AustLit

'In his latest work, Aboriginal People and Australian Football in the Nineteenth Century: They Did Not Come from Nowhere, Roy Hay critically examines a popular origin story of Australian football and details the nature and extent of early Aboriginal involvement in the code throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, Hay finds no evidence to support the tradition that holds Australian football to be partially derived from Aboriginal games like marngrook, but seeks to offer an alternative origin story to Aboriginal Australians’ involvement in the code. To this end, he details the scale and substance of early Indigenous involvement in the sport on the missions and stations of Victoria and southern New South Wales and, to a lesser extent, South and Western Australia. Hay draws on recently digitised newspaper archives and employs demographic analyses to explore the development of the code at specific stations and missions and he uncovers the successes and triumphs of numerous Aboriginal sporting teams and individuals in a context that was not conducive to that success. In this way, Hay fills an important lacuna in the history of sport in Australian society.' (Introduction)