Overview

From an award-winning First Nations author, a ground-breaking examination of sport's troubled relationship with race, gender and sexuality. Award-winning writer Ellen van Neerven plays football from a young age, learning early on that sport can be a painful and exclusive world. The more they play, the more they realise about sport's troubled relationship with race, gender and sexuality - and question what it means to play sport on stolen, sovereign land, especially in the midst of multiple environmental crises. With emotional honesty and searing insight, van Neerven shines a light on sport on this continent from a queer First Nations perspective, revealing how some athletes have long challenged mainstream views and used their roles to effect change not only in their own realm, but in society more broadly. Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that confirms, once again, van Neerven's unrivalled talent, courage and originality.

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9780702265853

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Reviews

"'Van Neerven brings their untameable voice and critical eyes to a tour de force that captures the complex, passionate relationship First Nations people have with sport, reminding us that we fight colonisation on every front, assert sovereignty with every act, and it's family and connection to country that keep us grounded, especially when the playing field isn't even.' - Larissa Behrendt 'Sport plays a central role in Australian life, yet remains one of the final frontiers of reckoning with who belongs within it and who has been discarded in its journey towards ubiquity. This work lays bare the many unspoken threads tangled up in modern Australian sport, from relationships with bodies to relationships with land, and highlights the paradox of sport as both a liberator and exterminator of difference, as told from the perspective of a queer First Nations writer - of which this space contains so few. Splicing together personal memoir with history, journalism, and throbbing poetry, this is a crucial interjection into the myths we tell about ourselves as a sporting nation, coalescing in a new and necessary kind of sports writing.' - Samantha Lewis 'Weaving memoir, poetry and polemic, Ellen van Neerven digs up some fascinating nuggets about sports played by First Nations people on this continent pre-invasion, returning through millennia to all the thorny present-day issues of how race, gender and sexual orientation play out in sport. With their trademark vernacular ease, van Neerven coasts between elite competition and community-run sport, their love for family, country and ""the beautiful game"" shining through.' - Fiona McGregor 'Personal Score is at once an analysis of the coloniality of sport and the Indigeneity of sport. Its scope is breathtakingly vast - Ellen van Neerven weaves together the autobiographical, the historical, and the sociopolitical so expertly, and, in doing so, demonstrates a new way to write toward Indigenous freedom. Personal Score hums with the vitality and intelligence of a definitive text.' - Billy-Ray Belcourt 'Ellen van Neerven's Personal Score is many stories, fragments, memories, anecdotes and poems interleaved with meticulously researched and beautifully written histories of First Nations sport in so-called Australia. This book is a night walk, a football bouncing deftly, bodies pushed and pushing - so intricately woven it reads like a root system. Read it. Then read it again. This work is exquisite.' - Quinn Eades"

Author Information

Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage. Ellen's first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize. They have written two poetry collections- Comfort Food, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize; and Throat, which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Multicultural NSW Award and Book of the Year in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.

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