Article

Abstract

Australian Aboriginal boxer Adrian Blair was one of three Indigenous Australians to compete in the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. To that point, no Indigenous Australians had ever participated in the Olympics, not for want of sporting talent but because the racist legislation that stripped them of their basic human rights extended to limited sporting opportunities. The state of Queensland, where Blair lived, had the most repressive laws governing Indigenous people of any state in Australia. The Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement, a government reserve where Blair grew up as a ward of the state, epitomized the oppressive control exerted over Indigenous people. In this article, we examine Blair’s selection for the Olympic Games through the lens of government legislation and changing policy toward Indigenous people. We chart a growing trajectory of boxing in Cherbourg, from the reserve’s foundation in 1904 to Blair’s appearance in Tokyo sixty years later, which corresponds to policy shifts from “protection” to informal assimilation and, finally, to formal assimilation in the 1960s. The analysis of how Cherbourg boxing developed in these changing periods illustrates the power of sport history for analyzing race relations in settler colonial countries.