ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the period of protectionism, where the historiography is slim, when sporting opportunities were stifled following the establishment of missions and settlements. Participation in sport by Australia’s Aboriginal people has been shaped by social, cultural and political forces often well beyond their control. Policy for Australian Aboriginal people has been characterised as an era of normalisation. Technologies of normalisation achieve their objective by first isolating anomalies and then normalising them, through the deployment of ‘corrective or therapeutic procedures, determined by other technologies’. Prior mobilisations of sport as a means of ‘caring’ for Indigenous Australians is instructive for contemporary sport organisations and physical educators who are enmeshed in various national iterations of Australia’s ‘close the gap’ strategies. While many dimensions of Aboriginal culture, such as Indigenous languages, were decimated during the period of institutionalisation, traditional games, in a similar way to corroborees, were encouraged as acceptable expressions of Aboriginal culture.
