Sport and visuality

The image appeared on the front page of the Sunday Age the next day, quickly causing controversy, and subsequently became an iconic, culturally important Australian sporting image. The original ‘image’, in the sense of its visual representation on a surface, has assumed particular importance in the context of changing Australian attitudes to sport, discrimination, race, and racism, and played a significant role in wider political, cultural, and social debate. The Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, for example, in the 1860s wrote two spectacular melodramas, one with a scene centred round the Derby and the other on the Oxford–Cambridge boat race, deploying theatrical technology stagecraft to demonstrate a response to the effects of modernity on male bodies. Studies of sport and visuality are rapidly increasing and now appear in a wide range of journals and books. International conferences on the sporting visual slowly proliferate.