Football, faith and family for the Australian Pacific Island diaspora: the role of the vā (‘space between’) in rugby league

Abstract

Football (rugby league) shares performative acts of service with faith and family that are significant to diasporic Pasifika personhood in Australia. Drawing on two years’ ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that participating in rugby league, whether spectating or playing, shares performative acts of service in similar ways to practices within faith and family, and that this can help us understand the high levels of Pasifika involvement in rugby league far better than any narrative of ‘natural’ Pasifika masculinity or physicality. I draw on the Pasifika concept of vā (‘the space between’) to help make sense of the power and connections between ‘the three f’s’. The vā is a complex concept of relationality and service, and can be a helpful tool in understanding the importance of rugby league to Australian-based Pasifika people, particularly the sport’s inextricable connections to family, and the changing nature of faith for the rapidly growing second-generation Pasifika diaspora.

Introduction

This article looks at three popularly prescribed cultural pillars of Pasifika community –football,¹ faith and family – in the Australian and, to a lesser extent, Aotearoa/New Zealand diaspora, to show how the Pasifika concept of vā (crudely translated as ‘the space between’) can help in understanding the power and pull of rugby league for Pasifika people through its connections to faith and family. I argue that an understanding of vā in spaces inhabited by Pasifika diasporas, including the sports field, and particularly rugby league, can help us move away from limiting narratives around hyper-masculinity and ‘natural’ corporeal abilities. These narratives continue to stereotype and limit people with Pacific Island heritage and are particularly pervasive around ‘hypermasculine’ sports like rugby codes (Hokowhitu 2004). They come from a history of colonial mentality in the region and the painting of Islanders as ‘warriors’, ‘childlike’, and ‘noble savages’ (Clement 2014). In previous work I argue that there is nothing natural about the overrepresentation of Pacific Islander men in rugby league in Australia through the lens of masculinities (Hawkes 2018).² In this paper I take a closer look at how ‘footy’ shares special connection with Pasifika practices and perceptions of faith and family in order to further elaborate on why Pasifika men are so overrepresented in Australian rugby league. To do this I draw on a term understood with various nuance across the Pacific, particularly throughout (what is commonly referred to as) Polynesia – the vā.

In Tongan, tauhi vā is the art of mediating sociospatial relations – it is a space between people and entities that requires action and service to be maintained and made harmonious and beautiful, such as giving and receiving (Ka’ili 2017). Samoan author Albert Wendt defines vā as ‘the space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things’ (Wendt 1999, 402; see also Ka’ili 2017; Lilomaiava-Doktor 2009a; Refiti 2002 for scholarship on the vā). This is a popular and oft-cited definition of vā, and one that captures the essence of the concept, despite being one possible descriptor of a very complex and multi-layered concept, as well as a particularly Samoan definition. I draw on this definition, among others, including Tevita Ka’ili’s work on the Tongan socio-spatial aspects of vā (2017).

In this article I argue that football, faith and family (the three f’s), allow diasporic Pasifika people a platform to do this mediating of sociospatial relations. I show how each of the three f’s interact with the vā for diasporic Pasifika peoples, and I take a closer look at the pivotal role of family for diasporic Pasifika rugby league players, particularly the role of females in male player’s lives, and argue that the common masculine stereotypes that affect Pasifika men also affect Pasifika women. With this focus on family, comes the inextricable issue of faith, where family and faith are particularly connected for second and later generation Pasifika peoples in Australia who may not feel as personally connected to the Church but have faith for the sake of their families. I argue that participating in rugby league, whether spectating or playing, shares performative acts of service in similar ways to practices within faith and family, and that this can help us understand the high levels of Pasifika involvement in rugby league far better than any narrative of ‘natural’ Pasifika masculinity or physicality.

I am Pakeha (a New Zealander of European heritage) with Samoan and Māori family members. As a non-Pasifika person I acknowledge my limitations in fully understanding the nuanced meanings of vā, and that I am not, nor ever will, or should, be an authoritative voice on Indigenous concepts (see Uperesa 2010). I do not live or experience vā in the same way as my Pasifika family, friends, and participants. What I can do however is try and understand its important role in certain elements of diasporic Pasifika life, and communicate this understanding to a wider audience. Writing about the vā in English, from the perspective of a Pakeha woman, can still shed much-needed light on the relational cross-cultural spaces inhabited by Pasifika diasporas and their connection to sport, and can help us move away from limiting narratives around hyper-masculinity and ‘natural’ abilities (see also Hawkes et al. 2017). The PhD research that this article draws from was examined by two eminent Pasifika scholars whose kind and helpful comments inform this work. In this article I focus on vā as a way the Australian Pasifika diaspora can and does engage with identity politics and sports as well as other active tenets of their lives in connected relational ways. I argue that even without a good understanding of Samoan, Tongan or other Pasifika languages, vā is still a useful and important concept to grapple with.

I now offer some theoretical clarification and explanation on the use of the terms Pasifika and diaspora, I then explain my methods, before turning to ‘the three f’s’. I start with a narrower lens on football to centre the role of the sport and explain its connection with the vā. I then broaden this out to consider how faith intersects with football, and then broaden this further to argue how family ties both the sport and faith together, particularly for the second-generation diaspora.

Terminology

Pasifika

Terms used by scholars of the Pacific to refer to Pasifika peoples and cultures have changed over time, with commonly used terms spanning ‘Pacific Islanders’, ‘Oceanian’, ‘Pasifika’, ‘Pacifica’, or most recently, ‘Moanan’ (see Tecun et al. 2018). I use the term Pasifika as it was the most used and understood term by my participants in Australia, where the research mostly took place. I include New Zealand Māori as they were counted as Pacific by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the National Rugby League (NRL) at the time of research, and because of the close connections they share with Pacific Islanders in Australia. If this research took place mostly in New Zealand, the lines between Māori and Pasifika would be far more distinct. However the distinctions between Māori and Pacific are not as strong in Australia where neither group is Indigenous to the land, and where Māori and other Pasifika people are a small minority of the national population.³ My fieldwork engaged mostly with the largest Pasifika diaspora groups in Australia – New Zealand Māori, Fijian, Samoan, and Tongan, as well as Cook Island Māori people, with minor inclusions from other areas, such as Papua New Guinea. The Pacific Islands encompass tens of thousands of different islands, atolls, waters, nations, cultures, shifting boundaries, languages and religions and I acknowledge the contentions in any form of generalised term, and that I did not work with people from every Pacific Island nation, nor do I speak for any Pacific person or culture (see Hau’ofa 1994; Te Punga Somerville 2012; Thomas 1989).

Diaspora

I discuss a particularly Australian Pasifika diaspora, and I use the term diaspora (rather than migrant or ethnic community) due to the transnational ties and growing second and later generations of Pasifika peoples living outside the Pacific Islands. Most diaspora scholars (e.g. Cohen 1997; Halilovich 2013; Hall 1990; Safran 1991; Sheffer 1986) agree that it takes more than migration alone to form a diaspora as a distinct collective identity. I take Halilovich’s (2013) view that late modern transnational mobility, complete with economic, cultural and political factors, globalisation processes and information and communication technologies, is directly linked to rapid diaspora formation, challenging traditional notions of diaspora. Diasporic identities are not static but rather constantly evolving and mobile (see Hall 1990, 235). In this regard, Pasifika groups in Australia are a modern transnational diaspora; concepts of home and abroad are constantly shifting (Lilomaiava-Doktor 2009a, 2009b) while connections to place and each other remain strong (Kanemasu and Molnar 2013). For many Pacific Island nations there are more people living abroad than not, and the second and later generations are growing rapidly. The Australian Pasifika diaspora is refashioning what it means to be Pasifika and Australian.

Methods

This article draws on research from my recently completed PhD, which took place mainly in Sydney, Australia where I did two years’ fieldwork. I spent six weeks in New Zealand to collect comparative data on the Pasifika diaspora in Auckland and surrounds, and made shorter visits to Samoa, Hawai’i, Tonga and Fiji, which helped make the uniqueness of the Australian diaspora even clearer. I took an ethnographic approach, utilising a combination of semi-structured interviews, an online survey, media analysis, participant observation, and the keeping of a diary. Pasifika communication often favours kinship connections and my family connections to Samoa and New Zealand Māori undoubtedly helped legitimise my presence to the Pasifika people I met. I am also a fan of rugby league and grew up watching it, which also helped legitimise my interests, but in this respect, it was my gender, not ethnicity, that was often implicitly challenged. I had to prove my knowledge and love of the game to both Pasifika and non-Pasifika men in a way I have not witnessed other men have to do, and my position as a woman yielded both positive and negative results.

I engaged in participant observation and numerous informal discussions with people at professional, semi-professional and amateur rugby league (and some union) matches, school sports carnivals, cultural events and festivals, churches, markets, awareness campaigns, family occasions, and academic events. I kept extensive field notes in a diary, which included field observations with more personal reflections to express how I experienced the fieldwork holistically. I was not sometimes an ethnographer and sometimes ‘me’ – I was always both (whether I liked it or not). I conducted 14 semi-structured interviews with Pasifika people aged 18 to 40, including former professional players, current amateur players, and community members. These interviews ranged from 45 minutes-two hours and helped expand on the nuances of the less formal fieldwork interactions. The online survey had 38 Pasifika respondents, with a fairly equal split between males and females, all of whom lived in Australia or New Zealand. The majority were in the 26–35 age bracket, and they included former and current players, and community members. Media analysis was also included due to the enormous role the media plays in contemporary sports, particularly rugby league, and because of its role in disseminating representations of and to Pasifika people. In Australia, it is sports and sports media where most visibility and knowledge of Pasifika culture(s) emanate (Teaiwa 2016). The study was approved by RMIT’s Human Research Ethics Committee, project number 19682. These combined methods aim to flesh out a picture of diasporic Pasifika engagement with rugby league and its connections to family and faith in contemporary Australia.

Football

Pasifika men are significantly over-represented in the NRL, with over 45 per cent of all professional players identifying a Pasifika heritage (Ravulo 2022) while accounting for less than two per cent of the nation’s population (ABS 2017). There has been a dramatic increase in Pasifika men playing at both the elite, and school boy levels over the past 20 years, which has often been attributed to their ‘natural’ athleticism and other corporeal reasons invoking hyper-masculinity. This view separates body, mind and spirit and harks back to colonial racial and sexual hierarchies (Besnier and Alexeyeff 2014). This separation and categorisation is also in direct contrast to Pasifika epistemologies of the vā, where the connections between seemingly separate entities are paramount (see Meyer 2003). In this section I explain how football provides a space to practice the vā which shares similarities with, and connections to, both faith and family.

The space between binaries

At the 2018 Pacific Test in Sydney, Tonga played Samoa for the first time since the 2017 Rugby League World Cup where Tonga had greatly exceeded expectations, only just missing out on the final. I had attended the Pacific Test the year before, prior to the World Cup, and it was a fairly even affair in the crowd between Samoan and Tongan fans. A year later, Tongan performative pride had taken a huge leap, with most of the crowd supporting Tonga, complete with painted faces, huge banners, and flags. Attending live sport is already a sensory experience, the sounds of thousands of people cheering and reacting, the clashing of bodies on the field, the bright lights and colours, the smell of people, beer, hot chips, and freshly cut grass – these are all common experiences at a rugby league match in Sydney, but the 2018 Pacific Test took it to a whole new level of sensory spectacle.

The atmosphere was electric from the very beginning, even during the first game between Fiji and Papua New Guinea. When Tonga took to the field to perform the national anthem and sipi tau (Tongan war cry), I could hardly believe the energy. As the game was being played, the crowd regularly burst into spontaneous singing of Tongan hymns. The contrast between the solemnity and sweetness that is the singing, with the force of what is happening on the field is a contrast that is both beautiful and strangely harmonious. I was genuinely moved, goosebumps and all. Tonga beat Samoa convincingly, but this did not seem to be the most important aspect of the game. The joy was continuous, and everyone seemed in high spirits. I was wearing my Samoan supporter gear and met many friendly Tongan fans. There were also a few people wearing something of both nations and that palpable sense of brotherhood between the Pacific nations was in full force.

The binary notion of winning and losing was perhaps most clearly challenged a few months later however, when Tonga took on Australia for the first time ever, after much encouragement from the Tongan team who were keen to sharpen their skills against the best team in the world. Only able to watch this game on television, I was still able to feel the familiar sense of performative pride shown at the Pacific Test. It can be hard to hear anything specific from the crowd when watching televised matches, but the singing came through clearly, with regular bouts during the game. Tonga were beaten by Australia 34-16 but neither the team nor the fans, nor the commentators for that matter, seemed to pay much attention to this. It was all about the atmosphere and the joy and pride in Tonga even being able to compete at that level. As Ka’ili argues, the maintenance of social relations in the vā ‘is an artistic expression as well as a marking of indigeneity’ (2017, 112). The performance of the spectators at these games occupied this vā, full of artistic expression, and a clear marking of their Indigenous identity as Tongan. They transformed the narrative of winning and losing being the key objective of sport to showing it could be about the vā – material, beautiful, harmonious, active, and in-between, expressed through performativity and perceived by others as something truly special. News headlines across Australia and New Zealand illustrated this, such as the New Zealand Herald’s – ‘Atmosphere at Mate Ma’a Tonga’s clash against the Kangaroos unlikely to be felt in New Zealand again’ (Reive 2018).

So what is football’s connection to faith and family? There is a growing body of work on religion and masculinity in the Pacific region and their connections to sport (Guinness and Besnier 2016; Presterudstuen 2019), but there has been very little done on the connections between Pasifika peoples’ changing religious beliefs and sport in the diaspora (see Lakisa et al. 2014). In contemporary Australian rugby league, religion is very visible amongst its large Pasifika cohort, with prayers before or after games, gestures made when scoring a try, as well as in tattoos, and imagery and words on strapping tape. Problems like playing on the Sabbath or leaving for religious service have been documented in the media. For instance, high profile player, Will Hopoate left the game in 2012 and 2013 to serve a two year mission for his Mormon faith (Hislop 2011). Hopoate was lucky enough to have the skills, profile, and the right people around him to be able to come back to the game and continue a professional career, but many do not. There have been some high-profile cases in the media of players negotiating into their contracts clauses to not play on Sundays, which is one of the main days games are held, with most of these cases eventually being dropped by the player. Even Hopoate had to compromise that he would play on Sundays but would not train or partake in any other activities such as media or community responsibilities (Australian Associated Press 2017). There have also been some recent controversies around Pasifika players boycotting rainbow jerseys aimed at celebrating ‘inclusivity’, citing religious and cultural reasons (Hawkes 2022).

A Fijian Australian man who has worked with the NRL talked about the complexity in uniting religious responsibilities with those of the business of the NRL:

I can see that any of that media hype about, ‘oh my gosh that player’s being disrespected because he doesn’t want to play on Sunday so he’ll miss the games on Sunday, and not turn up’, that’s great, all power to him, I think that’s great. But how much responsibility should the game have in changing all their policies? Not obviously just to accommodate to that one player, but just, we’re talking about a business, we’re talking about a commercial entity, not a religious entity…

He then goes on to say that he thinks most clubs are very flexible around Pasifika responsibilities but that it is the media and general public who get upset about it and need to understand the complexity and negotiations involved:

I’ve seen that a player needs to be in certain places or spaces, and the club completely understands… and then will assist in that process which is great, but then the hype that goes with this as well, I think it needs to be more critically understood.

Other men I spoke with in positions of power within both the NRL and New Zealand Rugby League shared similar views: that Pasifika involvement in the game should be celebrated and meaningfully engaged with due to their dominant position as players, but that the wider public and media interests also need to be accounted for. What this means in practice is still unclear within these organisations but thinking about Pasifika needs is undeniably growing (see Lakisa 2020).

Shame and salvation in football

Shame and salvation play a salient role in both religion and sports (Pavlidis et al. 2022). Rugby league is no stranger to the familiar story arcs of shame and salvation, or disgrace and redemption as would be the more common phraseology in this context. Sports news and other media often involve a human interest story about a player who has had to overcome some great personal obstacle or flaw to reach what is couched as an admirable place. Andrew Johns for example, who made racist remarks during the 2010 State of Origin, that lead to high profile NSW player of Aboriginal and Māori heritage, Timana Tahu walking out, has been shamed and redeemed numerous times, with scandals involving racism (George 2014), sexism (Sygall 2015), and drug abuse (Ritchie 2007). The common theme in these stories are confessions and apologies from the men who often express shame or guilt in their behavior, through which they are then redeemed. Andrew Johns, despite his public failings, remains one of the most popular personalities in rugby league, and is one of only thirteen official ‘immortals’ of the game – the highest honour a rugby league player in Australia can achieve. When he was named as the eighth immortal in 2012, only two years after the Tahu racism scandal, he said ‘I feel like the game’s forgiven me’ (Sygall 2015). He was effectively redeemed, and continues to have a busy media career with the NRL to this day.

Shame can play a large role in sports, from the shame you feel when you let your teammates down through a simple error, to getting injured, or making some other mistake. You can experience a sense of letting yourself down as well as letting down your family and everyone who has believed in you or sacrificed for you. For Pasifika people, it can also feel like you are letting down ‘your people’, ranging from your nation to Pasifika peoples in general, and even God (Teaiwa 2016). The pressure to perform can be stifling, and with this pressure there can often be shame in one’s feelings about struggling. A number of my participants shared stories about boys being physically punished by family members when unmet expectations on the field led to disappointment and shame felt by families. One man told me about the pressure put on a now well-known Pasifika rugby league player who, when he was as young as 13, would get routinely abused by his father after games, saying ‘if he had a bad game, man, wait until they get in the car park, he got bashed’. Another Pasifika man said of his counselling sessions with Pasifika NRL players,

A lot of my counselling sessions are around being more aware of your thoughts, your feelings, your behaviours…I do think that’s not just because of the game but the way in which we’ve been brought up, to not verbally articulate those things…a lot of my sessions are just players dealing with emotions and feelings, and just tears.

Young Pasifika boys can feel ashamed of their mental health battles relating to injury or under-performance, and this can result in terrible outcomes. It is often after injury or missing out on a much-awaited selection when young Pasifika rugby league hopefuls have committed suicide (Horton 2014).

Shame is also a large part of most Christian religions, with morality being a central pillar of most modern denominations. British notions of muscular Christianity played a significant role in this across the Pacific, particularly the racial and sexual hierarchy of white heterosexual man properly expressing manhood, and therefore, power (Guttmann 1994; Mangan 1986). Sport was a major part of the civilising mission of imperialism across the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Guttmann 1994). Football codes in particular were tied to notions of muscular Christianity, and good disciplined British citizens, and the sports field became a place good Christian gentlemen could let off steam and engage in their more brutish desires (Hawkes 2022). Indigenous men however, were limited to this physical realm only, seen as a place where their ‘true’ nature could be channeled safely. As Calabro argues in her work on Māori in rugby, ‘the perceptions of the hyperphysicality and rebellious “nature” of Maori bodies reflect a history of politics that has aimed at circumscribing their aspirations and their possibilities within physical arenas’ (2014, 391). Anything outside the limitations set by British colonising powers was effectively squashed and, most powerfully, shamed, so that the ‘good’ and ‘proper’ (hu)man would not even want to associate with them (Mangan 1986). Tengan talks about this in his work on the feminisation of Hawaiian men’s practices, such as hula, by white American powers to shame men out of their culture and make them ‘less than’ the masculine ideals eschewed by American imperialism (2008; with Markham 2009). This utilisation of shame in both sports and Christian religions was evident during my fieldwork when I met a Māori man working for Man Up – a ‘man saving’ initiative run by the New Zealand Pentecostal Destiny Church – where the ‘proper’ man was framed as not soft, feminine, or homosexual, but rather strong, athletic, willing to physically fight for his family, and faithful – a believer and follower of ‘the truth’.

Pasifika performativity and the vā

In the performing of sports or religious practice, there is also a consistent engagement with the vā for diasporic Pasifika people. Pasifika men are not simply naturally gifted footballers with some innate savagery or warrior-like characteristic. The language used to naturalise them has ignored the structural and cultural reasons behind Pasifika over-representation in rugby league in Australia, including how they have been affected by colonisation to pursue sports in lieu of other opportunities, and how the sport fits with their epistemologies of the vā, particularly its aesthetic, spatial, and active qualities.

As Ka’ili tells us, ‘vā is a space that is relational…the primary aim of tauhi vā [the Tongan art of mediating sociospatial relations] is to mediate conflicts and create harmony and beauty’ (Ka’ili 2017, 7). Like the vā, sport has beauty in it. Rugby league is often talked about in reference to its watchability and ‘attractiveness’ (see Collins 1998). Like rugby league, there is symmetry and other aesthetic qualities to the vā, which are evidenced in various Pasifika art forms – whether it be visual marks on a tapa cloth, or the beats of a drum in a song. In rugby league we can see these elements too, we have two halves, a repetitive structure of six tackles per side, and even the scores awarded for tries and conversions are even, not odd (unlike rugby union).

While it may be considered a paradox in western traditions, the binary notion of shame and salvation can also be approached through the concept of vā. There is meaningful space between the two, and it is important that this space is celebrated and that Pasifika people have access to it, so that they neither drown in self-shame, or in the rhetoric of salvation. Having suicidal thoughts because of the pressures of rugby league, feeling ashamed of your perceived failures, and like you will never be able to redeem yourself should not be ‘par for the course’ for Pasifika and other young Indigenous men. These young men are already skilled at negotiating the vā, even if they do not know it; they do it every day as Indigenous people living in settler states.

Vā is also active and represents the common belief among Pasifika peoples that whatever you do, you do it as a service for others, such as for family, community, and God. Caring for the vā takes active service, and doing things that maintain positive relations, like visiting, giving, receiving, or planting trees around the royal house which was once a common way to maintain the vā in Tonga (Ka’ili 2017, 32). The active performativity of sports can maintain vā in similar ways. One does not have to be ashamed or saved; one can live and indeed thrive in-between, by acknowledging the relational connectivity and communal nature of these spaces, and their holistic, not categorical, qualities.

The importance of active service is evidenced in much Pasifika culture, for Samoans for example, to uphold fa’a Samoa (the Samoan way) one must continuously engage in things like service (tautua) and obligations (fa’alavelave). Similarly for Tongans, anga fakatonga, the Tongan way, requires ‘ofa which involves actions to show one’s love, and talangofua, which is the act of obedience. Rugby league is fast becoming a Pasifika majority-played sport in Australia, and this position comes with opportunities to refashion a colonially introduced national sport that is run and reported on by a majority white-male cohort, and shape it in ways that better benefit Pasifika peoples. The material, active and aesthetic qualities of rugby league make it a salient space for practicing these same qualities of the vā, and connect it to identity forming practices, particularly for Pasifika peoples whose identities are often in-between, as well as active.

The vā requires service and harmony, but it also has a materiality to it, ‘as if it were an Object itself’ (Bennardo 2000, 56). It is a form of ‘sociality as well as materiality’ (Ka’ili 2017, 29). The concept of diasporic Australian-Pasifika identity occupies a tangible space that can be perceived and practiced, acted upon, negotiated, felt and understood as a space between Pasifika and Australian (or New Zealander) heritage. It is no accident that some of the core elements of this space are themselves material, such as church, family homes and football fields and paraphernalia. The acts of football, faith and family, whilst having plenty of private elements to them, also need performative and public acts of service to be recognised. The materiality of rugby league cannot be denied. It must be done in a certain space, and at the very least you need something to throw and people to play. At the higher levels, it is most definitely active, aesthetic, and material. It is a spectacular form of service. This ‘material spectacle’ is performative, much like preaching, or playing family roles. Spectating is also performative, especially live. It is often even spectacular, as evidenced by the 2018 Pacific games discussed above.

As C. L. R James wrote in what is perhaps the most famous book on cricket; ‘the spontaneous outburst of thousands at a fierce hook or a dazzling slip-catch, the ripple of recognition at a long awaited leg-glance, are as genuine and deeply felt expressions of artistic emotion as any I know’ (1963, 274). As a spectator, you become part of the performative spectacle, in harmony with others, and living in between reality and play. You are part of the vā – complete with its activity, harmony, beauty and betweenness. You are in a liminal space between reality – you are really there feeling real emotions with real others; and play – watching a game made up of arbitrary rules that would be completely meaningless out of context. Because of the context however – the performativity, the aesthetics, the shared space – it is deeply meaningful, and the vā after all, is ‘where meaning is made’ (Wendt 1999).

Faith

Serving God and family through sport

Despite trends across Australia showing increasing secularisation (ABS 2016), and my own survey showing the same across its’ small Pasifika sample, religion remains a central pillar of Pasifika life. A common sentiment among my participants was ‘faith before football’ which, by extension, meant a commitment to ones’ duties, not just to God, but to family. A second-generation Cook Island man shared how he used to resent his parents’ sentiment of faith before football but now respects it. When he turned 15 he had to give up league as it clashed with his Sabbath and he had to go to church. He said league ‘was part of me’ and found it very hard to be without it but eventually came to respect his parents’ decision. He came around to the view that faith, and by extension family, comes before football, and that going to church as a young man meant serving family. He also constantly referred to ‘we’ during our dialogue, rarely saying I or me, especially in regard to beliefs. When I asked who he was referring to when he says ‘we’, he explained he meant his sister and him. It was so natural to him that he and his sister were a unit, he did not think to have to explain this. Family and faith for him were inextricable.

Another Pasifika man in his twenties living in Western Sydney, a New Zealand born Samoan, expressed that it takes time to understand faith as a young boy:

Participant: Because we’re young we’re not like 100% involved in religion, but now I’m grown I understand what my parents were trying to say about playing on a Sunday, because my faith has grown… but as a teenager all you want to do is play sports, there’s no ifs or buts, you just want to play, it’s just the love of the game, but as you grow older you sort of see and understand where your talent comes from. But Sunday is big, especially for basketball, and I [was]… the only Polynesian kid, since I was 15, and never played a game, I would practice, but my parents would never let me play.

Interviewer: Because they were all on Sundays?

Participant: Yeah. I understand now, but back then I didn’t.

This sentiment that one must recognise their talent as coming from God and act accordingly came up a number of times. A Samoan father said ‘faith before football’ is very much his attitude with his five children who all play rugby league and that his children understand and respect this. He also expressed that education comes before football, despite his close connection to the game. He said the desire to be a rugby league player is obvious in his youth group where one boy just got signed to one of the NRL club’s Under 18’s squads and asked him for his advice, ‘he [the boy] asked “should he get a manager etc.” I said “do your damn homework, get an education”’.

As one of my second-generation Australian-Tongan participants expressed, football, or whatever you enjoy and are good at, is a way of thanking God and serving others:

I think faith in a way, it is our relationship with God, and I feel that in this relationship with God – the way that he shapes our thinking, the way that he shapes our motives and our gifts – and I think whether it’s through arts or football, this is our way of thanking him. This is our way of serving others, if this is something they enjoy or appreciate, this is a way of loving them and loving God at the same time.

Here we can see the potential for rugby league, even with its capitalist and individualistic framework, to effloresce cultural values such as Christian faith and the vā for Pasifika peoples. Rugby league can be an act of service, mediating the socio-spatial vā between ones’ self, God, and family. This goes beyond simple performative gestures such as those made when scoring a try, or writing religious words on one’s strapping tape, or even praying together after a match, which are all common amongst Pasifika players, but into the very idea of why one plays rugby league, as a service to God and family. Thinking about the vā and its material and social elements of connection helps us see how these things are truly inextricable from one another.

Negotiating competing expectations of family, football and settler society

Unfortunately, during the time this research took place, a number of young Pasifika men committed suicide in Sydney, often with a combination of pressures and misunderstandings being suggested as possible reasons (Ravulo 2015). Second and later generation Pasifika people can struggle with feeling like they do not belong either with their first-generation family members, or the wider Australian public. Support workers in Pasifika mental health in Sydney I worked with discussed the distance between parents born in the Islands and their Australian-born children as a common cause for mental health problems, and even suicide for Pasifika youth. Feelings of not being able to talk to one’s parents openly or be understood by them were common themes. At times this was put down to religious differences, with increasing secularisation amongst second-generation youth distancing them from their parents. However at other times it was about the changing nature of faith, where the younger generation are just as passionate about God, but have a different relationship to spirituality, and particularly the Church. A young Pasifika woman I spoke with expressed the sadness and confusion she and others feel about the fact that Pasifika people are one of the most religious in Australia, but also one of the most incarcerated:

We were part of a prison ministry, we got to spend time with the juvenile justice centre and spend time with Islander boys… we got the opportunity to sit down with both the Aboriginal and Pacific Islanders and got to hear their stories, but it wasn’t until we left, one of the officers told us; ‘all our Islander boys, we get so many. They come in every day and when they fill out the form, tell us who they are, they all tick that they come from a church. What are you guys teaching? Why are they here?’ It’s like, this is my quest. I feel like God has placed me here to find out what is our role, and how we can better this for future generations?

For this twenty-five-year-old second-generation Tongan woman, a relationship with God was paramount to her life, but she saw the churches as failing Pasifika youth and could understand why many move away from the Church. For her though, it made her determination to strengthen Pasifika faith even stronger,

I’ve had a negative experience with the Church and I know that a lot of young people do as well, and I feel the Church has neglected a lot of my spiritual development, and because of this, I feel like this is why a lot of young people disconnect from their faith and they shouldn’t have to blame God for the faults of the Church.

A number of other second-generation Pasifika people I spoke with shared a similar sentiment, although they took it further to not considering themselves as having faith at all. One Samoan participant was brought up in the Catholic faith, and while he considered himself an atheist, he attended church regularly for the sake of his mother and their community in Sydney. For him, church was about family and culture and a way to serve his obligations as a Samoan Matai (chief). He was also a former professional rugby league player and would often talk about rugby league as being similarly about family and cultural pride, as well as a place of pressure and misunderstanding, particularly in the early nineties when there were a lot less Pasifika players.

Family

How masculine stereotypes affect women

There are numerous stereotypes that continue to frame Pasifika men in colonial tropes of hyper-masculinity, physicality and savagery, both in Australia and other western settler states (Hawkes 2018; Hokowhitu 2003). These stereotypes do not just affect Pasifika men however. The female Pasifika participants in this study were just as likely to feel the pressure of negative stereotyping as their male friends and family, after all, whatever challenges the men faced, emanated through their communities, such is the nature of Pasifika relational personhood (Teaiwa 2016). Women may not feel the personal pressure to play rugby league at a professional capacity like the men do, but they are inextricable to the masculine sporting arena and suffer accordingly at the hands of corporeal stereotypes. In response to the last question of the survey, asking for anything else they would like to share, a second-generation Tongan-Australian woman in her early twenties, wrote as follows:

There are a lot of stereotypes people have upon Pacific Islanders, some see us as only talented people with sports and music. In my experiences other people from different races have mentioned to me that we are criminals who always get into trouble with the law and that we are not smart, to even know our timetables. I’ve heard people say hurtful things, our education levels are low. A girl in my class said that we are the worst people on the planet. Another even said we have a big family but can’t afford to buy food.

Another second-generation female, of Fijian heritage, said ‘it’s limiting to see Pacific Islanders as ‘role models’ in sports related fields only’ and saw the emphasis on sport as detrimental to educational goals, ‘In my tertiary studies, Pacific Islanders constitute a very small component of the student profile, and there would be many reasons behind this, but the mainstream ideas for Pacific Islanders isn’t one conducive to a career outside of sports’. While rugby league may not present the same career opportunities for Pasifika women, they feel the pressure just as much, and feel the impacts of stereotypes that are perpetuated in the name of sport. They are also often just as likely to feel expectations to be good at sports, whether it be a football code or, more often, netball, volleyball or dancing. Another second-generation Samoan woman in her early twenties shared this feeling:

I think there’s the idea that a minority of PI [Pacific Islanders] have that sport is the only pathway we have to success in life. I see a lot of sports mums and dads pushing their kids to their breaking point and that’s when you start seeing kids going down the wrong path, and it’s either ‘become an endorsed athlete playing for blahblah’ or work in the factory or settle and have kids. I feel like it really does suck when I’m at uni and there is such a small minority of PI’s that attend.

Even if they are not directly impacted by sports and sporting expectations, the stereotypes of hyper-physicality historically leveled at Pasifika men have affected the contemporary expectations on Pasifika women who are underrepresented in tertiary education and, as per the above, have been told they are not smart, and unable to provide for their families.

The family unit

A number of young Pasifika people, both in the fieldwork and the survey, saw a dissonance between their individual goals for a career and professional growth, and their older family member’s belief that a job is purely for income and to serve the wider family unit. A Sydney-born woman of Tongan descent in her twenties said to me, ‘it’s hard to pursue a career when our families only see work as the source of income’, adding that this is a downside to communal values as opposed to being ‘encouraged to build ourselves individually’ which she saw as a more western value. After discussing education for some time, I asked her why she thought the Pasifika levels of high school drop-out were higher than national averages, and she highlighted that while Pasifika families’ valuing of western education is increasing, financial struggle still plays a key role:

More parents are investing more resources in bringing their children up in education, however there is still an overwhelming sense that we need our children in the workplace as fast as they can, to help relieve them of financial pressures, and that’s the sad reality that we live, and they miss out on opportunities of developing really critical skills and thinking, when we’re expected – and it’s hard because we don’t get a say – we’re expected to help home, that’s number one. So I feel that that pressure to help the family is the number one reason [for dropping out of high school].

For many of the Pasifika people involved in this research, ‘I’ always infers ‘we’, and what affects parents affects children, and what affects males affects females. This is part of the ‘Unity-that-is-All’ (Wendt 1999) that is the vā. The expectations and desires of female family members were often presented as the driving force behind male determination to do well in rugby league. The common expression ‘to give back’ often started with a strong Pasifika mother and the desire to give her something in return for her years of sacrifice and care (closely followed by fathers and extended family, especially siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins). Despite the majority of my Pasifika participants seeing sport as an important part of their life, they also acknowledge its limitations and potential dangers. For many of my female participants in particular, these revolved around family dynamics. It is not enough to have only sporting role models and a sports career as the only fathomable and desirable future for young Pasifika men; there needs to be other educational and career options.

Rugby league, however, is still ‘the first horse out of the blocks’, as one of my participants put it, for many young diasporic Pasifika males who see the sport as one of very few options to succeed. Despite the limitations, and the opportunities it presents to achieve what may be considered western ideals like individual wealth, media presence, and status, part of its desirability for Pasifika boys is that it can also effloresce traditional customs, like maintaining the vā through active service and duty (Gregory 1982; Sahlins 1992). Things like fa’alavelave, the Samoan system of gift giving, can increase with a rugby league career because it means you can afford to give and remit more. When you live in a diaspora, you are often expected to remit generously and give large gifts, including cash, at births, deaths and weddings (Lee and Francis 2009). This is an important part of having a successful career with a good income for Pasifika peoples, and one of the reasons Pasifika men ‘code-hop’, taking up deals where they can in other sporting codes like rugby union or Australian Rules, or play for and in other nations, like England or France, which can be more lucrative. Lakisa et al. in their Australian Pasifika rugby league study, argue that ‘the cultural and familial motivations of their strategies to maximise income from sport may be misinterpreted by those who do not understand the importance of family, faith, and culture for Pasifika athletes’ (Lakisa et al. 2014, 352). When Pasifika athletes are condemned for ‘chasing the money’, such as Samoan-New Zealander Sonny Bill-Williams who has played for nine clubs in two codes, and been frequently criticised (Sportal 2018), what is often ignored is the large number of people they are supporting and how unknown and limited any athletic career can be. In other words, you take what you can while you can to support as many as you can. A lot of my participants talked about the overwhelming nature of this responsibility and that the potential to make money in sport can make these obligations less daunting and bring great joy and pride to both the giver and receiver (although some people expressed that the more people think you make, the more they will expect).

In the survey, in response to the multiple choice question: ‘How important is family to you?’ 67 per cent said: ‘It’s the most important thing in the world’, and 33 per cent said: ‘It’s very important, but so are my personal hopes and dreams’. Nobody chose either of the two other options which were ‘It’s pretty important’, and ‘Not as important as other things’. Of the Pasifika men who said that family was the most important thing in the world, most also ‘strongly agreed’ that sport was an important part of their life. These results were also reflected in my face-to-face interactions with Pasifika people where family was often presented as the most important part of life, but with an increasing focus on personal satisfaction, particularly for younger second and later generations. A lot more women than men mentioned health as a main reason for engaging with sports and encouraging their male family members to do the same. There was a palpable sense that obesity and related diseases were gaining more awareness for Pasifika peoples, especially for women who are often the ones in charge of what the family eats and what activities they engage in. Some boys said they struggled when moving to sports camps or away from home for trials and contracts because they missed their mother’s cooking too much, which often formed part of larger conversations on how moving away from family would be the hardest part about a rugby league career if it came to that. One boy said he would never move to England or France for rugby no matter how much money he was offered – unless he could take his entire extended family – to which he and his friends all laughed, presumably because there are so many of them. Every family is of course different, but what is common is just how inextricable Pasifika women are from the masculine sporting dream. While their experiences with sport may be inflected differently due to their different positions within families, the ways Pasifika masculinity is framed by both outsiders and their own communities affects them just as much as it does their male family and community members. This gendered aspect is important in grappling with the relationality and ‘betweenness’ of the vā, as it shows us how traditionally masculine sports like rugby league are just as influential in the lives of female (and other)⁴ Pasifika peoples as they are in the lives of males. The relational connections, as understood through the vā, between men and women is not a secondary consideration for those playing or even spectating rugby league, but a central part of their identities and drive.

Conclusion

Tuagalu tells us that ‘the nurturing of va relationships is a direct result of communal culture, where the individual is perceived in terms of the group’ (2008, 110). The supposed division between communal- and individual-focused cultures has been critiqued in the social sciences for some time (Josephides 1991; Sökefeld 1999; Wardlow 2006) and is a particularly salient criticism for diasporic communities who do not fit neatly into these divisions. The balancing of communal and individual interests is one of the many skillful negotiations Pasifika diasporas constantly engage in. The collective and communal nature of much Pasifika culture(s), particularly those in the Islands, is however evident, both in the research presented here, and in other literature, with the vā being a central part of this (see Tuagalu 2008; Ka’ili 2017). Rather than the western Cartesian philosophy of ‘I think therefore I am’, being a central framework, Pasifika peoples work more within a framework of ‘I belong therefore I am’ (Williams 2016). Relationships between people and groups are where strength and identity are created, like the sea connecting their islands following Hau’ofa (who famously argued that the Pacific Islands are not small islands in the sea but rather a large sea of islands, 1994). Pasifika identities in the diaspora are made through connections to each other, to their ancestral homelands and to their new homes and what they do there, including the playing and consuming of sports, which is, by no accident, itself a ‘space between’ – that between reality and play (Besnier et al. 2017) – or ‘betwixt and between’ to use Victor Turner’s classic terms (Turner 1977). Football, faith and family all share this communal nature, where the need to work together in context with others and share common goals is a necessity for any of these phenomena to work. What good is a preacher with no congregation? Who is a father with no child? And what sense does a forward, hooker or fullback make without a team of other positions? Nurturing and maintaining the vā – those spaces in between, that connect, where meaning is made – relies on active communal practice, whether it be preaching, parenting, or playing.

The three f’s – football, faith and family – are intricately connected for Pasifika diasporas in Australia. There is vā within them and between them and understanding how they are similar and how they work together helps us gain better understandings of them individually. Understanding these connections and the spaces between also helps us acknowledge the very real tensions and collisions between the three f’s, and allows us to address them from a more culturally aware and educated space, rather than relying on stereotypes and other damaging and limiting narratives. A person’s position within, and relationship with, each phenomenon requires a performative active service which has its own materialities, socialities and understandings of what makes the ‘good’ and beautiful. Faith and family are often put above football, but the sport also offers opportunities itself to serve family and God. While faith may be decreasing with later generations, it is still a major facet of diasporic Pasifika life, the shape of which is changing from traditional Christian frameworks to more meaningful spaces created by young Pasifika peoples. High incarceration and suicide rates have been linked to bad church experiences, shame, and the pressures that come from the perception that a highly improbable sporting career is one’s only hope to provide for large families. A greater nurturing of Pasifika epistemologies, such as understandings of the vā, could lessen these pressures and help Pasifika peoples navigate better through the varieties of the vā within diaspora. Instead of the options of shame or salvation, and the limiting stereotypes of Pasifika people as naturally gifted footballers, spaces between can be embraced and better understood.

Geolocation information

Australia, Pacific Islands, New Zealand.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Research mostly took place in Sydney, Australia, where football or ‘footy’ generally refers to rugby league.

2 I also acknowledge my PhD thesis, Hawkes, G. 2019. Diasporic belonging, masculine identity and sports: how rugby league affects the perceptions and practices of Pasifika peoples in Australia. Dissertation. Link: https://researchrepository.rmit.edu.au/esploro/outputs/doctoral/Diasporicbelonging-masculine-identity-and-sports-how-rugbyleague-affects-the-perceptions-and-practices-of-Pasifika-peoples-inAustralia/9921864288401341.

3 People of Māori and other Pasifika heritage account for 1.43 per cent (or 335,103 people) of the total Australian population according to the 2016 Australian census (Batley 2017).

4 I acknowledge the important cultural role and rich history of Pasifika peoples of other gender identities, including transgender, third sex, and non-binary people, including those who identify with specific Pasifika identities such as Samoan fa’afafine and Tongan fakaleiti. The data for this section of the paper was created through conversations with female-identifying Pasifika women (see Besnier and Alexeyeff 2014; Presterudstuen 2019; Tcherkezoff 2014 for work on diverse Pasifika gender identities).