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Football, identity, place: The emergence of Rugby football in Brisbane

Today we accept that football in its various forms is the predominant winter sport in Brisbane; in fact, it is reasonable to state that this is true globally. This paper examines the construction of identity of Brisbane and its people through football in the colony of Queensland during the 1880s. It demonstrates the centrality of sport in this process. The struggle over the choice of football code illustrates how sport was a feature of contested social and cultural terrains and how support for a game was a source of the construction of the identity of initially Brisbane and later Queensland. The paper further illustrates the centrality of the role of sport in the cultural hegemony of British imperialism and of the predominance of the ideology of athleticism in the public schools of colonial Australia.