SCULLING AND SKULDUGGERY
A History of Professional Sculling

Book Details

Stuart Ripley Paperback, 184 pp.
Walla Walla Press Sports Dissertations No. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-876718-06-0
$39.95

 

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After Edward Trickett won the inaugural sculling world championship on the Thames in 1876 Australians dominated this sport for 61 years. Professional sculling attracted enormous crowds and inspired massive betting. Sculling and Skulduggery provides a comprehensive study of a sport that helped put Australia at the forefront. It examines the sport's meaning for Australian society. Individual chapters explore the evolution and organisation of professional sculling as well as the links between amateur officials and professional scullers. The book also explores why professional sculling failed to maintain its pre-eminent status in Australian sport.

AUTHOR
Stuart Ripley's earliest sculling memory was a small wall photograph of his grandfather in a racing shell mounted in the Tea Gardens family home. The photograph's significance became clearer many years later when Ripley began piecing together aspects of his grandfather's diverse life. He found that little research had been undertaken into the contribution of professional sculling as a leading sport and its role in establishing concepts such as an Australian type and identity. There had also been little serious study into the sport's popularity and varying iconic status in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 2003, Ripley completed a doctoral thesis on professional sculling at the University of Western Sydney. He has also lectured and tutored in Australian History and Politics at the same institution, and in Newstep at the University of Newcaste.

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