Through Sport We Can See Ourselves

The Age

Saturday October 11, 2008

Greg Baum

The Krakouer brothers and Hakoah Vienna reflect the way games can shape society.

THE Krakouer brothers are synonymous with Australia's indigenous people and code of football, but their name comes from another place and tradition entirely. An ancestor was a Polish Jew, from the city of Krakow, who emigrated to England and was later transported to the Swan River colony. Theodore Krakow helped to build the colony's courthouse/jail, and died in the mental asylum, then the only other building in town, in 1877.

None of this will be news to readers of Sean Gorman's 2005 book Brotherboys, on the Krakouers. But Gorman told a Melbourne University conference entitled "Cultural Differences in Sport" last month that, since the book was published, many Jews had told him that they had claimed the Krakouers as their own when they played.

The seminar, obscured by the AFL finals, was an absorbing exercise in tracing aspects of the way sport helps to shape society and sometimes to identify society to itself.

Gorman's reflection on the Krakouers' heritage was prompted by fellow academic Gideon Reuveni's musings on the "muscular Jew". Reuveni said it emerged around the turn of the 19th century. "Sport at this time was part of the process of militarisation of European society at large," he said. "Jewish society was part of the European society and they used sport for similar purposes."

Reuveni said Jewish sports bodies tended to adopt the names of heroic military figures, or names that denoted power. Hakoah Vienna, for instance, was Austria's soccer champion; "hakoah" is strength in Hebrew.

But Reuveni said the meaning of the muscular Jew's declaration was open to conjecture. Was it that Jews, not previously known for sporting virtuosity, could hold their own in the world? Or was it, as the Zionists would have it, that they needed to create and vigorously defend a homeland of their own?

Barbara Keys, another historian, had a different spin on this period in European history. She argued that, hitherto, each country had its own, distinct form of physical culture. In Germany, gymnastics, or "turnen", was all the rage, emphasising posture and process rather than competition.

"What we've seen over the last century is a very striking 'sportification' of the world, and what we've lost is things like 'turnen'," she said. 'Sport', focusing on achievements rather than exercise for its own sake, was a British concept, she said, and Britain then still ruled the world.

Sport, mostly modelled by the Brits, became a trans-national force, like a language. It remained the world's lingua franca, Keys said. But the cost was homogeneity. A Martian, upon arrival on Earth, "would be struck most of all by the similarities (betweens sports)," she said. "It's just variations of the same principle."

She offered herself as a witness: American-born, Harvard-bred, once an American football fan, now perfectly attuned to the nuances of the AFL.

Gorman also dwelled on the idea of sport as a language, mute but rich. In 1994, he took a sabbatical and moved to Tambellup, in south-west WA.Two communities comprised the population, wealthy wheat farmers and mostly poor Aborigines. Yet on the football field, they were as one. "Sometimes, it was one white ruckman and 17 indigenous," said Gorman. But it was different in the summer, when the cockies played cricket by themselves and a more colonial mood prevailed.

Football, plainly, has been an agent of social reform for indigenous Australia. Gorman recalled how in 1987, the AFL - alarmed by an 11% decline in attendances - ran an ad campaign that focused on the Krakouers and their "black magic". The image was of Aboriginal people as few white Australians then thought of them: in charge.

The change was slow and painful. Jimmy Krakouer was vilified unmercifully on the field, responded in the only way he knew and lost 22 games of his career to suspension. Nicky Winmar's famous gesture in pointing to his skin at Victoria Park in 1993 was a turning point, said Gorman, because it was something other than fisticuffs: "It was a reply." The revolution had begun.

Nikki Henningham, also a historian, concentrated on another revolution, possibly more stoutly resisted: women in sport. She told of the formation in Sydney at the end of World War I of the City Girls Amateur Sports Association. "They saw organised sport as a way of enhancing women's potential as leaders and citizens," she said. The Depression put an end to it .

She told of Ronda Kimble, 50 years a netball umpire, who took it upon herself in the '60s to set up clubs and competitions to meet a need. "This was the one space where, as a woman, she could do something for herself," Henningham said.

Husbands were a problem, insisting that their wives not train until the housework was done. One saddled his wife with chores that took her until 10.30pm. Her teammates waited for her, and their solidarity became a landmark.

Henningham told of a long-retired woman cricketer who had said to her: "The girls now don't know how good they've got it - because they don't have to make a choice."

© 2008 The Age

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