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High School Sports Houses as Identity Primers Constructing Queensland and Australian Identities1.60 MB
Published VersionCC BY-NC-ND V4.0, Open Access
Journal article
High School Sports Houses as Identity Primers: Constructing Queensland and Australian Identities
Journal of Australian studies, Vol.48(3), pp.380-395
2024
Appears in UniSC Supported Open Access Outputs
Abstract
Sport plays an important role in the conception of Australian national identity. Much of the scholarly work on this topic has concentrated on professional, high-profile sports and athletes. In this article, we draw attention to a highly symbolic aspect of popular sporting culture—school sports houses—and the prominent historical figures and motifs that they project through their team names, mascots and colours. School sports houses are potent examples of banal nationalism, whereby elements of Australianness are reinforced through the tradition of school athletics and swimming carnivals. Here, we highlight the overlap between the school-based agenda of encouraging group identity and the broader notion of the nation as an imagined community. Using a comprehensive dataset of Queensland high school sport houses in 1969 and 2023, we observe several trends, such as the persistence of houses named after colonial explorers and the disparity between houses with women’s and men’s namesakes. We consider the role of school sports houses as “identity primers”, or scripts, that encourage schoolchildren to identify with specific historic figures, landforms, animal totems, character traits and other qualities as indicators of the region and nation in which they live.
Details
- Title
- High School Sports Houses as Identity Primers: Constructing Queensland and Australian Identities
- Authors
- Amy Clarke (Corresponding Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and SocietyKate Kirby (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and Society
- Publication details
- Journal of Australian studies, Vol.48(3), pp.380-395
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Date published
- 2024
- DOI
- 10.1080/14443058.2024.2369510
- ISSN
- 1835-6419; 1444-3058
- Copyright note
- © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
- Data Availability
- The data set associated with this paper is not currently publicly available due to ongoing research privacy and human ethics requirements. The corresponding author will consider individual requests to access the data set upon contact by email.
- Organisation Unit
- School of Law and Society; Sustainability Research Cluster
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 991043998902621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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