Perfect Score

• This is an ugly book that was born of the ugly language I grew up hearing in this country.
• This book is me scratching my way out of the scrap of the schoolyard, just trying to stay alive.
• Review: Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity – Ellen van Neerven (UQP) Weaving together race, Indigeneity, sports, sexuality, gender, class and Country, they offer something no sport historian has.

Prominent and personal Black sporting moments

• The sporting field as a site has offered many iconic moments for mob, both in victory and as victims of racial violence visited upon us – from spectators, selectors, and sporting clubs and associations.
• And with Aboriginal men’s innumerable, yet memorable, defiant stances against racism in both rugby league and Aussie rules.
• Van Neerven doesn’t visit those familiar iconic moments.
• Instead, they take us into the private moments they’ve experienced as a soccer player and as a queer non-binary Blackfulla growing up in Brisbane.

Strategising survival on the sporting field

• In reading their story, I felt perhaps I had missed something in not loving the game like they do.
• Van Neerven most powerfully demonstrates their skills – as a writer and soccer player – in the chapter titled “Skills”.
• And van Neerven honours Black theorising throughout the text, as they make sense of survival, sovereignty and sporting fields.
• With Perfect Score, van Neerven reminds us that sport, for Blackfullas – pre- and post-1788 – has never been just for recreation.