Towards a Pre-History of Disability Sport in Victoria, Australia

Abstract

The history of disability sport is an emerging field. However, much of the work in this area has tended to focus on celebratory accounts of the Paralympics. Accordingly, what is needed are histories that focus on the experiences of individual athletes that avoid the trope of positioning them as ‘tragic’ figures rescued from lives of misery. At issue are narratives of empowerment, progress and agency. This paper responds to this challenge with a ‘pre-history’ of formal wheelchair sporting contests in the Australian state of Victoria. By following the stories of two people who would become, among other things, paraplegic athletes in the 1950s and beyond, it provides a rare local story of the individual, medical and sporting worlds that came together to provide the foundations for the development of formal wheelchair sport. While the narrative of this paper has elements of the traditional celebratory tale of progress, it also points to the agency of the individuals and to the complexities of the medical worlds that they encountered–worlds that could hinder, as well as help facilitate, their recovery. As such this paper also provides something of an exploratory meeting place between the history of sport and the history of medicine.