Connecting patterns and places of sport history and heritage in Queensland

Sport heritage is a growing concern for heritage professionals worldwide. As Colin Tatz observes, “sport has its rules, rituals, idioms, codes, ethics, heroes and memories – in short, its own cultures.”  Sport relates to cultural heritage, which UNESCO defined in 1972 as “a diversity of values including symbolic, historic, artistic, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological, scientific and social significance.”  In this presentation, Kate Kirby looks beyond the role of sport in service to the nation, and prioritises regional and local experiences. Approaches adopted in this research include prosopography, microhistory and analysis of open-access digital datasets.

Image: courtesy Kate Kirby