ABSTRACT
Marngrook, a traditional form of football played by Aboriginal nations in south-eastern Australia, offers an example of the dominance of empiricism and the reluctance to consider, let alone embrace, Indigenous perspectives. Since the 1970s, Australian historians increasingly have questioned the viability of research based in forms of empiricism and methodologies that preference documentary evidence and chronological reconstructions of the past. Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton has therefore observed that ‘most Australians do not know how to relate to Aboriginal people. The reaction against efforts to reconstruct national histories to include both the empirical-based traditions of the discipline and Aboriginal recall of the past erupted in the 1990s in what became known as the History Wars. The emergence of revisionist histories, the fallout of the History Wars, and the ongoing debates about the place of Aboriginal methods for recalling the Australian past have impacted Australian sport history.
