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Fighting whose corner? Boxing, the sports press and the Australian imagination

This paper interrogates the sports press as a popular cultural site in which the representational politics of the (post)colonial nation are articulated. Drawing upon elements of critical approaches to ‘race’ and ‘whiteness’ we are interested in how the cultural narratives that inform (post)colonial Australian nationhood are articulated and reproduced within the sports press in unique and contingent ways. We take impetus from Turner's identification of media as ‘among the most important sites for interrogating the work of representing the nation, assessing its effects and interests, and revealing its ideological and political determinants’. Within the context of an historical moment characterized by the (re)assertion of ‘paranoid nationalism’, we centre on press coverage of the Anthony Mundine–Danny Green boxing match of May 2006. Coverage asserted oppositional evocations of national citizenry embodied by the two fighters. Specifically, the Anglo-Australian Green was constructed as embodying the idealised virtues of a white masculinity – the archetypal ‘aussie battler’. Aboriginal-Muslim Australian Mundine, meanwhile, was framed as the embodiment of an ‘un-integrated other’. Through bio-racial subtexts and suggestions of his devious opportunism, his longstanding political dissent was silenced and white Australia located as ‘victim’. Such framings point to the re-anchoring of a particular, valorised white-Anglo, masculine Australianess and, critically, provide a denouement to challenges to that authority.