Sisterhood, pleasure and marching: Indigenous women and leisure

For Australian Indigenous women, especially those who lived on settlements and missions, participation in the male preserve of sport was doubly shaped by colonization and by Western notions of women’s bodies. In this paper, we will discuss the Cherbourg Marching Girls, who competed in precision marching from 1957 to 1962, to explore how, as young Indigenous women growing up on a settlement in mid-twentieth-century Queensland, the Marching Girls were able to use their participation in what could be viewed as a Western, militarized, disciplined activity to access the joys and pleasures of sport and to strengthen connections with other Indigenous Australian girls and women. These connections and pleasures continue 60 years later through their memories of marching. In this article, we draw on Moreton-Robinson's Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint theory to truly listen to how the Marching Girls continue to make sense of their lives in the past and present.