Australia's Asian Sporting Context 1920s – 30s

<p>This book examines Australia’s sporting relationships with the Asian region during the interwar period. Until now Australia’s sporting relationships with the Asian region have been neglected by scholars of Australian and Asian sports history and the broader field of Australia’s Asian context. Concentrating on the period of the 1920s and 1930s – when sporting relationships between Australia and a number of Asian nations emerged in a variety of sports – this book demonstrates the depth of these previously under-examined connections. The book challenges and complicates the broader historiography of Australia’s Asian context – a historiography that has been strongly influenced by the White Australia Policy and the Pacific War. Why for example did white Australia so warmly welcome visiting Japanese sportsmen at a time when the Pacific region appeared to be inexorably sliding into a war that was informed by racial antagonisms? </p><p>This book examines sporting relations between Australia and seven Asian countries (China Japan India Netherlands East Indies Philippines Malaya and Singapore) and a range of sports including rugby football swimming hockey boxing cricket and tennis. </p><p>This book was published as a special issue of <em>Sport in Society</em>.</p>