Broadening Readings of Sport Monuments: The Arthur Baynes Memorial Obelisk

Monuments to past and present sports performers are increasingly commonplace. Despite the potential for analyses of sports monuments to provide new and valuable insights into past and present sociocultural practices, studies of monuments and other forms of material culture have, until recently, received limited attention in sports historiography. In addition, new scholarship has tended to focus on sporting statues over other, non-figurative, monumental genres. This article will attempt to redress this relative neglect and contribute to a broadening discourse of sport, memory and materiality by analysing one particular sporting monument, a memorial obelisk erected in 1933 on the banks of the Brisbane River in Queensland, Australia to prominent 1920s sculler Arthur Alexander Baynes (1899–1932). The article examines Baynes' sporting career, considers his memorial within the context of obelisks and other commemorative monumental forms, and reads the memorial in its various discursive international, national, regional and local contexts. By providing a detailed analysis of this one ‘local’ sporting monument, the intention of this article is to add to the expanding literature on sporting material culture and, in particular, broaden our readings of sport monuments.