chosen as house namesakes and mascots are markers of local, regional and national identity, selected for their ability to represent qualities or ideas believed to be valued by house teammates. Moreover, as houses generally retain their names and mascots over time (house rebranding is the exception rather than the rule), they take on a commemorative nature, ensuring that generations of children, their families and the broader community continue to acknowledge them as the best, most indicative, or most admirable representations of the collective “us”.

By examining the school sports houses adopted by Queensland public and private high schools in 1969 (by which time many of the first wave of state high schools had opened) and 2023, we demonstrate the value of such datasets as sources of sociocultural and historical information that allow us to track shifts in societal attitudes over time. As part of the broader Australian education tradition, the banal, casual nature of sports houses has meant that they have gone largely unnoticed as potential sources of what some have called “identity priming”, scripting, or “flagging”.⁴ We argue that sports houses are potent indicators or triggers of belonging, through which children are encouraged to develop specific understandings of their collective (Australian, Queensland, local) identities. School sports houses can be grouped together with other aspects of material culture and folklore that have had more sustained academic attention, such as flags, heraldry, colour semiotics, tribal totems, emblems and logos.

Despite the rich symbolic value of sports houses, they have been poorly documented in Australia—there is no central database that records each school’s choices, nor has there been any academic investigation of their history or contemporary significance. In seeking to establish a theoretical and historical framework, we turn instead to several works on North American high school, college and professional sport-team branding. These reveal distinct themes around representation (a relative lack of women’s namesakes, for instance, and the use of controversial Native American mascots); regionality and parochialism (local landmarks and industries are common motifs); and symbolism (aggressive predators such as tigers and sharks are favoured mascots, while the “feminine” colour pink is largely avoided).⁵ This confirmed the validity of using team names, mascots and traditions as a lens for understanding broader sociocultural attitudes and debates, and particularly for considering notions of group and community identity.

While it might be assumed that the study of Australian school sports houses is primarily concerned with sport itself, the physically competitive aspects—generally channelled into annual school-wide swimming, athletics and cross-country carnivals—are not our focus. Instead, our interest is the “tribal” nature of the houses as units around which a sense of group or collective identity may form. Scholars have identified sporting competitions as a source of group-based identity construction and noted the centrality of nationalism to international sporting events such as the Olympics/Paralympics or the FIFA World Cup.⁶ Crucially, sport’s value in these situations is its ability to bond an otherwise large and disparate audience through the shared desire for success. Most people engaged in the act of sporting consumption are not athletes but fans or casual bystanders, who, on some level, equate the achievements of “their” team with their sense of self-worth within their community.⁷ More specifically, sport has long held a prominent position in conceptualisations of Australian national identity, with Richard Cashman remarking that “most Australians would be surprised by any suggestion that sport was not a cornerstone of Australian life”.⁸ Though we do use our data on school sports houses to interrogate this and other commonly held perceptions of Australianness, we take a similar view to that of Jed Donoghue and Bruce Tranter, and suggest the apparent prominence of sport within the Australian nation is more significant when understood as a platform for the demonstration of broader “national” qualities such as physical toughness, mateship and fair play.⁹

At its heart, then, this is a study of public history and material culture that is concerned with the usefulness of a sport-related tradition (school sports houses) that can be tracked and tabulated through time (1969 and 2023) and across educational traditions (i.e. public and private high schools). Our dataset is substantial—we have identified 626 unique houses in use across Queensland high schools in 1969, and 1,880 unique houses in 2023—though we acknowledge that some of our observations may be specific to Queensland and may not translate to other Australian regions. As there is no central register of school sports houses, the process of compiling our datasets was labour- and time-intensive, and this was the primary reason for limiting the scope to Queensland high schools. Official school websites and public social media accounts were consulted, as were digital news archives stored with the National Library of Australia’s Trove, as well as in the ProQuest and Factiva databases. We consulted the John Oxley Library’s vast collection of Queensland high school yearbooks, annual reports and other ephemera, which provided extensive historical data for many schools, extending back to their earliest years of operation. Finally, we contacted the small number of Queensland high schools for which we still lacked data. Some provided details from their historical records, though others failed to respond or did not have records extending back far enough. We were able to identify the houses for all but 17 of the 506 public and private high schools operating in Queensland at the start of 2023; and 173 (or 66.03%) of the 262 high schools open in 1969. The 2023 dataset is, therefore, close to complete and offers a robust pool of information. Given the ad hoc nature of records management at schools in the 1960s–1970s, it is not surprising that the 1969 dataset is significantly patchier. Despite this, there are several obvious trends that emerge from the data and that stand in contrast to the 2023 material. Before proceeding to these findings, however, we will briefly establish the key historical and theoretical contexts that have informed this overarching study.

Literature Review

One of the first things likely to strike observers of Australian school sports carnivals is the fervour with which students represent their respective houses by wearing their house colour, waving hand-made signs, singing “war” cries (chants), wearing fancy dress, and sometimes featuring appearances by costumed mascots. This carnivalesque display is reminiscent of medieval tournaments, and indeed there is much commonality between school sports houses and medieval heraldry. As Olivier Droulers explains, coats of arms typically displayed a symbolic mascot or motif (known as a “charge”) and used colours of relevance to the bearer; they were adopted in Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries as a means of identification on the battlefield.¹⁰ Outside of warfare, coats of arms became cornerstones of tournaments, as they allowed the crowd to identify combatants who were obscured by suits of armour.¹¹ As its use spread, it became common to find heraldry displayed not only on shields and flags but on seals, furniture, manuscripts, jewellery and even everyday items; in other words, it became a form of logo with which the gentry and their servants communicated ownership, status and belonging.¹² Heraldic designs were deeply symbolic and governed by stylistic rules. As Gerald Wollaston and Charles Peers note, “Almost any object may be used as a charge in heraldry, but those charges which portrayed power and ferocity, and the various attributes of skill and endurance to which the bearers of arms aspired, were early favourites. Thus the lion, the king of beasts, and the eagle, the greatest bird of prey, figure largely in the science. Fabulous monsters also, such as the griffin, the dragon, the unicorn and many others were early inhabitants of the heraldic menagerie.”¹³

The adoption of mascots by medieval knights is one example of the long tradition of cultures developing symbolic and sometimes religious attachments to creatures believed to endow or represent valued attributes. Synthia Slowikowski argues that this practice extended back to early hunter-gatherer societies and their “ritualized habits” of hunting and consuming particular animals, while Émile Durkheim and Janet Lever describe the “animal worship” of primitive religions as a form of totemism that unified communities around sacred mascots.¹⁴ Several scholars draw a direct line between such attitudes and the contemporary symbolism of sports-team mascots, though none have explicitly made the connection with school sports houses.¹⁵ Other correlations of note include the human tendency to attribute meanings to particular colours and to use these colours in art, clothing, medicine and other folkloric products in the belief that they wield a kind of symbolic or supernatural power.¹⁶ As with mascots, the tradition of colour symbolism also has present-day ramifications in sporting competitions: scholars have investigated the belief that red uniforms give the wearer an advantage over their competitors.¹⁷ Stephen Hardy, Brian Norman and Sarah Sceery note that spectator allegiance to colour, rather than to an athlete, extends as far back as the gladiatorial battles of ancient Rome, during which crowds remained loyal to colour “stables” even when individual gladiators switched teams.¹⁸

The adoption of mascots, colours and other symbols is indicative of a human desire to communicate who we are—our self-image and group-identity—to others. This, in turn, is about self-esteem and a sense of belonging and coherence.¹⁹ As Gary Charness and Yan Chen note, people seek validation of their self-identity through processes of categorisation (placing oneself and others into groups), identification (associating ourselves with particular groups) and comparison (comparing ourselves and our groups with others).²⁰ Group identity, which can take the form of membership in a family unit, friend or interest group, sports team, or even the nation, is marked by a sense of collective connection and purpose. As Yuqing Ren et al. observe, in some instances members “may know few other members but they identify with the cause the group espouses”, while in other cases, the attachment of members “works through interpersonal bonds, whereby people develop relationships with other members”.²¹ Some suggest that one of the ways a group asserts a sense of connection is by acknowledging shared cultural history and traditions, while others point to the more overt strategy of adopting a group name and uniform.²² There are obvious correlations here with school sports houses. A particularly important aspect of group or social identity theory is that of identity priming or scripting, in which the introduction of stimuli—such as a word, text, image, video or object—triggers stereotyped beliefs or behaviours informed by “individuals’ social knowledge structures”.²³ In other words, when an individual is prompted to think about a particular stereotype in conjunction with a certain aspect of their identity (their gender, ethnicity, age, class or another aspect of their belonging to a particular social group), this can foster behaviours or attitudes that align with that group’s membership traits.²⁴ Here we can see how the adoption of particular mascots, colours or namesakes—and their symbolic values—might induce the members of a group (or, indeed, school sports house) to think or perform in ways that match the traits of their chosen symbol.

The final historical and theoretical pieces of the puzzle lie in the late 19th-century origins of sport education. In Britain and the Commonwealth in this period, political attention coalesced around the perceived weakness of male children who, upon maturing to adulthood, would be ill-prepared to defend nation and empire. As Christopher F. Armstrong and Michelle Gorzanelli both note, the introduction of physical education took the form of military drills intended to foster a sense of belonging with “one’s class, country, and the British Empire” while also “establishing disciplined and strong young men fit for war”.²⁵ The militarised nature of physical education continued in Australian schools well into the 20th century, though other traditions, such as Swedish gymnastics, athletics, swimming and team sports, were also gradually introduced.²⁶ By the 1950s, Gorzanelli argues, sport and physical education were being used in Australia to “promote a sense of nationalism” and induct waves of postwar migrants into “the nation’s sporting culture”.²⁷ School sports houses were part of this tradition; limited initially to private schools in Britain from the 1850s, they spread to Australian private schools by the 1900s and expanded into British and Australian public schools in the 1940s–1950s.²⁸ Armstrong claims the model of house-based competition was immediately successful, and students developed “a spirited sense of identification with [their] house”.²⁹ A 1976 study undertaken by R. B. Dierenfield reveals that in Britain, 91% of the schools surveyed had sports houses, and 78% of students indicated they felt “some loyalty” or “great loyalty” towards their house and teammates.³⁰ There is no correlating Australian study, though our data for Queensland demonstrates that at least 66% of high schools were using sports houses by 1969, and the practice had been adopted by more than 95% of schools by 2023. It is to this data that our discussion now turns.

Queensland High School Sports Houses, 1969 and 2023

Much like other parts of Australia, the schooling system in Queensland started under the auspices of the colony and was dominated by independent (private, generally religious) institutions. Austin notes that by 1895, Queensland and the other Australian colonies had passed legislation to standardise their education curricula, and they continued to manage their school systems under state legislation following Federation in 1901.³¹ The most substantial change came in the 1950s–1960s, when the postwar baby boom resulted in an explosion in the numbers of school-aged children, and this, combined with greater awareness of the special requirements of secondary curricula, prompted government intervention.³² By the 1970s, as Craig Campbell notes, each of the states had “reformed or expanded their secondary school systems” and made them “comprehensive in character”.³³ While collating data for this research, we noticed that the majority of Queensland high schools founded as part of this postwar restructuring had been opened by 1969, and it was a suitable point at which to take a “snapshot” of sports houses. Of course, approaches to managing education have continued to evolve, with more recent debates focusing on the so-called “National Framework for Values Education” introduced by the Howard government; standardised and globally benchmarked testing; and the politicisation of curricula during what some have described as Australia’s “culture wars” era (2000s–present).³⁴ We suspected that some of these trends might have influenced school sports houses—particularly in terms of namesakes that Australians might now regard as outdated—and thus captured a second snapshot of Queensland high schools in the early months of 2023. When recording the data for both time periods, we noted a range of factors, including whether the school was public or private (i.e. part of the state system or independent), whether it had co-ed or single-gender cohorts, and whether it had a shortened or expanded range of school years (some schools cater for students from Prep, or age five, through to Year 12, for instance). This afforded us different ways to examine the data, such as investigating whether girls-only private high schools favoured women’s namesakes for their sports houses.

The most challenging aspect of analysing the data was in determining sufficiently specific, yet still broad, categories with which to classify individual sports-house names. Scholars of North American team mascots have experienced this problem too: Ezra J. Zeitler describes undertaking rigorous content analysis of online imagery in order to ascertain whether generic human-based names such as “Raiders”, “Rebels” and “Warriors” were intended to represent specific historic or ethnic examples, such as a Confederate soldier or a Native American person.³⁵ In his survey of Illinois high school mascots, Fred Willman sorts his data based on the most obvious category only, even in instances where the mascots might fit into two or more categories.³⁶ For the present research, we sorted house names into “Primary” categories on the basis of what we regarded as their most likely intended meaning, though this proved imprecise. We thus undertook additional sorting, in which we reclassified those houses that had a plausible second meaning as “Secondary” categories. Table 1 provides details of our Primary and Secondary regimes for categorising house names. One of the main differences was that in the Primary round, we sorted any First Nations names that related to specific people, animals, landforms and so on into those categories, rather than under the broader umbrella of “Indigenous”; in the Secondary round, we moved any First Nations names or words into this “Indigenous” category. This allowed us to capture two possible intentions: first, the desire to use local landforms, animals and other features as house namesakes and to refer to them by their First Nations names; and second, the tokenistic use of First Nations words as part of a broader societal trend, prominent in the 1940s–1970s, of White Australians appropriating genericised “Indigenous” culture. Similarly, there were numerous non-First Nations names in use that refer to landforms, but as these places had acquired their names from colonial figures, we did not want to ignore that history. Several schools in southeast Queensland, for instance, have sports houses named after nearby islands, such as “Fraser” (named after Eliza Fraser; the island is known as K’gari in Butchulla dialect) and “Stradbroke” (named for Captain Henry John Rous, of the Earls of Stradbroke; the island is known as Minjerribah in Jandai dialect). In the Primary categorisation, we grouped such names into their intended localised meaning, and in the Secondary round, we regrouped them under the label “Colonial (including explorers)”.

Table 1. Primary and Secondary classifications of Queensland high school sports house names.

“Primary” classification	“Secondary” classification
Alphabet. Including ancient Greek letters (e.g. Alpha, Beta).	Alphabet. Excluding ancient Greek letters (now grouped under “Ancient”).
Ancient. Including ancient warrior nations (e.g. Spartans).	Ancient. Excluding ancient warrior nations (now grouped under “Military”).
Animal. Including Indigenous words (e.g. Kuruman/Kangaroo) and mythical creatures (e.g. Dragon).	Animal. Excluding Indigenous words (now grouped under “Indigenous”) and mythical creatures (now grouped under “Ancient”).
Arts. Including First Nations people (e.g. Albert Namatjira).	Arts. Excluding First Nations people (now grouped under “Indigenous”).
Astronomy. Including constellations named after mythical figures (e.g. Orion).	Astronomy. Excluding constellations named for mythical figures (now grouped under “Ancient”).
Colonial. Any colonial figures not in other categories (note: explorers grouped under “Science”, politicians grouped under “Public Service”).	Colonial. Including explorers.
Colour. Including Indigenous words (e.g. Kara Kara/Black).	Colour. Excluding Indigenous words (now grouped under “Indigenous”).
Concept. Including Indigenous words (e.g. Matjiin/Create).	Concept. Excluding Indigenous words (now grouped under “Indigenous”).
Education. Including educators with religious roles (e.g. Father David O’Meara).	Education. Excluding educators with religious roles (now grouped under “Religion”).
Indigenous. Any Indigenous words or people not in any other category.	Indigenous.
Landform. Including places named after religious or colonial figures (e.g. Adderton—house at All Hallows School named after original owners) and places with Indigenous names (e.g. Coolangatta—a beach on the Gold Coast).	Landform. Excluding places named after religious figures (now grouped under “Religion”), places named after colonial figures (now grouped under “Colonial”) and places with Indigenous names (now grouped under “Indigenous”).
Military. Including weapons with Indigenous names (e.g. Boomerang).	Military. Excluding weapons with Indigenous names (now grouped under “Indigenous”).
Nature. Including Indigenous words (e.g. Bunya [a type of pine tree]) and words for produce named after colonial figures (e.g. Bowen mango, named for Sir George Bowen).	Nature. Excluding Indigenous words (now grouped under “Indigenous”) and words for produce named after colonial figures (now grouped under “Colonial”).
Public Service. Including colonial figures (e.g. Caroline Chisholm) and First Nations leaders (e.g. Vincent Lingiari).	Public Service. Excluding colonial figures (now grouped under “Colonial”) and First Nations leaders (now grouped under “Indigenous”).
Religion. Any religious figures or concepts not in other categories (note: religious educators grouped under “Education”, landforms with religious names grouped under “Landform”).	Religion.
Science. Including colonial explorers (e.g. Captain James Cook) and medical professionals (e.g. Sister Elizabeth Kenny).	Science. Excluding colonial explorers (now grouped under “Colonial”) and medical professionals (now grouped under “Public Service”).
Sport. Including First Nations athletes (e.g. Evonne Goolagong Cawley).	Sport. Excluding First Nations athletes (now grouped under “Indigenous”).
Mixed Meaning. Houses with hyphenated or hybrid group names (e.g. Melville-Russell).	Mixed Meaning. Houses with hyphenated or hybrid group names (e.g. Melville-Russell).
Unclear Meaning.	Unclear Meaning.

We determined that in 1969, the most popular types of sports-house names (Primary categorisation) in use in Queensland public and private high schools conformed to the following five themes: Science (including explorers), Education, Religion, Landform, and Public Service (see Table 2). Crucially, there were obvious divisions between public and private high schools: 90.65% of the Science houses were at public schools, as were 87.32% of the Landform houses, and 88.89% of the Public Service houses. Private schools dominated the Education and Religion house-name categories, with 88.51% and 100% of those names in use, respectively. This is not surprising, as private high schools are often affiliated with specific Christian religious institutes (e.g. Christian Brothers, Sisters of Mercy) and draw from these traditions for house names (e.g. McAuley, after Catherine McAuley, founder of Sisters of Mercy). Moreover, our data revealed that private high schools also name sports houses after significant teachers, principals and school community leaders. Neither of these trends are apparent in Queensland public high schools. Upon regrouping the 1969 data under the Secondary categorisation, we noted two significant shifts. First, the “Colonial (including explorers)” category replaced the Primary regime’s “Science (including explorers)” category as the most common type of house name: 27% of the 626 houses identified for Queensland high schools were either explicitly or historically connected to the colonial period; of these, over 95% were at public high schools. Unable to use religious namesakes, public schools appear to have turned to a secular equivalent: colonial explorers and administrators, such as Captain James Cook (13 houses), Assistant-Surveyor of New South Wales Edmund Kennedy (10 houses), explorer Ludwig Leichhardt (8 houses), and the ninth premier of Queensland, Sir Samuel Walker Griffith (4 houses).

Table 2. Top five categories of sports house names in Queensland high schools in 1969.

Primary classification			Secondary classification
House name type	Number of houses	Percentage of houses	House name type	Number of houses	Percentage of houses
Science (incl. explorers)	107	17.1%	Colonial (incl. explorers)	169	27%
Education	87	13.9%	Religion	102	16.3%
Religion	82	13.1%	Education	82	13.1%
Landform	71	11.3%	Indigenous	76	12.1%
Public Service	54	8.6%	Public Service	39	6.2%

The other significant change that occurred with the Secondary categorisation was the appearance of “Indigenous” names as the fourth most popular type in 1969, of which 94.74% were at public high schools. This is likely further evidence of what Sam Furphy describes as the mid-century tendency of White Australians to appropriate First Nations words, which were often reproduced in generic, decontextualised lists published in the Australian Woman’s Weekly magazine and mainstream newspapers.³⁷ This trend is perhaps not as visible as the widely debated use of negatively stereotyped Native American people as mascots in North America, but in adopting First Nations names there is a similar sense of romanticising First Nations cultures as part of a national “ancient tradition”.³⁸ Combined, the Colonial and Indigenous categories under the Secondary approach make up 233 (or 61.8%) of the 377 house names adopted by public high schools in 1969. This was a period when public perceptions of Australianness were shifting away from British symbols and was just prior to the era of “New Nationalism” marked by the election of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government (1972–1975). It is plausible that the combination of colonial and Indigenous sports house names used by Queensland public high schools was reflective of a broader societal desire to identify and adopt specifically Australian symbols as part of the evolution of the postwar collective national identity.

When we look to the 2023 data (Table 3), little has changed with the private high school naming traditions. Under the Primary categorisation, Religion has become the most common type of sports house name, and all 347 such houses were at private high schools. Education has remained popular as the third most common type of house name, with 89.56% of these instances also at private institutions. Queensland high schools have continued to favour Landform and Science namesakes, with Nature replacing Public Service in the top five categories. A similar shift to that observed with the 1969 data occurred when applying the Secondary categorisation to the 2023 houses (Table 3): Colonial and Indigenous moved into the top five. Given the public debates around colonial-era figures such as Captain Cook that have occurred in recent years as part of the broader culture wars in Australian society, we expected the popularity of colonial-related house names to have declined significantly. Upon scrutiny, it appears that 12 of the high schools that used the names of colonial explorers in 1969 have since replaced these with non-colonial-related names. However, five other high schools have swapped their non-colonial names from 1969 for colonial explorer names, making 40 total high schools with this type of namesake in 2023. Overall, there were 10 sports houses named after Captain Cook at Queensland high schools in 2023 (down from 13 in 1969), and nine named for Edmund Kennedy (down from 10), but Ludwig Leichhardt’s tally has risen from eight to 15 houses. In the early months of 2023, it seems that schools retained a sense of connection to these colonial figures, or at the very least, were committed to using house names to commemorate the colonisation (which some describe as settlement and others as invasion) of Queensland.

Table 3. Top five categories of sports house names in Queensland high schools in 2023.

Primary classification			Secondary classification
House name type	Number of houses	Percentage of houses	House name type	Number of houses	Percentage of houses
Religion	347	18.5%	Religion	414	22%
Landform	294	15.6%	Colonial (incl. explorers)	359	19.1%
Education	230	12.2%	Indigenous	328	17.4%
Science (incl. explorers)	150	8%	Education	213	11.3%
Nature	147	7.8%	Sport	99	5.3%

The most remarkable change that was evident in the data is that houses named after sportspeople had risen dramatically in popularity, from 10 in 1969 (Primary categorisation; 100% at public high schools), to 115 houses in 2023 (Primary categorisation; 75.65% at public high schools). The diversity of sportspeople had improved, too: in 1969, seven of the 10 houses were named for men, with two taking Sir Donald Bradman as their namesake. In 2023, however, women athletes were approaching gender parity, with 51 of the 115 sports-based house names, or 44.35%, named after women, including Dawn Fraser (9 houses) and Cathy Freeman (7 houses). Sir Donald Bradman still dominated, however, with 16 houses (or 13.9% of the Sport category) in 2023 bearing his name. This aligns with Donoghue and Tranter’s 2016 work on Australian sporting heroes, in which Bradman was regarded as by far the most influential by survey participants (38% of respondents ranked him as the best Australian sporting hero), followed by Cathy Freeman (5%) and Dawn Fraser (4%).³⁹ The rise in women athletes as house namesakes in the 2023 data is, we argue, indicative of the desire of schools to provide schoolchildren with a greater diversity of role models. In 1969, 44 (or 11%) of the 399 houses in Queensland high schools with people namesakes were named after women; in 2023, there were 251 (or 22.6% of the 1,108 houses named after people). When we look specifically at boys- and girls-only high schools, the picture changes (see Table 4): in 2023, girls-only schools had a roughly 70–30 split in favour of women’s namesake houses, which was a modest improvement from 1969. It should be noted, however, that there was not much diversity among the types of women’s namesakes: of the 74 houses of this kind at girls-only schools in 2023, the majority sit in the Religion (45.9%) and Education (39.2%) categories. At boys-only schools, over 90% of the people-based namesakes were taken from men in 2023, which was only a negligible shift towards gender parity when compared with men taking up 94.1% of people-based namesakes at boys-only schools in 1969. While Queensland high school sports houses are still far from achieving gender parity, with 22.6% of all people-based houses named after women in 2023, the gains that have been made since 1969 have primarily occurred in co-ed schools. While the Sport category achieved close to 50–50 distribution between women and men athletes, the broader pool of people namesakes still favoured men, which suggests that by early 2023, sport had become one of the main arenas in which women achieved public recognition from Australian society.⁴⁰

Table 4. Percentages of gendered sports house names at Queensland high schools in 1969 and 2023.

	1969 Gendered namesakes			2023 Gendered namesakes
School type	Women	Men	Mixed / group	Women	Men	Mixed / group
Public co-ed	4% (9 houses)	91.6% (208 houses)	4.4% (10 houses)	16.3% (62 houses)	75.8% (288 houses)	7.9% (30 houses)
Private co-ed	9.1% (1 house)	90.1% (10 houses)	0% (0 houses)	22.4% (108 houses)	64.3% (310 houses)	13.3% (64 houses)
Private girls	55% (33 houses)	45% (27 houses)	0% (0 houses)	67.3% (74 houses)	31.8% (35 houses)	0.9% (1 house)
Private boys	1% (1 house)	94.1% (95 houses)	4.9% (5 houses)	5.1% (7 houses)	91.95% (125 houses)	2.95% (4 houses)

While house names were our main focus, we also tracked colour usage and mascots. A few studies on North American sport teams, as well as Droulers’s historical survey of heraldry and corporate logos, indicated several trends with which we sought comparison. As with categorisation of names, however, colours can be slippery; James L. Spencer observes in his survey of professional sport that “many teams do not utilize the simple referents” of red, blue, yellow, and so forth, but “include modifiers (‘navy blue’) or use synonyms (‘scarlet’)”.⁴¹ In our Queensland high school survey, we opted for a basic categorisation that avoided descriptive colour variations, though we noted when schools used more specific labels. Others argue this is important when dealing with “yellow” versus “gold”, as gold has historically carried positive connotations of victory, wealth and power.⁴² Moreover, alongside green, gold (as opposed to yellow) is one of the two official colours of Australia and is associated with Australian international sporting teams.⁴³ Overall, of the 1,850 sports houses in Queensland high schools in 2023 for which we could identify a colour, 343 (or 18.54%) were represented by yellow, though of these, 72 (21%) were specifically described as “gold” by their schools. Blue (388 houses, or 20.97%), red (385 houses, or 20.81%) and green (364 houses, or 19.68%) proved to be marginally more popular than yellow; these four colours were by far the most used, with the next most common being purple (85 houses, or 4.6%). Pink was used only 17 times, which suggests a similar aversion to the so-called “feminine” colour as has been observed in other studies.⁴⁴ While the low uptake of pink did not surprise us, the relative prominence of green was a departure from previous colour surveys. Droulers notes that green was largely avoided in the medieval period, and Spencer observes a dearth of green among North American sport teams in his survey.⁴⁵ Jorls Olde Rikkert et al. suggest that green may be an unpopular uniform colour for sports that require team members to have good visibility of one another on grass-based fields or pitches, while John Hutchings’s study of colour symbolism in British and European folklore finds that many cultures have traditionally associated green with bad luck.⁴⁶ Aside from the fact that green is one of Australia’s two official national colours, the other explanation we can offer for its popularity with school sports houses—in contrast to previous findings—is that it is a common “basic” colour, alongside the primary red, blue and yellow. Many schools allow students to wear colour-based “free” or fancy dress for sports carnivals, so there is a certain pragmatism in choosing green as one of the house colours: green sport-appropriate clothing is easier to find in a range of sizes than in colours like purple, maroon or pink.

Lastly, we were interested in the adoption of animal-based house names as well as animal mascots representing non-animal-named houses. A few surveys of North American mascots indicate the dominance of intimidating, predator-type mammals, such as feliformia (e.g. tigers, panthers, lions) and caniformia (e.g. bulldogs, wolves, bears), as well as birds-of-prey (e.g. hawks, eagles), and aggressive insects and reptiles (e.g. hornets, wasps, alligators, vipers).⁴⁷ This aligns with observations about heraldry, in which charges such as dragons, lions and eagles were favoured due to their association with power, aggression and strength.⁴⁸ We were interested to see whether the same was true of mascots in Queensland and whether there was any prioritising of native animals over exotic wildlife. In 2023, 134 Queensland high school sports houses used animal names and an additional 563 houses had animal mascots. Of these, the five most popular animals were eagles (55 instances), sharks (51 instances), lions (48 instances), crocodiles (44 instances), and dragons (39 instances), thus demonstrating strong similarities in mascot choice between Queensland high schools, North American sporting teams and medieval heraldry. While not native to Australia, lions carry Judeo-Christian symbolic meaning and are featured on the coat of arms of the United Kingdom (with which Australia has strong historical and cultural connections). More specifically, the Queensland capital city is home to the popular Brisbane Lions Australian Football League (AFL) team, meaning the lion motif carries strong state-specific sporting connotations. This, combined with its more general associations with ferocity, nobility (“King of Beasts”) and strength, may explain the popularity of the lion as a high school mascot.

With regard to native Australian animals, one way to interpret the adoption of eagles, sharks, crocodiles and snakes is as an attempt to select fierce, predatory native mascots. However, only in a small number of cases did schools specify a native breed (e.g. carpet snake, taipan, sea eagle); otherwise, the animals depicted were generic varieties. Nevertheless, it is worth noting the moderate popularity in 2023 of native fauna such as kangaroos (the eighth most common mascot with 28 instances), dingoes (14 instances), emus and cassowaries (10 instances, combined), and goannas (6 instances). These animals have a reputation for being dangerous if mishandled or approached abruptly, which explains their popularity as mascots ahead of the “friendlier” Australian animals like koalas (5 instances), possums (3 instances), and wombats (2 instances). The overall dominance of fighting, predator-type animal mascots over other localised and native options strongly supports the theory that people attribute particular traits and values to mascots, and that they seek out those that communicate a competitive and physically tough image for their team or group identity.⁴⁹ By association, this adds further weight to our argument that house names and colours must also be understood as carrying symbolic value.

Concluding Remarks: Re-evaluating School-Based “Scripting” of National Identity

It is apparent that the names, colours and mascots of school sports houses in Australian schools—demonstrated in this article by our close analysis of Queensland high schools in 1969 and 2023—have obvious significance as transmitters of identity. We acknowledge that our state-specific focus means that some observations may not translate into other Australian regions. However, a surprising number of the people- and animal-based namesakes used for sports houses in Queensland are not local (or exclusively local) in origin and instead represent a broader sense of Australianness. In 2023, for instance, some of the most common house names at Queensland high schools were derived from A. B. “Banjo” Paterson (Australian poet born in New South Wales; 7 houses), Caroline Chisholm (English-born Catholic philanthropist active in Sydney; 15 houses), Sir Donald Bradman (Australian cricketer born in New South Wales; 15 houses) and Saint Mary MacKillop (Australia’s first Catholic Saint, active primarily in South Australia; 23 houses). Superficially, the Landform category reveals far greater localisation of namesakes (e.g. Queensland rivers, beaches, islands, mountains). However, schools in other Australian regions similarly name sports houses after local landforms because these types of names are genderless and arguably less politicised and “safer” than those associated with historic figures who may one day be discredited.⁵⁰ As such, we believe the broader intention of Landform and other neutral categories of names can be regarded as applying Australia-wide, rather than just to Queensland. It is also possible that our findings would have been different if the survey had instead focused on primary, instead of high schools, though the more than 200 primary-inclusive schools in our 2023 dataset (e.g. Prep to Year 12, Prep to Year 10, etc.) exhibit a high degree of uniformity with the broader trends we have mapped. There is some consistency, too, between our data and the findings of other (non-school-sports-house-related) surveys of Australian identity. Tranter and Donoghue’s 2015 investigation of Australians’ perceptions of important national figures, for instance, reveals Sir Donald Bradman, Saint Mary MacKillop, Dr Fred Hollows, Eddie Mabo and Sir Howard Florey among the top 20 most frequently mentioned; each also had multiple houses named after them in Queensland high schools in 2023.⁵¹

Unlike previous studies undertaken on notions of Australian identity, in the present article we have drawn attention to what Peter Mühleder describes as a form of ritual or cultural performance that occurs specifically in education settings and thus primarily influences school-aged children.⁵² D. Stanley Eitzen and Maxine B. Zinn, in their examination of gendered naming practices of sports teams in North American colleges, argue for the need for greater awareness of the symbolic weight that school symbols, including team names, carry.⁵³ But it is Grant Smith, writing in 1997 about the often heated debate around the usage of Native American mascots by North American teams, who best captures the importance of understanding team brands as broader historical markers: “Athletic teams are important vehicles of group identity, and their names, insofar as they have meaning, may be said to reflect a community’s linguistic standards, its sense of social decorum, and some of its basic values … Team names have become a focal point in our discussion of tolerance and multiculturalism and illustrate a dynamic relationship between national debate and changes in local usage.”⁵⁴ Australian schools have not yet reached the level of discussion Smith describes, in part, we argue, because of the banal, everyday nature of school sports houses as part of the Australian education tradition. They are the epitome of what Michael Billig describes in his influential text on banal nationalism as “forms of mindless, collectively imagined and socially constructed national identity” that are evoked for citizens through “everyday experiences that appear devoid of political content”, and which promote a sense of unity.⁵⁵

There have been no comprehensive studies of school sports houses and the implied sociocultural values of their names, colours and mascots. The present article is but a modest first step toward unearthing some meaning from what we have revealed to be a rich area for further inquiry. Indeed, this mirrors the argument of public sport historians such as Josh Howard, who suggests that by examining non-elite, community-based and informal sport and recreation—including school sport and playground games—we have an opportunity to draw attention to “underserved audiences” and social issues that would be missed if our focus was limited to professional athletes.⁵⁶ Luke Rodesiler and David Premont have taken this idea further, suggesting that schools should encourage students to re-evaluate their team names, mascots and logos as a means of fostering historical awareness, critical literacy and social justice.⁵⁷ At the very least, Australian schools and their communities should be mindful of Jonathan Leib’s warning that even casual and seemingly innocent forms of national identity have the potential to become sources of dissension.⁵⁸ Some of the findings outlined in this article—such as the gender disparity in names, popularity of non-native animal mascots and continued commitment to historic figures who have recently been subject to public debate (e.g. Captain James Cook and other colonial explorers)—indicate that there is a need for schools to reflect on the messages their sports houses might be projecting to their students. After all, “Just because one signifier of the nation may be mundane and unremarkable to some,” as Leib notes, “does not mean that it is not controversial and a potential site of contestation to others.”⁵⁹

Data Availability Statement

The data set associated with this paper is not currently publicly available due to ongoing research privacy and human ethics requirements. The corresponding author will consider individual requests to access the data set upon contact by email.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example, F. L. Jones, “Diversities of National Identity in a Multicultural Society: The Australian Case”, National Identities 2, no. 2 (2000): 175–86; Tim Phillips, “Popular Views about Australian Identity: Research and Analysis”, Journal of Sociology 34, no. 3 (1998): 281–302; Bruce Tranter and Jed Donoghue, “Colonial and Post-Colonial Aspects of Australian Identity”, British Journal of Sociology 58, no. 2 (2007): 165–83.

2 Catherine Austin and Farida Fozdar, “Australian National Identity: Empirical Research since 1998”, National Identities 20, no. 3 (2018): 286; Phillips, “Popular Views”, 283.

3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Nola Purdie and Lynn Wilss, “Australian National Identity: Young Peoples’ Conceptions of What It Means to Be Australian”, National Identities 9, no. 1 (2007): 70.

4 Gary Charness and Yan Chen, “Social Identity, Group Behavior, and Teams”, Annual Review of Economics 12 (2020): 692–93; Jonathan Leib, “Identity, Banal Nationalism, Contestation, and North American License Plates”, Geographical Review 101, no. 1 (2011): 39; Henk Erik Meier et al., “Fan Identification and National Identity”, Sport in Society 22, no. 3 (2019): 477–78.

5 See, for example, D. Stanley Eitzen and Maxine B. Zinn, “The De-athleticization of Women: The Naming and Gender Marking of College Sport Teams”, Sociology of Sport Journal 6, no. 4 (1989): 362–70; Brandon Lang, “Are North American Sports Fans Offended by the Redskins Team Name? A Demographic Analysis”, Canadian Journal of Native Studies 38, no. 1 (2018): 19–39; Grant Smith, “School Team Names in Washington State”, American Speech 72, no. 2 (1997): 172–82; Ezra J. Zeitler, “A Taxonomy of Secondary School Athletic Team Names and Mascots in the United States”, Names: A Journal of Onomastics 66, no. 4 (2018): 219–32.

6 Pedro Dionisio, Carmo Leal, and Luiz Moutinho, “Fandom Affiliation and Tribal Behaviour: A Sports Marketing Application”, Qualitative Market Research 11, no. 1 (2008): 18; Nathan Kalman-Lamb, “Imagined Communities of Fandom: Sport, Spectatorship, Meaning and Alienation in Late Capitalism”, Sport in Society 24, no. 6 (2021): 931.

7 Meier et al., “Fan Identification and National Identity”, 476–78; Juan Carlos Castillo, “The First Quixotic Sports Hero: Federico Martin Bahamontes and National Identity Creation in Spain”, Sport in History 41, no. 4 (2021): 554–55.

8 Cashman, quoted in Jed Donoghue and Bruce Tranter, “On Bradman’s Bat: Australian Sporting Heroes”, National Identities 20, no. 2 (2016): 145–46, emphasis added.

9 Donoghue and Tranter, “On Bradman’s Bat”, 144.

10 Olivier Droulers, “Heraldry and Brand Logotypes: 800 Years of Color Combinations”, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 8, no. 4 (2016): 509.

11 Gerald W. Wollaston and Charles Peers, “Heraldry”, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 81, no. 4198 (1933): 574–75.

12 Droulers, “Heraldry and Brand Logotypes”, 512.

13 Wollaston and Peers, “Heraldry”, 577.

14 The work of Durkheim and Lever is summarised in Eitzen and Zinn, “The De-athleticization of Women”, 362–63. Synthia Sydnor Slowikowski, “Cultural Performances and Sports Mascots”, Journal of Sport and Social Issues 17, no. 1 (1993): 24.

15 See, for example, Christian H. Brill and Howard W. Brill, “Baseball Mascots and the Law”, University of Kansas Law Review 65, no. 105 (2016): 106–7; Eitzen and Zinn, “The De-athleticization of Women”, 362–63; Zeitler, “A Taxonomy”, 220–21.

16 See, for example, John Hutchings, “Colour in Folklore and Tradition—The Principles”, Color Research & Application 29, no. 1 (2004): 57–66; Donald A. MacKenzie, “Colour Symbolism”, Folklore 33, no. 2 (1922): 136–69.

17 Martin J. Attrill et al., “Red Shirt Colour Is Associated with Long-Term Team Success in English Football”, Journal of Sports Sciences 26, no. 6 (2008): 581; Russell A. Hill and Robert A. Barton, “Red Enhances Human Performance in Contests”, Nature 435, no. 7040 (2005): 293; Jorls Olde Rikkert et al., “The Colour of a Football Outfit Affects Visibility and Team Success”, Journal of Sports Sciences 33, no. 20 (2015): 2166–67.

18 Stephen Hardy, Brian Norman, and Sarah Sceery, “Toward a History of Sport Branding”, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 4, no. 4 (2012): 483–84.

19 D. Stanley Eitzen and Maxine B. Zinn, “The Sexist Naming of Collegiate Athletic Teams and Resistance to Change”, Journal of Sport and Social Issues 17, no. 1 (1993): 362–63; Daniel J. Lock and Daniel C. Funk, “The Multiple In-Group Identity Framework”, Sport Management Review 19, no. 2 (2016): 88.

20 Charness and Chen, “Social Identity”, 692.

21 Yuqing Ren et al., “Building Member Attachment in Online Communities: Applying Theories of Group Identity and Interpersonal Bonds”, MIS Quarterly 36, no. 3 (2012): 843.

22 Nigel Grant, Bob Heere, and Geoff Dickson, “New Sport Teams and the Development of Brand Community”, European Sport Management Quarterly 11, no. 1 (2011): 37–38; Ren et al., “Building Member Attachment”, 843–44; Yu Zhang and Pengfei Qin, “Comprehensive Review: Understanding Adolescent Identity”, Studies in Pscyhological Science 1, no. 2 (2023): 18.

23 Charness and Chen, “Social Identity”, 704.

24 Charness and Chen, “Social Identity”, 704–5; Ren et al., “Building Member Attachment”, 843–44.

25 Christopher F. Armstrong, “The Lessons of Sports: Class Socialization in British and American Boarding Schools”, Sociology of Sport Journal 1, no. 4 (1984): 316; Michelle Gorzanelli, “The Three-Legged Race: A History of Physical Education, School Sport, and Health Education in New South Wales Public Schools from 1880 to 2012” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2018), 68–69.

26 Gorzanelli, “The Three-Legged Race”, 75, 97–98; David Kirk, “Physical Education and Regimes of the Body”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 30, no. 2 (1994): 171–72.

27 Gorzanelli, “The Three-Legged Race”, 112.

28 R. B. Dierenfield, “Personalizing Education: The House System in England”, The Phi Delta Kappan 56, no. 9 (1975): 605; David Fincham, “Horizontal or Vertical? Integrating Pastoral and Academic Concerns”, School Organisation 11, no. 2 (1991): 241–42; J. A. Mangan, “Manufactured” Masculinity: Making Imperial Manliness, Morality and Militarism (London: Routledge, 2014), 99–101.

29 Armstrong, “The Lessons of Sports”, 324.

30 R. B. Dierenfield, “The House System in Comprehensive Schools: Its Current Status”, British Journal of Educational Studies 24, no. 1 (1976): 8–9.

31 A. G. Austin, Australian Education 1788–1900: Church, State and Public Education in Colonial Australia (Carlton: Pitman, 1972), 133–35, 73.

32 W. F. Connell, Reshaping Australian Education 1960–1985 (Hawthorn: ACER, 1993), 2–3.

33 Craig Campbell, “The Middle Class and the Government High School: Private Interests and Public Institutions in Australian Education in the Late 20th Century, with Reference to the Case of Sydney”, History of Education Review 36, no. 2 (2007): 1–2.

34 Anna Clark, “Teaching National Narratives and Values in Australian Schools: What Do Students Really Think About Australian Identity and Character?”, Agora 43, no. 1 (2008): 4; Bruce Haynes, “History Teaching for Patriotic Citizenship in Australia”, Educational Philosophy and Theory 41, no. 4 (2009): 424–40.

35 Zeitler, “A Taxonomy”, 221–22.

36 Fred Willman, Why Mascots Have Tales: The Illinois High School Mascot Manual (Addison: Mascot Publishing, 2005), 11.

37 Sam Furphy, “Aboriginal House Names and Settler Australian Identity”, Journal of Australian Studies 26, no. 72 (2002): 60–63.

38 Micah A. Zeitler and Donald E. Petzold, “Lions and Tigers and Bears: The Geographical Significance of Wisconsin Public High School Nicknames”, The Wisconsin Geographer 17 (2001) 26–27; Sanja Runtic and Luka Pejic, “No Logo! Visual Sovereignty and the Washington Redsk*ns Debate”, Neohelicon 44, no. 1 (2017): 102.

39 Donoghue and Tranter, “On Bradman’s Bat”, 6.

40 Our work on the stocking of sport sections in bookstores and libraries in Australia similarly demonstrated women athletes achieved parity with their male counterparts—but only in some sports, and not in all bookstores. See Kate Kirby and Amy Clarke, “#Sportshelfie: Representation in the Sport Section of Australian Bookshops and Libraries”, in Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, ed. Lee McGowan and Kasey Symons (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2023), 13–29.

41 James L. Spencer, “An Examination and Evaluation of Uniform Color across North American Professional Team Sports”, Journal of Sport Behavior 40, no. 4 (2017): 402–3.

42 Spencer, “An Examination and Evaluation of Uniform Color”, 403; Willman, Why Mascots Have Tales, 59, 153–54.

43 “Australian National Colours”, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, accessed 24 May 2024, https://www.pmc.gov.au/government/australian-national-symbols/australian-national-colours.

44 Patrick A. Reid and Daniel S. Mason, “Sport Signifiers and Symbols: An Ideographic Analysis of the 1990 Women’s World Ice Hockey Championship”, Managing Sport and Leisure 22, no. 5 (2017): 383; Spencer, “An Examination and Evaluation of Uniform Color”, 401.

45 Droulers, “Heraldry and Brand Logotypes”, 515–17; Spencer, “An Examination and Evaluation of Uniform Color”, 403.

46 John Hutchings, “Folklore and Symbolism of Green”, Folklore 108, nos. 1–2 (1997): 55–63; Rikkert et al., “The Colour of a Football Outfit”, 2169–70.

47 Michael E. Baltz and Mary J. Ratnaswamy, “Mascot Conservation Programs: Using College Animal Mascots to Support Species Conservation Efforts”, Wildlife Society Bulletin 28, no. 1 (2000): 159; Ray Franks, What’s in a Nickname? Exploring the Jungle of College Athletic Mascots (Amarillo: Ray Franks Publishing Ranch, 1982), 9–10; Rob Sledge, It’s a Jungle out There: Mascot Tales from Texas High Schools (Abilene: State House Press, 2005), 13; Willman, Why Mascots Have Tales, 122–23; Zeitler, “A Taxonomy”, 222–24, 228–29.

48 Wollaston and Peers, “Heraldry”, 577.

49 Emily Dane-Staples, “Gendered Choices: Mascot Interactions in Minor League Baseball”, Journal of Sport Behavior 35, no. 3 (2012): 287; Zeitler, “A Taxonomy”, 220–21.

50 This favouring of “neutral” names was similarly observed by Smith in the sports-team mascots of Washington state. Smith, “School Team Names”, 179.

51 Tranter and Donoghue, “National Identity and Important Australians”, 245.

52 Peter Mühleder, “The Japanese School Sports Day—The Socio-Cultural Role of a Ritualistic School Event in Contemporary Japan”, Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies 4, no. 1 (2014): 72–73.

53 Eitzen and Zinn, “The De-athleticization of Women”, 363.

54 Smith, “School Team Names”, 172.

55 As elaborated in Castillo, “The First Quixotic Sports Hero”, 554.

56 Josh Howard, “On Sport, Public History, and Public Sport History”, Journal of Sport History 45, no. 1 (2018): 24–25.

57 Luke Rodesiler and David Premont, “On Second Thought: Teaching for Social Justice through Sports Culture”, English Journal 107, no. 6 (2018): 86.

58 Leib, “Identity, Banal Nationalism, Contestation”, 38–39.

59 Leib, “Identity, Banal Nationalism, Contestation”, 39.