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The policy of assimilation of Aboriginal people in Australia had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. The Australian states, which were primarily responsible for Aboriginal affairs, adopted many different forms of assimilation. In Queensland, assimilation was predominantly carried out through the extensive system of missions and settlements that the state had heavily invested in since the late colonial era. This paper examines the role of extra‐curricular activities, particularly sport, that emerged out of Queensland's Aboriginal institutions in the government‐driven strategies to promote assimilation. The focal point is the women's only sport of Marching Girls and the marching teams that were formed at the government settlement of Cherbourg, north‐west of Brisbane. Using spatial history and document analysis, the Marching Girls are a case study to examine the complexity of assimilation as the policy was filtered through the Queensland government apparatus, to investigate the intersection between sport, gender and assimilation, and to explore how women's participation in extra‐curricular activities provides insights into the assimilation project at local, state and even national levels.

Australian sports historiography, in privileging Western, reconstructionist approaches to narrating histories of Aboriginal sport, has overlooked Indigenous research methodologies that privilege Aboriginal voices. This paper adopts the Indigenous research methodology of yarning in a collaborative project with former sportswomen from the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement in Queensland. Yarning, as a culturally respectful way of eliciting memories and valuing expression of Indigenous voices, was used to explore their experiences, memories and meanings of competitive marching, a popular sport for young women in mid‐twentieth century Australia. The yarning sessions revealed insights into sport that are missing from the empirical, archival record, and allowed the exploration of agency and autonomy, acts of resistance, and complex intersections of nostalgia and trauma. This paper offers specific and broader insights on sport in Australian Indigenous communities and on the entanglement of the sporting past with the histories and politics of race and gender in Queensland. In repositioning researcher and researched in Aboriginal sport history, this paper demonstrates the potential of transformative narratives about the experiences of Indigenous Australians.

This article examines the political economy of one of Australia's prominent football codes: Rugby League. A Marxist-influenced political economy approach is used to emphasize processes of domination, subordination, and resistance in the production and reproduction of power relations within capitalist sporting relations and structures. Analysis, framed around the concepts of MediaSport and the media sport cultural complex, shows how Rugby League is bound up in both national and global media processes. Key areas under examination include the historical development of the commodification of Rugby League, the growth of the media sport cultural complex, the role of pay television and the control of Rugby League vested in the transnational company News Corporation, and the supporter resistance to corporate media control in the sport.

This study uses figurational theory to analyse the articulations between standards of violence control and commodification in Australian rugby league between 1970 and 1995. It is argued that the interdependent social processes of violence regulation and commodification cannot be reduced to a simple cause-and-effect mechanism. Instead, it is imperative to comprehend that myriad social processes interweave to produce fluctuating standards of violence. The major social processes that are addressed include TV, technization, surveillance technologies, judicial structures, negative and positive feedback cycles, marketing and tension-balance.

This article compares the Golden Girls of Sport calendar, which was ostensibly launched to provide Australian women competing in the 1996 Olympic Games with greater access to the media, with a special issue of black+ white magazine, titled The Atlanta Dream, which featured Australian men and women competitors at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. The two publications are analysed in the context of gender theory, with particular focuses on the social construction of gendered bodies and the different ways that femininity and masculinity are represented in the mass media.

Metrics, and increasingly altmetrics, are a pervasive aspect of academic life. A proliferation of digital tools available have seen greater emphasis on the quantification of the 'performance' of individual journals. Although metrics and altmetrics are justified in terms of increased accountability and transparency, there are significant inequities in the ways they are deployed. Key among these is the unsuitability of many popular metrics for assessing publications in the humanities and social sciences, as the data, algorithms and systems which support them cater to authorship and citation practices of the various science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. These issues are amplified for journals in the sociology of sport, which publish research by humanities and social science scholars whose work is quantified according to the standards of the health science departments in which they frequently work. In this discussion, we critically examine how common forms of metrics and altmetrics, including those produced by Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Altmetric.com, are applied to available sociology of sport journals. We analyse and critique how different metric algorithms produce variable measures of performance for each of the journals in the field and reveal how other information available on these databases can augment our understanding of the sociology of sport publishing ecology. Far from advocating the value of metrics and altmetrics, our analysis is intended to arm scholars and journals with the information required to critically navigate the entanglement of metrics and altmetrics with neoliberalism, audit culture and digital technologies in universities.

This paper investigates the relationship between self‐determination and sport through the exploits of the Brisbane All Blacks, an Aboriginal rugby league football club established in Brisbane after the Second World War. When the club was formed, the government policy of "Protection," which legalised the forced removal of Aboriginal peoples to government settlements, was giving way in Queensland to the policy of assimilation. Aboriginal people in Brisbane, including members of the Brisbane All Blacks, were expected to renounce their Aboriginality under the assimilation policy and culturally absorb into white society. Oral history and archival research show, however, that the Brisbane All Blacks actively pushed back against these expectations. The footballers strategically navigated their settler colonial environment in ways that allowed them to exploit the assimilation policy for their own needs and purposes. The All Blacks' football activities and associated Boathouse dances facilitated the emergence of a distinctly Aboriginal community in Southeast Queensland. This community demonstrated a sense of pride and empowerment, as well as forging strong social networks, which enabled Aboriginal initiatives in the following decades. The All Blacks are a meaningful example of self‐determination by Aboriginal peoples before formal self‐determination emerged federally on the political landscape or internationally at the United Nations.