Through a generous exploration of intimate personal narrative, cultural studies, and poetry, Ellen van Neerven’s collection, Personal Score (Two Dollar Radio, 2024), illuminates the impact and history of sport on Indigenous land. Against the backdrop of a society that resists fluidity, van Neerven uses an intersectional lens to look at everything, from the problematic relationship sports has with race, gender, and sexuality, to the impact of climate change and the struggle for sovereignty.
Ellen van Neerven (they/them) is an award-winning Australian Indigenous writer and editor who belongs to the Mununjali Yugambeh people in Southeast Queensland. With their mother’s Aboriginal family and their father’s Dutch family in the Netherlands, van Neerven’s mixed-race heritage informs their work. Author of Heat and Light (2013), which won the Queensland Literary Awards’ David Unaipon Award for unpublished Indigenous writers, Comfort Food (University of Queensland Press, 2016), and Throat (University of Queensland Press, 2024), their first work of nonfiction is Personal Score. Originally published in 2023 by University of Queensland Press for an Australian audience, it is now available in the United States through Two Dollar Radio in 2024.
Van Neerven and I met on Zoom, where we discussed the inspiration that sparked this collection, how poetry and sport coexist in their work, and how histories of oppression and representation throughout literature have historically been used as a way of control.
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The Rumpus: Did Personal Score evolve into a book, or did you have this design from the beginning?
Ellen van Neerven: When I started thinking about the book, I wasn’t sure what form it would take, and I wasn’t sure about the scope. I knew I wanted to write about sport because of how much it has been—and is—a big part of my life. There were personal memories I wanted to record, but there were bigger questions I wanted to ask, about sport in society, as well as sport in nation, and how the past affects the present. I wanted to consider and reflect on these things, and it felt like these themes were fitting quite well together in my head. It was about finding the right way to tell those stories and how much I really wanted to learn along the way.
At one point, I even thought this book would be a novel. I decided on creative nonfiction to let the places I had a relationship with, or [the land I] had played on, lead the conversation. Some of the chapters start in a place and are working out a personal relationship to what happened on that land and those waterways, and it’s all a way to capture the micro and macro. I leaned towards poetic prose and hybrid creative nonfiction and having other forms in the book as well. As books often do, they take their time, and they take their time to find a form that not only fits the works’ contents but perhaps how the author sees themself in the world.
Rumpus: Some of the sections of the book were originally published in third person. Is that something you were already doing before you started putting this book together?
van Neerven: Many years ago, a friend of mine commissioned a short piece that had a very short life in an online zine. “Four Grounds” had four vignettes based on four sporting grounds I played on. These pieces appear throughout the book now, and now there are ten of these—each representing a place I used to play on. In the original publication, in the zine, I used third person, but at that point I was going by she/her, so it was written in third person with she/her pronouns. I was writing this character who was separate from me, writing about my experiences playing sport and growing up, and understanding the places where I played and spent so much time. I realized how often I would think about myself in the third person to dissociate. I needed to do that for a world or people or sporting team who saw me as a particular binary gender. That was a necessary tool both in self-reflection and self-actualization, but also as a literary device.
In the writing process of Personal Score, I kept the third person but changed the pronouns to they/them, and those sections expanded to catch up to the rest of my life. The third person signposted thinking about pluralities and fluidities and the potential for these parts to be read in many different ways, but I realized that writing in third person had initially come from a sense of dissociation and dislocation and not feeling a sense of truth of who I was. When I reread these sections again—and it’s a hard text to reread because it’s personal and it’s the accumulation of so many years—I thought there was a distance in the third person sections, and that was potentially an intended distance, but I decided to change this writing to the first person. I feel like now I can own these sections and bring a sense of intimacy to the reader.
Rumpus: Does wanting to change this point-of-view have to do with feeling more solid in your identity?
van Neerven: I am accepting myself for who I am, and I want that to have a mark on the page. I’m always going to feel different on a different day, in terms of some of the choices that I’ve made in this book, but that’s also the point of this book. Personal Score is about the feeling of flux, and it’s okay to be figuring things out as we go through life. Print is perceived as such a permanent form, so I wanted to have a feeling that you can disrupt that permanency with the way I write and the things I choose to write about.
Rumpus: Is the impulse to disrupt this permanency about knowing how your sense of self can change between the time you’re writing the book and after, when it comes out?
van Neerven: Absolutely. I think that’s where I found the most tension and conflict in writing the book, and it wasn’t necessarily a negative thing. It was a thing that was constantly moving through me as I was writing. I think that’s why I felt reluctant to write nonfiction before this. With fiction, the reader projects onto the characters, and with poetry—even though it’s often read autobiographically, especially for diverse writers whose identities are often conflated with the poets’ voice—there’s more nuance. I was stressed out about writing a project that spans time, not only in the way I represent past versions of myself but in the way that I might represent someone else or some other event. My account could differ from other people’s perspective, or throughout time it could be seen as dated. Language itself is constantly evolving. I put a large sense of responsibility on myself when I wrote this book, as we often do, but at the end of the day we also have to own it. We have to let things go a little bit and think, “This is the book I wrote, and it won’t be the same book if I write it in ten years’ time.”
I was also wondering how I’d feel in the future, after having written about my life so personally. I really had to let go of those feelings at that point, to shift the focus solely on myself. I started a list of all the things I wanted to cover in this book—what I was interested in and what I think other people would be interested in—and that list grew to over one hundred things. I wanted to put in as many of these as possible, knowing the book had a limit. That is an important step in writing a book: knowing your limits and knowing the book’s limits. You might not be able to include, or be, everything.
Rumpus: Was there anything on that list that made you think, “Well, this doesn’t really fit this book,” or “It’s not something I’m ready to write about now, but I might tackle later?”
van Neerven: Definitely. There are some things I touched on briefly because I thought, “I don’t have lived experience with this and another person would be able to expand on this topic a lot more.” Sometimes we realize we need to wait to write about a certain topic. Perhaps it will be for the next book. We might think we’re ready now, but you start writing and something in your gut kind of claws at you a little bit, and you realize it’s not sitting right. It’s because you haven’t arrived at that point in your life. As Indigenous people, we often grow up with this tiered learning, where you get a certain amount of information at a young age, and when the elders think you might be ready to receive the next amount of information, you get that. It’s all connected and constantly evolving and expanding. I’m now at an age where I’m coming out of being a young person and entering that middle age where I can still learn and also pass on knowledge. The book is me feeling that stage of my life out a little bit, as well as realizing there’s a lot of space there. It comes around in a circle.
Rumpus: I would imagine there’s joy and celebration in being able to express yourself but also stress in having to explain yourself to people outside your community. How do you navigate that tension?
van Neerven: It’s something I talk about with my friends: the expectations that are placed on us as Indigenous writers that weigh heavily on our bodies and how the histories of oppression and representation through literature have historically been used as a way of control. There’s an enormous sense of privilege to be able to write, when I think about the context of my family. It’s a privilege to write with a sort of level of freedom. I don’t think it’s complete freedom, because there are a lot of things to consider, but I want to feel free to write with grief and loss coexisting with joy and pleasure on the page. That’s what is real for me and the people that I know. I love how Billy-Ray Belcourt writes about joy. While writing, we always feel the limits of the white gaze and how they might see us. We also write, very consciously, in spite of those expectations of us and our work: knowing that, potentially my book can inform and also be something people can hold on to, laugh in places, cry in places, be a work that is held by so many other works, and will be in a family of queer literature, Indigenous literature, trans and nonbinary voices, works about sport that push against what sport books should look like. It can be many different things as well as being its own shape.
Rumpus: In Personal Score you write about how, in Indigenous culture, work and leisure are intertwined. You’ve also said a lot of the Indigenous writers you know feel a comfort and need to write across genres. Do you think those are related?
van Neerven: I’m pushing against binaries in this work, including the so-called binary between work and leisure. I break down Eurocentric ideas of sport and how sport was also seen as something that was for the elite members of society and only for men, and how that plays into how we’re still really grappling with exclusionary legacies in sport and ideas of justice around sport from those Eurocentric ideas. This includes a harsh separation between sport and land. As Indigenous people in Australia, we use the word “Country” to think about land—not just what’s on the ground but what’s under the ground and waterways and skies and the animals and plants. Everything that you see is Country, and we are Country as well. We don’t see ourselves as being separate from land. Eurocentric models of sport are about putting lines down on the field and making chlorinated swimming pools. For example, [these models] are creating golf courses that often have a negative impact on the land. We [Indigenous people] don’t have separate words for sport. That also speaks to how it wasn’t seen as something that was separate to other aspects of life. We have words like “moogahlin,” [which means] “to play” in the Bundjalung language. Everything in our lived-presence is interconnected: family, looking after Country, learning, ceremony, dancing, singing, games, and sport—the broader sense of community and coming together.
When I was researching Indigenous sport, I noticed there are no fixed boundaries. There’s always a sense of sustainability around looking after the land and looking after the materials that are used. For example, a ball game traditionally played with a possum-skin ball? That spirit is in the game, and that possum is not killed just to make the ball. Every part of that possum is going to be used in a sustainable way. I’ve been thinking about how much care and consideration is in our culture and how inclusive those games are. A few of the traditional sports and games are still played on the continent of Australia, but some of them are only in the historical record and in cultural memory. These games are inclusive. Who can play, compared to this sense of inequality in the histories of organized sport, continues to this day.
Today, there are large sections of the population—whether through cultural background, gender, sexuality, ability, location, or class—who feel like sport is inaccessible or not welcoming to them. So they miss out on those benefits that we all know that part of our lives can bring. It starts to have a lot of different divisive effects. Sport is seen as characterizing a nation. If there’s a sense of injustice and inequality in the fabric of what a nation says it is, then how does that trickle down to everyday life?
Rumpus: You wrote that in the USA, you’re either seen as a sports person or not and that sports are seen as anti-intellectual. Can you expand on that?
van Neerven: If we see sport as anti-intellectual, we deny other forms of intelligence like spatial intelligence and body intelligence—these have always been important and have always been valuable—and that creates this oppressive binary. In Australia, if you’re growing up, you might feel like you have to choose between the arts or sport. There are a lot of people in the arts who have a secret football team or feel like it’s a guilty pleasure that will be ridiculed by their peers. It’s the same way in a hypermasculine environment. Maybe a young person can’t share with their teammate that they’re enjoying reading novels or painting. Sport and arts also compete for funds and venues and public attention, so there’s a tension that politically is continuously stoked.
Rumpus: Is your desire to show how both sport and art can be equally upheld, that they are connected? Is this what started you on the journey of composing this essay collection?
van Neerven: When I was playing soccer, I would have training a few times a week, and games would compete with literary events and travel. For example, poetry readings would be on the same night as training. I would feel like I would have to make the decision of which one I should attend. A couple of times, I came straight from training late to the poetry reading. I would still be sweaty and wearing my kit. I would have changed my shoes and swapped the boots for sneakers, but I did that a couple of times on purpose. It was such a conversation starter that I would embody what I had done earlier in the evening into this space. I think I did it to be defiant and feel like I wanted to bring the two things I loved together in some way. I wasn’t really sure how I was going to do this when I first started writing the book, but I think it really did come from this same cheeky motivation I had, to go to a poetry reading in a jersey. I was thinking I’m going to find a way to make it work and find a way to weave these things together.
Rumpus: Is that feeling part of what tipped you into writing nonfiction?
van Neerven: I think I wanted to privilege emotions. I wanted to privilege things that I had felt and experienced and understood as body in the work. I also think I gave permission to myself to write nonfiction after reading the work of other writers such as Billy-Ray Belcourt, Akawaeke Emezi, and Maggie Nelson, who had also privileged those same things in their nonfiction. I realized there was more plurality, more agency, more slipperiness than I thought in nonfiction. I could actively play and challenge that. I thought, “Okay, I can do this.”
Rumpus: If you could snap your fingers and have the reader take away or learn something from Personal Score, what would it be?
van Neerven: That is assuming a readership is a monolith and that they are not a diversity of people. So while I appreciate the question, I would want each reader learn something different or gain something that they personally might take away. For example, I’ve had queer readers who’ve said there are certain sections that are particularly affirming for them. Readers who live with chronic illness say they have identified with what I’ve written. I’ve had people who’ve said that the chapter “How to Play Sport on Indigenous Land” has influenced their thinking on land. Overall, I think it’s an individual journey I want readers to go on. If I had to choose one thing for readers to take away, it would be perhaps a personal reflection on the places they live on or have lived on, and how they move through these places.
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Author photograph courtesy of Ellen van Neerven
