The sport field in Australia : the market, the state, the nation and the world beyond in Pierre Bourdieu's favourite game

This chapter appraises the game’s similar and distinctive transformations in the case of Australia, focusing on the last 30 years but recognizing the preceding historical factors that helped condition rugby union’s corner of the Australian sport field. It has been highlighted for two principal reasons – the rough ‘coincidence’ of its professionalization with the release of Creative Nation, and the centrality of commercialization, crucially accompanied by transnationalism and ‘nationing’, to the changing nature and position of the sport. Of course, rugby union cannot represent the entire Australian sport field – itself, in any case, a phenomenon that is resistant to easy conceptual and empirical capture – but it can effectively illuminate a range of convergent and divergent processes that help constitute the sport field as a whole