Decades of expansion for Whyalla were followed by decades of contraction. Whyalla has seen optimism and idealism but also, if not despair, then its close neighbours, alienation and apathy.
Before the AFL, there was the much better, much cooler, much more local SANFL.
heatherw/flickr
Footy isn’t just the dominant spectator sport and topic of conversation in South Australia. It’s a salve.
Marcoo was a 1.4 kilotonne ground-level nuclear test carried out at Maralinga in 1956. The contaminated debris was buried at this site in the 1967 clean-up known as Operation Brumby.
Author provided
History is writ large in the remote areas around Woomera and the Nullarbor: from the fossils of microscopic, cell-like creatures to ancient stone tools to the deitrus of rocket tests and the painful legacy of the Maralinga atomic blasts.
Chris Wallace (centre) in 1966 with brother Ron and father Arch.
Chris Wallace
Since his ascendancy, the currently trim and muscular-looking Malcolm Turnbull has – for an Australian prime minister – had unusually little to say about sport.
Whichever way you look at it, Australian rules football makes a clear difference for the better in people’s lives.
AAP/Joe Castro
Until we see a marked change in the stories that are told, together with a shift from inclusion to social justice, the national story of Australian sport will remain very, very white.
The Papunya elders who organised the event were less concerned about their team winning and more about ensuring each community got a fair go.
Barry Judd
Public policy no longer requires the imprimatur of the Aboriginal people; Aboriginal participation in the decisions taken about their lives is negligible.
The climate is startlingly complex, as is the immune system.
Pilottage/Flickr
Never has the Anzac tradition been more popular and yet never have its defenders been more chauvinistic, bellicose and intolerant of other viewpoints.
What is obscured in our understanding of returned servicemen’s problems is the private pain of families who bear the brunt of these psychological strains.
AAP/Dan Himbrechts
Australia has continually faced a returned soldier crisis. This is something that marked men returning from all the wars of modern memory – from the Great War to Afghanistan and Iraq.
A ‘view from tower’ reveals the long rows of huts at Holsworthy internment camp, where Germans were interned during the First World War.
Paul Dubotzki/Dubotzki Collection
Research Fellow, Institute for Health & Sport, member of the Community, Identity and Displacement Research Network, and Co-convenor of the Olympic Research Network, Victoria University