Sport in Australia: A Social History - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521071356 ISBN 13: 9780521071352

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Synopsis

This is the first single-volume book to deal comprehensively with Australia's sporting life. It covers the history of a range of individual sports in Australia, including cricket, horse-racing, netball, rowing, tennis, lawn bowls, swimming, surfing, and the various football codes. The book demonstrates the central role of sports in Australian popular culture and shows the ways in which sports reflect changing Australian society.

About this title

Book Description

This book is an exciting survey of Australia's sporting life. It deals comprehensively with the history of a range of individual sports in Australia, including cricket, horse-racing, netball, rowing, tennis, lawn bowls, swimming and surfing and the football codes. It demonstrates the central role of sport in Australian popular culture and shows the ways in which sport reflects changing Australian society.

Review

"...a very effective and entertaining panorama of Australians at play. ...an excellent introduction into the study of sport history and, more specifically, Australian sporting culture. The editors should be congratulated for their judicious selection of authors, the use of flexible guidelines rather than fitting each history into a formula, and their ablility to create a broad social history into which each individual sport can position itself comfortably. The book should appeal to a wide variety of readers and will certainly encourage students of sport history to persue their passion with renewed vigour." Canadian Journal of History

"By giving the reader a comprehensive look at the wide variety of sports played in Australia, this anthology is more than a straightfoward history. The book makes its contribution not by its compilation of names and facts, but rather by situating various sports within the sociocultural context." Choice

"...a very handsome book that is as satisfyingly substantial as a well-balanced bat....full of the kind of insights that belie the ironclad stereotypes and comfortable assumptions to which sport in Australia is so vulnerable....Sport in Australia makes a telling contribution towards subverting, in Stoddart's words, 'the stereotyped prejudice against sport as an unflinchingly physical preoccupation with no reference to the more cerebral aspects of life'." Times Literary Supplement

"This book is another important contribution to the growing body of literature on sport in Australia, which has become increasingly prominent in the last several years....'Sport in Australia: A Social History' is a publication of high quality and well worthy of the attention of scholars beyond Australia." Katharine Moore, Sport History Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0521071356
• ISBN 13: 9780521071352
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 364
• Editor: Vamplew Wray, Stoddart Brian