Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sport: Sporting Literacy, Attenuated Agency, and Survivance

Abstract In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have a long history of involvement in Western sports. Many of these physical activities emanated originally from Britain, Europe, and the United States of America, and some were distinctly Australian. In order to understand this involvement, the concept of sporting literacy is introduced as a way to capture their motivations, the decision-making processes involved, the attenuated agency they possessed, and how sport was a forum for resistance used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to mitigate the power imbalances of settler colonialism. Four examples are examined – written correspondence about sporting opportunities, a strike by Aboriginal footballers, the sport of marching girls, and a rugby league competition organized by Aboriginal people. These case studies are analyzed and understood as what Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor describes as survivance stories.

colonialism for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from the authors' collective standpoint. Following the lead of Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor, sport is employed to explore how First Nations peoples responded to the power imbalances of settler colonialism. 2 The authors' standpoint is generated through a combination of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal perspectives. Dr Wheeler is a proud Ngarabal man and human movement scientist whose expertise ranges from managing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academic units in universities to working with communities about redressing inequalities in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. Dr Phillips and Dr Osmond have worked with First Nations communities stretching from Cherbourg in south-east Queensland to Torres Strait Islander communities in the north of the state to repatriate historical documents and material and, through sport, to understand the impact of colonialism on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures, and identities. Dr Wheeler offers lived experience of being an Aboriginal person in a settler colonial society, including working with the two worlds through a western-orientated health system, and assists Dr Phillips and Dr Osmond, as non-Indigenous scholars, to understand Aboriginal cultures and to walk alongside First Nations peoples to tell their stories.
The concept of sporting literacy -a combination of imperial literacy and physical literacy -is introduced as a way to capture the initiative, decision making, attenuated agency, and resistance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Four sport case studies from the state of Queensland are explored: written correspondence about sporting opportunities, a strike by Aboriginal footballers, the sport of marching girls, and a rugby league competition organized by Aboriginal people. These case studies correspond to what Vizenor describes as survivance stories, that is stories describing the presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, stories that disempower the history of settler colonialism, and stories that renounce dominance, sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry. 3

Sporting Literacy
Sporting literacy is a concept developed from two different scholarly bodies of knowledge. The first body of knowledge emerged from the work of historian Tracey Banivanua Mar, who used 'imperial literacies' as a framework to understand the resistance of Indigenous people in Tahiti, Narre Narre Warren in Victoria, Australia, and Waitangi in Aotearoa/New Zealand to settler colonialism. In the Pacific and Aotearoa/ New Zealand and to a lesser extent in Australia, she argues that settler colonialism was inextricably linked to the early missionaries who equated Christianity with civilization, and civilization with European society. Central to the proselytization of Christianity was the Bible. Indigenous peoples not only engaged with Christianity, but many also attained a level of literacy through engagement with the Bible. These skills were employed in their attempts to negotiate with settler colonial communities in both Australian and Pacific colonies. The reading and writing skills, developed through the proselytization of Christianity, created an 'imperial literacy' for Indigenous peoples, providing them with a way to circumvent local authorities through letters and petitions to the British administration. As Mar concludes: 'What emerged were shared, translocal and informed political processes that translated and communicated indigenous peoples' expectations to imperial audiences in a recognisable language' . 4 The second body of knowledge that sporting literacy draws from is physical literacy. Physical literacy is a concept, policy, and practice that has been extensively defined, widely debated, and contested in the academic discipline of Physical Education. An all-inclusive understanding of physical literacy includes the acquisition of physical skills and movement patterns over the lifespan which results in physical competencies, all-round health outcomes, psychological benefits, reduced obesity, as well as individual and collective productivity. Beyond these capacities, physical literacy is perceived to foster citizenship, nationhood, productivity, and economic growth. 5 Given the tremendous scale and scope of the benefits, it is not hard to see how the claims associated with physical literacy are vigorously debated and contested. What is downplayed in most definitions is the social, cultural, gendered, political, and racial contexts that shape physical literacy, although some scholarly attention has been given to physical literacy and Indigenous people globally. 6 In this paper, a racial lens is applied to recast physical literacy as sporting literacy to examine the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and sport.
In this way, the concept of sporting literacy is the combination of physical literacy and imperial literacy. The knowledge around physical literacy shows that a range of physical skills comprise in part, or in combination, sport. 7 Acquiring these skills, becoming proficient at them, and competing against others is not a given. People must have the capacity and want to participate, to learn, and to compete. The hurdles for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to engage in settler colonial sports that were new to them were huge. Learning to play cricket, with its unique rules, code of conduct, and skills, or football with its emphasis on passing, kicking, and tackling, or boxing with its specific form of physical body contact, required considerable initiative and determination, as well as a series of challenges. 8 Yet these hurdles were met and overcome, and Aboriginal people embraced sport because it provided access to a radically changing, unpredictable, and unknown world created by settler colonialism. 9 Imperial literacy reveals the capacities, willingness, and desires of Indigenous peoples to engage with what was available in various forms to negotiate their existence in a settler colonial world. Spoken and written literacy, as Mar demonstrates, was one such endeavour; this paper contends that sport was another. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, like First Nations peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and the United States of America, embraced modern sports as they were highly valued in settler colonial states. 10 Sport provided a language, specifically a corporeal one, that Aboriginal and settler colonials had in common. Consider, for example, that the first sporting team of any sort to leave Australian soil to compete in England was an Aboriginal cricket team in 1868. 11 This was incredible in many ways, but on other levels it was not exceptional: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples took every opportunity to learn, play, and compete in sporting competitions. Sporting literacy explains the ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia deliberately and consciously accessed sport and, like other First Nations people around the world, mobilized sport for their own agendas, providing opportunities for social mobility, status, resistance, community identity, political actions, and self-determination. 12 Of course, the nature of sporting literacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had, and continues to have, many contours. One defining feature, as suggested above, is that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples engaged in settler colonial sports: that is modern sports created in Britain and Europe, and to a lesser extent in America, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which came to Australia as part of British imperialism in the Pacific region. Australian sport, like modern sport more broadly, is 'an invention of hegemonic, Western instrumental whiteness' . 13 What is striking is the appropriation of sports with British, European, and American origins by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in ways that reflect their histories, confirm identities, enhance cultural continuity, and contribute to their popularity in the forms of All-Aboriginal Australian rules football, basketball, netball, rugby league, softball, and touch football competitions. 14 This sporting profile emerged against a backdrop of an extended history stretching over 60,000 years of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures with a complex system of traditional games played across the entire land mass. Traditional games and physical activities were specific to geographic areas; some were shared widely across the continent, many were integral to daily life, and others were tied to special ceremonies; and they were gendered, age related, and linked to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family, kinship, and culture. There has been a continuation and revival of these traditional activities, particularly in the education system. 15 At least one traditional Aboriginal activity has a strong relationship to modern settler colonial sport. Aboriginal men and boys played games where a stuffed ball made from possum skin was kicked and caught above the head. Known as 'marngrook' and played on the lands of the Mukjarrawaint people in Victoria, and by different names in other parts of Australia, scholars have made the case that these traditional games are precursors to Australian rules football. 16 For the last half century, Aboriginal players have had a very powerful presence in Australia's most popular football code. Perhaps more than any other sport, Australian rules football has been appropriated by Aboriginal communities to meet their needs, to nurture identities, and retain their histories. 17 Australian football, and to an extent rugby league, has been shaped by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to ensure continuity with cultural practices, languages, epistemologies, and ontologies in a rapidly changing world. 18 The second major contour of Aboriginal sporting literacy is the limited range of events and sports that were available. Not all sports that emerged in Australia as part of the British, European, and American sporting legacies were open to and accessible for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The team sports that were engaged with from the late-nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth century included cricket, rugby league, and Australian rules football; the individual sports included professional running (pedestrianism), boxing and, to a lesser extent, horse racing. As Tatz argued: 'When we examine Aborigines in sport it is clear that the great bulk of achievement, perhaps 90 per cent of it, has been in the "stadium sports" of boxing, professional running, [Australian] rules and league' . 19 A range of other sports -basketball, golf, rowing, rugby union, sailing, and soccer -were not as accessible for Aboriginal sportspeople until the second half of the twentieth century because of movement and residential limitations imposed by governments, social class, and status regulations maintained by some sporting clubs, and financial requirements involving equipment or fees, many of which were closely linked to the racism that defined settler colonial society. 20 In this way, a limited range of sports provided readily accessible forms of attenuated agency. ' Attenuated agency' , as historian Lynette Russell argues, recognizes the legal and social impositions of colonialism but signposts how some cultural practices and employment opportunities provided prospects to make advantageous choices, facilitated forms of freedom, and occasionally enabled some Aboriginal people to move beyond colonial dominance. 21 Boxing, cricket, football, horse racing, and professional running offered income beyond subsistence labouring wages; provided opportunities to travel and escape the confines of missions, settlements, and town camps; enabled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sportsmen to promote a racialized masculinity through sporting prowess; and generated moments of power when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sportsmen scored more runs, ran faster, or punched harder than their settler colonial opposition. 22 Sport provided a cultural space that mattered to Anglo-Australian society, a space that was specifically opened up by various settler colonial administrators, where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples made deliberate and calculated decisions to access the associated power, prestige, and finances, even if the benefits may only have been fleeting.
The third contour of Aboriginal sporting literacy is gender. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men had many more sporting opportunities than women from their communities. Tatz is not overstating the case when he uses a baseball analogy to argue: 'if white women [were] having difficulty getting to first or second base in sport then by comparison their black sisters [were] not coming within cooee of the ballpark' . 23 Australian rules football, boxing, cricket, professional running, and rugby league were encouraged, supported, and accessible for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men, but not women. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men made the most of these sporting opportunities to experience life outside missions, settlements, pastoral properties, and town camps to earn some supplementary income, and to compete on the same playing fields as setter colonials and often defeat them at their own games and sports. These sports fostered forms of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander masculinities tied to attenuated agency that remain relatively unexplored and poorly understood in the scholarly literature. 24 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women rarely enjoyed the attenuated agency available through sport. The gendered nature of settler colonial sport limited opportunities for women to modified versions of male sports, sports that were for women only, and to sports that were discontinuous and intermittently held on special occasions. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women rarely participated in football, cricket, boxing, or professional running, but some played vigoro -a modified form of cricket that was exclusively for women and was shaped by, and conformed to, notions of middle-class, settler colonial femininity. 25 Some Aboriginal women participated in another exclusively female sport, probably the largest women's sport in mid-twentieth Australia that, like vigoro, was shaped by middle-class femininity, but was distinctly militaristic. The sport was precision marching. This paper will explore the Cherbourg Marching Girls to demonstrate that agency via sport occasionally crossed the gender divide. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women also competed in school athletic events and in holiday sports held on missions, settlements, and pastoral properties in running, three-legged, sack, obstacle, hurdle, and skipping races. 26 Even considering the notable exception of precision marching, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, limited by gendered cultural practices within communities, and under the additional twin yokes of race and gender of the settler colonial world, had far fewer opportunities to participate in competitive sport. 27 Sporting literacy was also shaped by the precariousness and uncertainty of life for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The emergence and codification of modern sport in Australia during the second half of the twentieth century coincided with the draconian implementation of government legislation pertaining to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the colonies and states. A year after the Aboriginal cricket team toured England, the Colony of Victoria passed the Aboriginal Protection Act (1869) that prevented any Aboriginal person leaving the state. Such restricting legislation varied considerably throughout Australia, but it invoked the period of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history known as the Protection Era, a misleading term that referred to enhanced government control of the lives of Aboriginal people. This resulted in many Aboriginal people being forcibly removed or coerced from their traditional lands onto government settlements, religious missions, reserves, pastoral stations, and town camps, while others in more remote areas were left to fend for themselves and compete for their lands with settler colonial pastoralists. 28 The next section of the paper focusses on four case studies including written correspondence about sporting opportunities, a strike by Aboriginal footballers, the sport of marching girls, and a rugby league competition organized by Aboriginal people. These case studies vary considerably in time, place, and sports, reflecting the experiences of the authors working with communities, but together they demonstrate ways in which Aboriginal people developed sporting literacies in many contexts. These examples illustrate that even though Aboriginal lives were controlled by an increasing array of government legislation shaping where they lived and worked, how their families were constituted, who they associated with and even who they married, how they accessed limited resources, what language they spoke, and the education they received, sporting literacy was actively pursued by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to make the most of their attenuated agency, to enhance community identity, and to push back against the settler colonial world.

Clyde Combo: Bucking the System
In 1928, an Aboriginal man at the Barambah Aboriginal Settlement in southeast Queensland wrote to a senior government official proposing to arrange a rodeo in the nearby setter colonial town of Murgon. Clyde Combo's draft program for this ' Abors [Aborigines] Excitement day' included buck-jumping, cattle throwing, saddle races, a variety of other equestrian events, and a tug-of-war competition for stockmen. Writing in clear English, he proposed cash prizes for each event, noting that he had previously conducted a profitable show like this in New South Wales. He sought permission to hold the event and to access his own savings, which were held in trust, to fund the program. 29 There is nothing particularly exceptional about Aboriginal people in buckjump and roughriding competitions in eastern Australia in the early twentieth century. 30 There is, however, much that is exceptional in Combo's letter. It is a potent example of how Aboriginal people could exercise their agency in such institutions, evidence for which is hard to find in the settler colonial archive. His missive is formal, polite, and respectful, but also direct, assertive, and proactive in its appeal. Most striking, however, is Combo's decision to bypass local decision-making channels and address the  31 Aboriginal people did not live voluntarily on the settlements, but were forcibly confined there under the Act and known as 'inmates' in official parlance. They reported directly to the settlement superintendent, who controlled virtually every aspect of their lives (including their savings, as Combo's appeal attested). Attempts to circumvent the established order were frequently punished with jail sentences, other deprivations, or exile to more remote institutions. Combo's audacity in contacting Gall was risky. 32 Combo was no doubt aware of the risks but assessed these as minimal because of his circumstances, age, and physical labour skills. Settlement residents in 1928 had a variety of backgrounds. Some were elderly, sick, or indigent, fitting the 'protective' purposes of the Act. Others were young, healthy, and fit, born on or removed to the settlement for any number of possible reasons and required as labourers to help ensure the viability of the settlement. Combo was one of this latter group. Born in Brewarrina, New South Wales, around 1898, he was removed from Roma in south-west Queensland to the Taroom Aboriginal Settlement in 1911 as a thirteen-year-old. 33 He escaped in 1915 and 'turned up' in Barambah. 34 In the late 1920s he won buckjumping competitions at local sports days, 35 and in 1927 he performed as a buckjumper and bullock rider in a rodeo at Murgon staged for the silent movie 'The Romance of Runnibede' . 36 Combo's mastery of horse-and bullock-riding skills learned via his employment and his application of these in a sporting context exemplifies sporting literacy. His choice to adapt and apply these skills to competition was deliberate and intentional, made to negotiate his status as a Cherbourg man and to maximize his ability to participate in the heavily restricted settler colonial world.
Combo's request to Gall was ignored or rejected -no rodeo organized by him was reported at Murgon and there is no further correspondence on record -but his victorious appearance at a sports event at nearby Goomeri on New Year's Day in 1929 suggests he was not punished by the Barambah superintendent. His equestrian skills likely helped ensure this. The failure of his written appeal may have disappointed him at the time, but today his letter can be read as significant from the perspective of Aboriginal agency. As with the Tahitian Queen Pomare, who wrote in a 'dignified' way as an equal to her 'sister Queen' Victoria seeking British intercession against French incursions in Tahiti, Combo used the settler colonial language (English) and written mode of imperial discourse (letter) to engage with the authorities. 37 His letter was an expression of imperial literacy as conceptualized by Mar. This written appeal, together with his mastery of buckjumping, highlights Combo's proficient grasp of sporting literacy as a tool of personal agency.

Woorabinda Strike: Pausing the Game
A second example of Aboriginal sporting literacy also occurred in 1928, but in a vastly different context. This case study occurred some 500 kilometres distant, in the Woorabinda Aboriginal Settlement, and involved rugby league rather than rodeo. It also involved collective action by a group rather than efforts by one individual. Whereas Clyde Combo exemplified sporting literacy through his mastery of stock riding and his application of these skills to rodeo, the Woorabinda rugby league team demonstrated sporting literacy through striking, a calculated move based on their understanding the power of collective action, and through their use of rugby league to expand horizons through travel. What both cases have in common is the deliberate, conscious, and intentional nature of their agentic actions.
The Woorabinda footballers, who were part of the local work gang, took action on July 11, a few days after a rugby league game on the settlement against a visiting settler colonial team from Westwood. Unlike in Combo's case, the men's voices are missing. 38 Reports of the strike exist, but all accounts were written by government officials and employees and focus less on the protest action and more on internal ructions and feuds within the administration. As a result, exactly what happened and why is ambiguous. What is clear, however, is that the footballers were upset with reports that government staff and their wives as well as the shopkeeper from Woorabinda had racially abused them during the game while barracking for Westwood. They may also have harboured a grievance with the Superintendent, H.C. Colledge, for allegedly mishandling the team's funds. In any case, they ceased work, either withholding their labour for a full day or refusing to carry water to the homes of their abusers. 39 The Woorabinda Aboriginal Settlement was established in 1927 in central-west Queensland under the Act. Most people at Woorabinda were moved overland from the Taroom settlement, some 250 kilometres distant, which was then closed down. As at Barambah, conditions were strict. 40 Given the oppressive context, a strike seems improbable, and the risks to the striking footballers potentially high, yet the men escaped sanction. Several factors help explain the collective action and the centrality of sporting literacy to the men's ability to resist.
Strikes did occur at Queensland settlements and religious missions, but they were uncommon in that era. A strike happened at the church-run Yarrabah Mission in far north Queensland in 1916, but what details if any had filtered through to the southern settlements are unknown. 41 Several other strikes came later. Aboriginal workers at Foleyvale Station went on strike in 1944, two years before the property was incorporated into Woorabinda. Mass strikes occurred in the Torres Strait in 1936, and actions at both Yarrabah and Palm Island in 1957 led to the exile of organizers. 42 Where, then, did the Woorabinda footballers gain their inspiration so early on?
Despite the lack of documentation about strikes on settlements, two actions in 1916 and 1918 bear consideration. The famed Aboriginal boxer Jerry Jerome, who was Australian middleweight champion in 1912-13, was moved to Taroom in 1914 where he made clear his dissatisfaction with conditions and, specifically, the lack of proper payment for labour. In 1916 he led strike action at the settlement. The Chief Protector of Aborigines branded him a 'pernicious' influence who sought to 'obstruct discipline and defy authority' . 43 The Chief Protector's annual reports, typically sanitized accounts tabled in state parliament to promote the work of the settlements, did not refer to the incident. Two years later, however, the annual report for Barambah, Palm Island, and Taroom notes that an unnamed person was removed for 'fomenting a strike because the local race-meeting was not made the occasion for a general holiday' . 44 The specific settlement was not named, but from context it appears likely that this incident occurred at Taroom.
Many, if not all, of the Woorabinda footballers who went on strike in 1928 had lived at Taroom, and no doubt recalled these incidents. As labourers who were often contracted out to nearby farms and stations, they would also have been aware of striking as an act of collective resistance. There was a long history of strikes in the agricultural sector in the state, and Aboriginal workers had joined mass sheep shearers' strikes in the late nineteenth century. 45 By adopting strike action, which was a discursive tactic straight from the settler colonial labour playbook, the Woorabinda athletes demonstrated imperial literacy in a way not dissimilar to Combo's use of his letter.
The men's status as labourers not only gave them exposure to the prevailing industrial culture but also offered them a level of protection uncommon in most Aboriginal settlements because Woorabinda was new in 1928. As labourers, the men were essential to the development of the settlement, its farms, and its infrastructure. There was safety in numbers too: an individual agitator could be removed, but not a large group of able-bodied men at the outset of such a project. Aside from their value in physically building the new settlement, the men enjoyed special status as footballers because rugby league was emerging as a key component of image building, a means by which the government could demonstrate the success of the settlements and its protection policy. 46 In addition, officials were increasingly interested in encouraging football as a revenue-generating pursuit -travelling teams from the settlements were beginning to attract large crowds and gate takings, which for several years increased government coffers. 47 For the Aboriginal men who played rugby league, developing and maintaining sporting literacy in football was increasingly important. Rugby league provided them not only with an enjoyable recreational pursuit, but other advantages besides, including the ability to travel and mix with wider society as well as with Aboriginal people met along the way. It also reinforced their collective bargaining power, limited though it was. As a result, the men had extra incentive to hone their football skills. Men had played sporadically at Taroom, when league was still a fledgling sport in Queensland. 48 By 1928, however, they trained daily after work and played on both days of the weekend. 49 In 1927 the Woorabinda players visited the regional capital, Rockhampton, where their skills made such an impression that they were invited to tour the central west of Queensland in 1928. This tour, which took in six centres over two weeks, occurred just one month after the strike action. The fact that this tour proceeded, and was not cancelled as punishment for the strike, indicates not only safety in numbers but also the value of sporting literacy for these men.

Marching Girls: Creating a Sisterhood
Sporting literacies on a collective scale can also be read into the Cherbourg Marching Girls, three decades after Clyde Combo's actions in the same settlement and the strike at Woorabinda. Like Combo and the Woorabinda sportsmen, the young women of Cherbourg developed sporting literacies to expand the limited aperture of opportunities available to them within an Aboriginal settlement. They did this by exercising their limited agency to embrace competitive marching.
Marching Girls was a women's-only sporting movement that gained a large participation base across Australia in the middle of the twentieth century. Cherbourg sent teams of marching girls from 1957 to 1962 to local, state, and national competitions and exhibitions. 50 Marching was a sporting activity that was constructed around movements, practices, and attires that merged valorized forms of femininity in settler colonial society with the militarism that characterized the post-World War Two national fitness movement. It was a highly disciplined sport both on and off the field. Teams were evaluated on the posture and deportment of individuals and on the precision of collective movements as young women marched in military-like formations around sporting fields. None of the individual and collective movements of marching girls were part of day-to-day life at Cherbourg, and the skills to perform and succeed in this sport required planning, dedication, and regular training. These girls and their parents, whose permission was required to participate, actively pursued the sport because of the unprecedented opportunities it provided. 51 Many young women at Cherbourg jumped at the prospect of being involved and the authors are very privileged to tell the story of the marching girls through their own voices. 52 These young women actively pursued marching, with all its demands, often as a compensation for the dearth of opportunities to engage in sport. Lesley recalled: 'There was a message sent out in Cherbourg about, eh, about marching eh? I put my hand up cause all the boys they had their football they had their cricket and us girls had nothing' . Similarly, Alma wanted to even the score with her brother, who was a Scout, and would often boast about his travel: ' And he' d say "Yeah yeah, you're not going anywhere, you've gotta stay home". So, when the marching girls started, I said, "Mum I want to be a marching girl, I wanna go trip around" and you know, get excited about going from town to town' . For Beryl, who was raised in the girls' dormitory at Cherbourg, marching provided a newfound freedom: [I]t got you out of the dormitory for starters. While we were there in the dormitory, we were under rules and regulations all the time. You couldn't climb a tree without somebody saying 'I'm gonna tell […] on you' . You couldn't be a normal healthy child because you had little pimps around telling on you.
What these voices capture is how developing the sporting literacy required to be a marching girl provided young women, those raised by their families and those in the dormitory, with forms of attenuated agency to explore life inside and outside Cherbourg.
The pleasure evident in the early days of the Cherbourg Marching Girls expanded to individual and collective pride in their participation, achievements, and many successes. For Faye, 'It was an adventure for us, and it made us proud, and ya know, and it made us take pride in ourselves you know, appearance and everything like that, standing straight and tall you know, and proud, yeah. ' The pride was individual and personal, but also collective. As Alma explained: 'What we really did was we really represented Cherbourg, and that was the pride of us to go and do that so anybody can acknowledge that there were nice girls marching for Cherbourg […] We were never out of place. ' Beryl fiercely recalled the feeling that swept over the team in one competition: 'When we got out there, something just came over us. We weren't just the black fellas. We clicked our heels together, saluted. We ripped them and knocked them off their perch' . Individual pride, collective achievement, and shared histories bound the marching girls to the Cherbourg community and Aboriginal identity. 53 What these young women also describe is the sisterhood within the team and with the women of Cherbourg, who helped organize the sport, who sewed their uniforms and who accompanied them as chaperones on their trips throughout Queensland and Victoria. For Ada, 'just getting in with the girls was one of my main passions and to be part of a team because … when you were in the marching girls in a team you did everything together. I used to love the turns, the saluting, you know that's what I enjoyed most. Just being part of a team. ' These pleasures are clear in Selena's explanation: 'It was a lot of fun, it was fun for me anyway. And most of the girls that were there were people that I knew, people that I went to school with and it was just wonderful' . This sisterhood was created through relational connections to people, places, community, culture, and history. Alice's memories linked marching, community identity, and shared histories: … that's the memory that I have, beautiful memories, and […] when you think of our little team, ya know, that came from [Cherbourg], and especially where we grew up, how we grew up, eh. We came from oppression, racism, poverty, you name it, but we went on, eh, we achievers, make us feel proud, and when I think of our old people, the sacrifice that they've made for us […] that's the memories I have, yeah, beautiful.
The window for the marching girls was short, only five years, but the feelings, satisfaction, and identity formation have extended for generations. The marching girls have been celebrated for over half a century in yarning sessions, reunions, marching displays, museum exhibitions and a community book. 54 The marching girls used their experiences as competitors, and the subsequent celebrations, to maintain practices, connections, and relationships to their communities, which reveals an always-in-process continuation of Aboriginal ways of knowing and being. The joy these women continue to experience today is in relation to their connections to other Aboriginal women and to the community they were, and continue to be, part of. As Indigenous Studies scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues, 'Kin, extended family and community are important to Indigenous women because they are where social memory becomes activated through shared experiences, knowledges and remembering' . 55

Barcaldine Black and White Charity Football: Aboriginal Organization
The fourth and final case study begins concurrently with the Cherbourg Marching Girls. Like the other examples, it highlights how Aboriginal people capitalized on sporting literacies developed over time in a settler colonial sport, in this case rugby league. This example, however, differs from the others in two fundamental ways: it involves Aboriginal people who lived outside the formal confines of the government-run settlements and it showcases how Aboriginal people harnessed sporting abilities not only to play and expand opportunities but also to organize community events and contribute to civic life in ways that defied strict government policy.
Almost 40 years after the Woorabinda Aboriginal rugby league team played in the town of Barcaldine on its tour of central-west Queensland in 1928, an 'all-black' Aboriginal team competed against an 'all-white' team in the town in a charity match in 1963. 56 In the interim decades, Aboriginal rugby league teams in the state had flourished, including the settlement teams from Cherbourg, Palm Island, and Woorabinda but also non-settlement teams such as the Brisbane All Blacks and the Beaudesert All Blacks. 57 One key difference with the 1963 match in Barcaldine was that the all-black team was initiated and organized by Aboriginal players expressly to compete against an all-white team. As a self-organized event, it has more in common with the New South Wales Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout events held in the same era than it does with previous Queensland matches involving all-black teams. 58 Aboriginal players from Barcaldine, Alpha, Blackall, and Emerald were joined in 1963 by international player, Lionel Morgan, who journeyed from Brisbane, to defeat the white team 32-20. 59 Another key difference was that the match was instigated by local Aboriginal people in cooperation with the Barcaldine rugby league club. Significantly, this event in 1963 led to annual 'black versus white' matches, formally called the Barcaldine Black and White Charity Football Matches games, which were held from 1963 to 1986.
The centrality of Barcaldine to these annual events is important. The Act led to the creation not only of the government settlements and church-run missions, but also 'country reserves' . Aboriginal people on country reserves, which were mostly located close to towns throughout the state, were supervized by local protectors, usually the police. 60 In the mid-1950s, for example, in addition to the settlements and missions, 75 other areas across the state were controlled by local protectors, and in 1962 roughly 10,000 Aboriginal people lived on country reserves. 61 Barcaldine was one such area, where Aboriginal people lived initially in a camp at Lake Dolly about 10 kilometres east or closer to the town itself. 62 By the early 1960s, some Aboriginal people in Barcaldine were well integrated into the town, and some Aboriginal men played on the local rugby league team. 63 One of these men, David Thompson, whose family had lived at Lake Dolly in the 1920s, was a member of the local rugby league club. Thompson and his wife, Carrie, initiated the event as a fundraiser for the Spastic Welfare League (later the Cerebral Palsy League), supported by the local rugby league club, and made all of the arrangements themselves. 64 The event was repeated in 1964, and games were held in most years until 1986. The program extended to include other sports, parades, and social events, attracting up to 2,000 visitors annually and fundraising significant sums. Women's competitions were held in several sports, including rugby league, and groups of marching girls were sometimes organized for the parades. In their organization and variety, the Barcaldine events are unique inter-racial contests that were Aboriginal-inspired and Aboriginal-run, held in a country town and popularly supported by Aboriginal players of national standing. The showcase rugby league matches included many high-profile players such as Morgan, Arthur Beetson, and Mal Meninga. The Thompsons' son, also named David, told journalist Martin Flanagan that 'Reconciliation began in Barcaldine in the '60s, ' and that 'if you're a racist in Barcaldine, you don't have too many mates' . 65 The black versus white weekends were highly significant both for Aboriginal residents of Barcaldine and for Aboriginal people across the state. For locals, like the Thompsons, it allowed an application of their sporting literacy to civic life because the event bolstered local tourism and raised funds for charities. In recognition of this, Thompson was selected by Brisbane's Daily Sun newspaper as one of the top-10 Queenslanders in its 1983 Australia Day honours list. 66 For visiting teams, their families and their supporters, the annual event also helped translate sporting literacy accrued over time in the sport of rugby league, and other sports, into new levels of mobility and opportunity. For Aboriginal people from the settlements in particular, where the Act continued to apply, the freedom to travel was novel in the early 1960s. Perhaps more significantly, prowess in rugby league helped Aboriginal athletes buck the assimilation policy. Assimilation was a highly problematic ideology of incorporation that for Aboriginal people meant adopting settler ways -customs, language, and lifestyle -and jettisoning their own complex systems of culture, family structure, and traditional existence. 67 Assimilation was developed at both federal and state levels, with Queensland not officially implementing policies until 1965. 68 While assimilation policy allowed a gradual loosening of strict isolation and control, it also carried an expectation that Aboriginal people would integrate with non-Aboriginal sportspeople rather than form their own teams. All-black football teams, once the norm, were increasingly discouraged, especially on the settlements. In Cherbourg, for example, footballers were encouraged instead to join majority white teams from nearby Murgon. When those footballers formed their own black teams in the early 1970s, the white administrators considered this to be a backward step and banned practice on the community showground. 69 Because Barcaldine was not a government-controlled settlement, and because the Black and White matches were community-driven, government could not attempt such an intervention. While officials praised the charity dimension of the events, and the resulting civic harmony in the town, they were also wary of making such a racially segregated sporting event too visible. In 1971, the same year that the South Africa rugby union tour of Australia generated anti-apartheid protests and led to the Queensland state government instituting a month-long state of emergency, one state government official warned that the Barcaldine event, if widely promoted, would 'attract every eccentric, racial psychotic, extremist dilettante and rat bag in the Commonwealth' . 70 By 1971, however, the Barcaldine Black and White games had been running successfully for a decade, empowering Aboriginal people and demonstrating irrevocably the power of their sporting prowess and literacy.

Sport and Survivance
These representations of the Aboriginal sporting past and present -the rodeo correspondence, the footballers' strike, the marching girls, the Black and White rugby league competition -are what Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor refers to as survivance stories. Survivance is a not a new term, and has a long etymology, but it was reinvigorated and reinterpreted by Vizenor to extend well beyond the much more commonly used term, survival. Survivance encapsulates both survival and resistance. 71 Whereas survival depicts First Nations' peoples hanging on by their fingernails to tradition and identity, survivance stresses an ongoing presence and vitality of First Nations' identities depicted through literature, rhetoric, storytelling, photographs, and material culture and, as argued here, through sporting literacy. 72 Survivance allows the authors to understand and demonstrate how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were able to preserve and foster their identities even in the context of asymmetrical power relations that defined settler colonialism. Survivance facilitates storytelling about how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples contested and countered the impact of settler colonialism, how they managed the overwhelming dominance of settler colonialism while still maintaining a sense of community identity, and how First Nations peoples, as anthropologist Stephen W. Silliman argues, sought 'to change in order to stay the same' by demonstrating the capacity to both accept and elude settler colonialism. 73 Survivance enables scholarly narratives to go beyond those of dominance, tragedy, and victimhood, to go beyond recognizing First Nations peoples as merely passive subjects in their histories, and to recognize them as dynamic actors in their pasts and their futures. Finally, survivance stories diminish the ways in which 'settler states have sought to erode the sovereignty and vital presence of Indigenous peoples through constraining social narrative to promote a sense of victimry and inevitable erasure' . 74 Survivance provides a framework, or a lens, for the authors to reflect on four case studies of Aboriginal sporting life through the intersection of survival and resistance. It enables the authors to appreciate the attempts of Combo to organize a rodeo. It recognizes the imperial literacy he developed as part of a limited education to communicate his desire to organize this event, it recognizes his acumen in determining that he needed to go beyond the Cherbourg superintendent if he was to succeed, it recognizes his judgement about who could possibly respond to his request, it recognizes that he put himself at risk by writing the letter, but was probably shrewd enough to understand that his actions would not likely result in serious consequences. Survivance facilitates this understanding of Combo's letter, rather than dismissing his efforts as a failed attempt by a powerless agent in world in which he had no control.
As Combo's letter indicates, survivance allows us, as Vizenor contends, to recognize 'a sense of native presence over absence, nihility, and victimry' . 75 Survivance provides a powerful perspective to view the strike action initiated by the Woorabinda footballers. The footballers understood the value of their labour to the settlement, which needed their skills to establish the buildings and facilities at Woorabinda, they understood and appreciated striking as an act of collective resistance and bargaining, they understood that it was harder to identify and punish individuals in collective actions, they understood that there was unlikely to be long-term repercussions from their strike as exemplified by their subsequent football tour in Queensland, and they understood the incentives for Woorabinda to continue sport as a way to generate positive images and to raise income beyond government funding for the settlement. The footballers strike can be seen as one example in a long line of industrial action that has sought to address labour abuses of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
The pursual of competitive marching by the women of Cherbourg reflects the active choices made by Aboriginal people that encompassed both survival and resistance. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, marching enabled young women to temporarily escape Cherbourg by regularly travelling beyond the boundaries of the settlement, to experience the settler colonial world in ways that were impossible before this time, to develop the skills to know how to assert their rights when the opportunities arose, and to start to understand the settler colonial world and ultimately how to live outside the narrow confines of life on the settlement. Some 60 years later, the marching girls continue to be a survivance story. While their lives have moved in many directions since their marching days, these women continue to strengthen the ongoing sisterhood developed in their teens through commemorative events, reunions, yarning sessions, museum displays, and a recent book. In doing so, they actively facilitate and nurture connections to their history, culture, and identity.
The marching girls, and the remaining case study of the Barcaldine Black and White Charity Football Weekend, epitomize the ways that 'the practices of survivance create an active presence, more than the instincts of survival, function, or subsistence' . 76 The Barcaldine Black and White Charity Football Weekend was a two-decadelong, inter-racial contest that was Aboriginal-inspired and Aboriginal-run, popularly supported by settler colonial and Aboriginal Queenslanders alike, and respected for its fundraising efforts and the sporting tourism it provided for a whole region. The Thompson family utilized the relative autonomy they possessed in Barcaldine free from the restrictions imposed by government-run Aboriginal settlements, like Cherbourg, to organize an event that contradicted the assimilationist policies of the Queensland government. They understood the role this event played in attracting Aboriginal peoples from afar and from the nearby settlement of Woorabinda, and they understood that it was an event celebrating Aboriginal identities much like other sporting events organized and managed by Aboriginal entities in other parts of Australia at the same time.
The stories of the rodeo correspondence, the footballers strike, the marching girls, and the Black/White rugby league competition epitomize the sporting literacy developed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This sporting literacy -not just playing sport, but making active decisions to participate, to learn, to compete, to challenge, and to organize -demonstrate a strategy adopted by Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders to maintain their connections to their history, culture, and identity. These are sporting examples of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander survivance that sit alongside strong traditions of art, literature, storytelling, music, and dance.