Golf Dreaming: An Aboriginal perspective of golf

All of my work across the past thirty years has been driven with a desire to unearth and explore little known areas of Aboriginal history. Aboriginal sporting involvement is one of those areas that for such a long time period was hidden from view. Today our history remains a giant jigsaw puzzle with many of the pieces missing.

My recent book Golf Dreaming is my latest attempt to place another missing piece into that Aboriginal history jigsaw puzzle. I grew up in the Newcastle suburb of Adamstown — the location had an influence on my two earlier books on Aboriginal jockeys and Aboriginal soccer players. Across the road was Broadmeadow racecourse where my father, Merv, was a top Koori jockey and, in close proximity, the Adamstown Rosebuds soccer club that led me to become a first-grade soccer player aged seventeen. Only three blocks away, at the back of our house, was the Merewether Golf Club established in 1933. In the summer, aged about seven, I would spend my time with mates swimming in the club dams and collecting golf balls to sell back up at the clubhouse. Newcastle racecourse also had a nine-hole course in the middle of the track that I started to frequent from about the age of twelve and belted balls around the course.

Sport: a documented past-time

Aboriginal culture was always a sporting culture. Aboriginal people played traditional games that were all about teaching skills, building athleticism and stamina—all attributes integral to a hunting and gathering lifestyle. These games were taught and encouraged from a very young age. Anthropologist Herbert Basedow compared the Aboriginal focus on strict principles of sporting behaviour to the regimentation of the Spartans of ancient Greece (Basedow, 1925: 87).

Missionary Lancelot Threlkeld noted in 1834 that Aboriginal people of the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie region of New South Wales were encouraged to practise sporting contests and games from a very young age: ‘children practice, in sport, the attack and defence, using a piece of bark of a gum tree for a shield, and small grass stems for spear’ (Gunson, 1974:68).

Convict artist Joseph Lycett captured the strict discipline incorporated by Aboriginal people in their sporting pursuits. These sporting contests captured the fitness and practised skills of the Aboriginal participants: ‘The sporting games were obviously much enjoyed by all members of the tribal group – in Lycett’s image, women and children are sitting on the side-lines cheering on their favourite participants’ (Maynard, 2014: 60).

Marngrook & witch-a-witch

There are countless early settler accounts and observations of the physical health and fitness of Aboriginal people across the country.

My own people, the Worimi of New South Wales, were recorded and noted for their health and imposing physical attributes. An observer of the Aboriginal people of Coal River (Newcastle) in 1827 remarked upon their imposing physical presence: ‘You seldom see a black under five feet eight or nine inches. I have seen them about six feet four in height’.

Robert Dawson at Port Stephens observed the agility and speed of the local Worimi people – ‘they go up the largest and tallest tree with great facility’ – and he noted ‘their quickness is astonishing’ (Dawson, 1830: 68). Aboriginal people played forms of football, most famously a game in Victoria called marngrook that many claim is the origin of today’s popular Australian rules football game (Nicholson, Stewart, De Moore & Hess 2021:65-69). But the precedents for golf haven’t been explored before.

Anthropologist Walter E. Roth recorded in his studies in Queensland that Aboriginal people ‘played a sort of golf but without clubs. There was only one hole, and that was a pit, guarded by a cross bunker in the form of a net.’ The game involved throwing a bone ‘from a prodigious distance, and to hole in one’. Roth recorded another throwing ball game that was played ‘with a leather ball, bound with hard twine, not vastly different in its component parts from the earliest golf balls’. Roth revealed another game involving a boomerang that was not about making it come back but instead to make it ‘fall directly on an agreed spot marked with a peg in the ground’, a target much like a golf flag on the green. Another version of an Aboriginal golf game was recorded in Victoria:

They played a game that looked like golf, but which they called ‘witch-a-witch’. Shaping a knob of wood like a long hen’s egg, they split it at one end and fastened therein a piece of stick from the prickly bush and made soft by working in the ashes. This handle was about 18 in. long, and when everything was ready the young men would gather and choose a suitable piece of ground. They would then swing the contrivance over their heads striking it on the ground in a sloping direction. If the stroke were well executed the ‘witchie’ would rebound to a height of about 20ft, shooting like a comet for about 200 to 300 yards. After each had had his throw, the lot would wander about like golfers, looking for their ‘witchies’. When they were found they would repeat the performance.

Register News, Adelaide, 1929: 7; Australasian (Melbourne), 1944:30

Four Aboriginal men play golf on the Wallaga Lakes Golf Course, located on the South Coast of New South Wales in 1936. Supplied by author.

Golf, caddying & resting places

Ray Kelly, John Maynard FAHA & Bilum Henry pose for a photo after a day of golfing. Supplied by author.

The aftermath of 1788 had a cataclysmic impact on traditional Aboriginal sporting games and health and well-being. Aboriginal people across the greater part of the twentieth century were denied access to participate in the majority of introduced sporting games. Golf was closed off: first you had to gain admittance to a golf club and second be able to afford a set of clubs. However, one path that provided access to golf clubs, as well as gaining some income, was caddying.

NSW Golf Course at La Perouse has a long history of Aboriginal caddies on the course dating back to the 1920s. Stewarts Island at Nambucca Heads on the north coast of NSW is another, where a number of prominent Aboriginal men worked as caddies when they were boys, including Gary Foley, Gary Williams and Uncle Rob Bryant (Interviews, conversations Gary Foley, Gary Williams, Rob Bryant 1922-1923). Uncle Rob passed away recently but in an interview with me recalled acting as a caddy on the course where he was paid 2/6 (two shillings and sixpence) for the round and given a drink of lemonade. He said he would head back to Cook’s Bellwood Store for a bag of lollies.

One historical highlight is from the NSW Aboriginal community at the Wallaga Lake Mission they were encouraged by the manager to construct their own golf course during the 1930s. They even cut and shaped their own clubs from hard wood. The manager was obviously a golf nut. A visitor from the Royal Sydney Golf Course said the course and location was stunning. Sadly, when the manager moved and was replaced by another manager, he abruptly informed them there would be no golf and it disappeared from history and memory (Nowra Leader, 1936: 4; Smiths Weekly, 1936: 4.).

There are numerous golf courses around the country that contain Aboriginal burial sites. Stewarts Island at Nambucca Heads has a prominent sign post highlighting the location of a burial site on the course. Rottnest Island Golf Course in Western Australia is another with a signposting of an Aboriginal burial site. Royal Sydney Golf Course is reputedly the location of the burial of two prominent Aboriginal men, Bungaree and Ricketty Dick.

We have had some top golfers over the last fifty years including Scott Gardiner who qualified for the USA PGA Tour in 2012 teeing it up with the likes of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. May Chalker was a top female player in WA during the 1970s and 1980s. She was the state captain and was also a winner of the State Singles and Fourball Championship. Ash Barty our former tennis champ is also a top golfer and plays off four.

Undertaking this study and writing the book was an exciting initiative. I have only briefly touched on some of the stories in this summary that highlight the historical background to the interest in golf by Aboriginal people today.

Golf Dreaming: An Aboriginal Social, Political, Cultural and Historical Perspective of Golf by Emeritus Professor John Maynard FAHA is out now with Fairplay Publishing.

The post <i>Golf Dreaming</i>: An Aboriginal perspective of golf appeared first on Australian Academy of the Humanities.