Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity

This extraordinary blend of cultural studies, memoir and poetry explores a broad spectrum of subjects centred around sport and identity. With their first book of nonfiction, award-winning writer Ellen van Neerven casts a wide net over subjects as varied as the history of First Nations sports, health outcomes, desire, gender, equal pay, sovereignty, climate catastrophe and more. Threaded throughout is van Neerven’s own personal history and relationship with the sport of soccer: how the game served as a conduit for their personal expression when they were a young player on Turrbal and Jagera land, and how that love was complicated by their experiences growing up as a queer, First Nations person.

I’ve always treasured great writing about sport; there’s something so hard about using words to capture wordless action. When it’s done well, it feels like magic. It would be easy to laud Personal Score for being a triumphant example of this form, with writing that lives up to the beauty of the Beautiful Game’. Van Neerven’s prose is intimate and alive, their sentences arc like a fluid pass, linking complex insights with biographical reflections. Except, as van Neerven also reminds us, ‘This is not a beautifully written book about decolonising Australian sport. This is an ugly book that was born of the ugly language I grew up hearing in this country.’

Personal Score may dazzle on the pitch, but its power lies in how it dismantles a logic and lexicon of violence – ‘beat’, ‘flog’, ‘smash’ – in order to write Indigeneity back into sport’s every aspect, from reminders of how our sportsgrounds were built on sacred sites to how current attacks on trans and gender diverse people’s participation in sports are rooted in the vicious binaries of the colonial gender project.

As the world prepares for the Women’s World Cup later this year, this book is an eloquent statement and a reminder that whatever is written about sport on these lands should be built on the recognition of what came before and still survives. As van Neerven writes, ‘As First Nations people from Australia are the oldest surviving living culture in the world, we are also the oldest living sporting culture and the oldest sportspeople in the world.’