What’s behind the AFL’s sudden insistence that the game has Indigenous beginnings? | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on Sat, 22/06/2019 - 8:00am

We should allow for the possibility of a shared history but the timing of this changed position looks opportunistic

Debate over whether Australian football has its beginnings in Indigenous Marn Grook, a ball game with an ancient continental past, is intensifying after the AFL’s sudden insistence that the Aboriginal pastime has apparently influenced the earliest official Aussie Rules code.

Welcome to the resurgence of tensions on another front of Australia’s contested past whereby colonial Australian documentation, and its omissions, is accepted by many non-Indigenous authorities to be ascendant over Aboriginal oral transfer of cultural practice.

Documentary omission – the material absence of a document - does not, of course, nullify Indigenous experience