Sport and Colonialism in 19th Century Australasia - LA84 Foundation

myth that the education of Ancient Greece developed the perfect
and balanced personality, and that amateur sport was one of its
most endearing characteristics, Adamson saw schoolboy sport as
a higher form of ludic activity permeated with the virtues of
nobility, bravery and integrity. Moreover, sport focused upon
group loyalty and engendered patriotic feelings, sentiments that
not only fitted Adamson's educational ideology, but had practical
value in committing boys to Wesley and raising enrolment
numbers at the school. 25
Understandably, sport was a medium
and an environment which offered a man forced to leave England
and its inclement climate for health reasons the opportunity of
embracing some familiar parts of the culture which had shaped
him.
The comments made by Adamson to Darling in 1930 concerning
sport as the only difference between the public schools and the'
state secondary schools is equally revealing of the Wesley head's
philosophy. Sport was an integral feature of social class, and
it was the "purity" of amateur sport that appealed to Adamson.
Gentlemen did not bet or take part in sports that involved the
payment of its players, an attitude demonstrated by Adamson in
1911 when he refused S.B. Gravenall, a member of the Wesley
teaching staff, permission to play for the St Kilda football
club in a Victorian Football League game. 26
Adamson was concerned
about the directions being taken by football in Victoria
and he opposed the game's increasing professionalism and the
"curse of large gate money" which was destroying the game. 27 A
deputation from the St Kilda club which requested Adamson to
reverse his decision on Gravenall met with no success, but it
gained an impromptu lecture from the Wesley head on his absolute
postulate: "that any game, in spite of its possible advantages,
is useless, and to be avoided, unless it is regarded also as a
moral training in controlling the temper, in unselfishness, and
in the virtues of hardihood, chivalry, and learning how to lose
decently". 28
Even though Adamson was motivated by his classical
idealism, he was equally aware of the historical corruption
in sport and that ludic activity wrongly organised was just as
capable of producing immoral behaviour. His view was that when
the medium was run as a business and for financial gain, "the
players" were very much more exposed to the unsavoury aspects
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