It’s time we draft Aussie Rules to tackle Indigenous mathematics

This is the first of a three part series addressing the educational implications of Indigenous concepts of space, written by Christine Nicholls and first published in The Conversation.

When discussing how to embed Indigenous Australian knowledge and practices into the Australian national curriculum effectively – particularly the maths curriculum – there’s no better place to start than analysing our own distinctively Australian national sport: AFL, the winter game.

Why, you might ask. Well, have you ever wondered why Indigenous players frequently excel at Aussie Rules, where they are vastly over-represented in the national AFL competition?

In populist discourse, the exceptional ability of some Indigenous players is frequently ascribed to “natural talent”. This is actually a soft racism, uncomfortably akin to the Social Darwinism expressed via the now-infamous “ape” comment directed at a gifted Indigenous player during a recent AFL match.

The interrelated concepts of “natural ability” and “genetic endowment” are ultimately furphies, because they fail to take into account learned cognitive factors routinely brought into play by some Indigenous AFL players – and the hard work that goes into their success.

Elite footballers aside …

This apparently remarkable aptitude on the AFL field is readily observable in matches between groups of young Aboriginal men who live in Australia’s remote rural communities.

Throughout most of the 1980s and into the early 1990s I lived and worked, mostly as school principal, in such a desert community, the Warlpiri settlement of Lajamanu in the Tanami Desert about half way between Alice Springs and Darwin. Along with other community members, I revelled in watching the home games, in which young Warlpiri men played dashing, thrilling football.

The seemingly superhuman exploits of the youthful, although mighty – according to local graffiti – Lajamanu Swans, who played electrifying footy in their bare feet on a dusty and grassless “oval”, a circular tract of rock hard red earth, is something I’ll never forget.

Even smaller kids frequently showed outstanding skill in their capacity to grab hold of an airborne Sherrin flying from any direction whatsoever, while running at full pelt, and in their ability to find a passage through a narrow corridor, and in the finely tuned accuracy of their near-vertical jumps.

In what ways might Indigenous youths’ early childhood learning experiences and socialisation patterns lead to greater-than-average success in the game of AFL? Before attempting to answer this question, it is necessary to identify what makes the Australian game unique as a game of football.

How AFL stands apart

Unlike other football codes AFL does not have an offside rule, making it a multi-directional sport.

Moreover, it takes place on a very large oval-shaped field, requiring of players 360° of spatial consciousness, with the need to update and re-align oneself in space continuously, with split-second judgement and timing. The requirement of 360° spatial cognisance and responsiveness, a byproduct of the no-offside rule, is arguably AFL’s most salient feature, differentiating it from other football codes.

Indeed, one of AFL’s two major antecedents is an Indigenous Australian game with demonstrable kinship connections to today’s AFL (the other one is Irish Gaelic football). As the late Paddy Patrick Jangala, the first professional Warlpiri linguist, attested in the Warlpiri Dictionary Project in 1987:

Purlja, ngulaji yangka kalalu ngurrju-manu nyurruwiyi wita japujapupiya wampanajangka, wirrijijangka, manu janganpajangka wirrijijangka yumurrujangka. Ngulaji kalalu panturnu kankarlarrakari ngulakalalu puuly-mardarnu manu kalalunyanu warru kujurnu yapangku. Yarlpurrukurlangumiparlu. Yangka purljangkaji manyungka.

[Purlja is a small ball, which they used to make in the old days from string spun from wallaby fur and from possum fur. They used to kick it up in the air and then grab hold of it and throw it around to each other. Only age-mates (yarlpurrukurlangu) played on the same team. That is when they played with the “purlja”.]

So, for what precise reasons do so many Indigenous players find the 360° attribute of the game to be such a good fit, in cognitive terms? Traditional Aboriginal mathematical systems are largely founded upon spatial relationships rather than on numbers, which is the case in Australia’s dominant culture.

Parts 2 and 3 will be published in Passive Complicity on Monday and Tuesday