According to the Yugambeh people, one of many Aboriginal groups in Australia, only two relationships matter in life: Our relationship with the land and our relationship with other human beings.
For non-binary Mununjah Yugambeh and Dutch writer Ellen van Neerven, this foundational belief has complicated their relationship to sports, for not only are most games played on First Nations’ Land, but many athletes carry a slew of discriminatory attitudes about race, class, gender and identity into every competition.
Personal Score, a collection of more than 40 essays, parses the many issues that arise for both professional and amateur athletes while simultaneously championing the elation that comes from teamwork. In addition, the book provides a concise but searing indictment of the multiple ways that white settlers have erased Indigenous history from the dominant narrative and have sidelined the contributions of Indigenous people from official accounts.
Unsurprisingly, this has extended from agriculture, to healing, to sports.
Growing up, van Neerven’s game of choice was football [called soccer in the U.S.] which they played from the time they were seven until physical health problems made it impossible to continue. Throughout, they were keenly aware of anti-Aboriginal racism and its intersection with other forms of bigotry.
Their awareness of personal vulnerability, they write, came early, with an understanding that danger was ubiquitous and came from homophobic teammates as well as laviscious coaches.
Call if a double whammy, with 41 percent of female athletes telling investigators that they had been sexually abused “within the sports environment.”
Add in heterosexism–the fear of many female athletes that they will be “smeared” as lesbians– and the situation for players like van Neerven was further compounded. In Gender Police, they offer a deeply-felt reflection on adolescent angst. “My body wasn’t like the white girls. It was thick, dark. It wasn’t normal. I began to feel monstrous. I started shaving and waxing and made an effort to be more feminine but I found that there was always something that stopped me from being accepted. That game I wasn’t going to win.”
Later, as their feminist consciousness developed, they assessed the damage of exclusion and noted that it extended beyond football. “As a young Murri, queer person growing up in Queensland, they write in Bookmarks, “I felt a deep psychological shadow on my being. I did not see anyone who represented me on television, in movies, or in books. I didn’t understand the strange alienation I felt as one of very few Indigenous students at my school, even though I was part of such a strong culture and lineage to Southeast Queensland, my ancestral home.”
Activism ultimately helped them feel less disconnected and gave them a way to link indigenous wisdom about land stewardship, climate change, and the intersection between disrespect for women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and descendants of the nation’s first inhabitants, into a coherent ideology.
The mix is potent. Overall, Personal Score is a powerful, poetic homage to Indigenous foreparents that merges personal and political stories with a vital history of exploitation and domination. Moreover, the essays are a painful look into racial and gender hierarchies and the ways they continue to impact culture and social relations–and not just in Australia.
Personal Score is a powerful, poetic homage to Indigenous foreparents that merges personal and political stories with a vital history of exploitation and domination.
There is abundant fury and righteous anger here. There is also practical advice. In How to Play Sport on Indigenous Land, van Neerven offers recommendations: Recognize that most parks and sports grounds were originally Aboriginal camps; make athletics available to everyone regardless of immigration, disability, or economic status; implement water conservation measures; respect the diverse sentient beings with whom we live; and consistently promote gender equity and global human rights.
They’re sound suggestions. Nonetheless, I closed Personal Score with questions about van Neerven’s Dutch heritage [paternal] and wondered why some of the essays use the first person and others the third. That said, van Neerven, born in 1991, is clearly a writer to heed. Theirs in an incisive voice, provocative, wise, and radical.
“This is an ugly book born of the ugly language I grew up hearing,” they write in Pregame. “This book is my scratching my way out of the scrap of the schoolyard…This book is reflective of the fact violence does not exist as a binary and we are all capable of causing harm as well as receiving it.”
To its credit, Personal Score does not offer platitudes or simple solutions to vexing social problems. Instead, it calls out bad behavior–individual and collective–and reminds us that we can and should do better.
Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity
Essays by Ellen van Neerven
Two Dollar Radio
April 2024.
