A Sporting Nation will appeal equally to the serious sports enthusiast and mainstream reader. Its main text comprises excerpts from the Library's oral history recordings, with additional features by Olympian Marlene Mathews, and Eric Rolls and Marion Halligan.Twenty-six richly illustrated features present a broad and popular sweep through the nation's sporting culture, opening with a recollection of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and a survey of the Sydney 2000 Games by Marlene Mathews.
The extraordinary performances of Australian athletes, and the awareness of the system that fostered them, came to the world's attention during the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. Bloomfield traces the development of Australian sport from the early 19th century to the modern day institutions that drive our sporting success.
Australia is only a small player in the world’s political and economic landscapes, yet, for many decades, it has been considered to be a global powerhouse in terms of its sporting successes. In conjunction with this notion, the nation has long been portrayed as having a preoccupation with sport. This labelling has been seen as both a blessing and a curse. Those who value a Bourdieuian view of culture bemoan sport’s centrality to the national imagination and the consequent lack of media coverage, funding and prestige accorded to the arts. Other scholars question whether the popular stereotype of the Australian sportsperson is, in fact, a myth and that instead Australians are predominantly passive sport consumers rather than active sport participants. Australian sport, through its successes on the field of play and in advancing sport coaching and management, has undergone a revolution, as both an enabler of global processes and as subject to its influences (economic, political, migratory etc.). This book will examine the shifting place of Australian sports in current global and local environs, from the perspective of spectators, players and administrators. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.
This book offers an accessible overview of the role sport plays in international relations and diplomacy. Sports diplomacy has previously been defined as an old but under-studied aspect of the estranged relations between peoples, nations and states. These days, it is better understood as the conscious, strategic and ongoing use of sport, sportspeople and sporting events by state and non-state actors to advance policy, trade, development, education, image, reputation, brand, and people-to-people links. In order to better understand the many occasions where sport and diplomacy overlap, this book presents four new, inter-disciplinary and theoretical categories of sports diplomacy: traditional, ‘new’, sport-as-diplomacy, and sports anti-diplomacy. These categories are further validated by a large number of case studies, ranging from the Ancient Olympiad to the recent appearance of esoteric, government sports diplomacy strategies, and beyond, to the activities of non-state sporting actors such as F.C. Barcelona, Colin Kaepernick and the digital world of e-sports. As a result, the landscape of sports diplomacy becomes clearer, as do the pitfalls and limitations of using sport as a diplomatic tool. This book will be of much interest to students of diplomacy, foreign policy, sports studies, and International Relations in general.
This is the first single-volume book to deal comprehensively with Australia's sporting life. It covers the history of a range of individual sports in Australia, including cricket, horse-racing, netball, rowing, tennis, lawn bowls, swimming, surfing, and the various football codes. The book demonstrates the central role of sports in Australian popular culture and shows the ways in which sports reflect changing Australian society.
A sporting nation is only limited by its imagination. Every time this story is told it changes; something is always added, embellished or dropped from the run-on side. For more than thirty years, H.G. Nelson has been finding the poetry in the punt and humour during half-time. Now, he turns his keen eye for facts and folly to the illustrious history of our great sporting nation. In his trademark fast and furious style, H.G. dives deep into the moments that have truly made us who we are. He reminds us of our leaders' great sporting triumphs, from Harold Holt's swimming to John Howard's bowling; rewrites the record on legends such as 'Aussie Joe' Bugner and Jack Brabham; and explains why Australia's reality TV is the best in the world. The Fairytale is H.G. Nelson's magnum opus - an all-encompassing, no-holds-barred history of Australia at play, told through the stories of our sporting highs, lows and middles.
If anyone is qualified to talk about sport in Australia, it's David Hill. In this book, with the benefit of his years of personal experience both playing and working in the sporting world, he vividly narrates its rise in Australia since the end of the nineteenth century, from the first cricket tour of England in 1868 by an Australian team - an Aboriginal team - to our earliest successes at the Olympics in 1896, when Edwin Flack was the only Australian competitor and won two gold medals, to the golden age of the 1950s when Australia ruled the world in tennis, swimming and athletics.In this book David also recalls his battles as president of the North Sydney Bears with tobacco sponsorship lobby groups; his coup as managing director of the ABC in buying the broadcast rights for the AFL; his gargantuan efforts to clean up soccer as chairman of Soccer Australia. And he takes us through the shift in sport from the relative innocence of the amateur era to its commercialisation, which, through the years, has undoubtedly contributed to the uglier sides of our national obsession: the corruption, the drugs, the sexism and racism. Have we plunged to a nadir in recent times, or are these characteristics of our sporting nation an inevitable and permanent effect of the need to succeed? This book is a riveting, personal take on a subject that so many Australians follow fanatically - a must-read for sports lovers, but also a compelling, revealing account for those who have never quite understood the appeal of our national obsession.
