Connecting with Country & Community
🖤💛❤️ Community begins with connection 💚💙🤍
Emerald City Kickball brings people together through sport, friendship and community across Australia.
We recognise that every place we play has a much longer history of community, culture and connection, and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have cared for and maintained connections to Country for tens of thousands of years.
As a community-led organisation, we want our respect for Country to be more than words at the bottom of a webpage.
This space is where we'll share some of the relationships, creative collaborations, community initiatives and learning that are helping shape how Emerald City Kickball connects with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities.
Acknowledgement of Country
Emerald City Kickball acknowledges the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands and waters on which our communities gather, play and connect.
We recognise their continuing connections to Country, culture and community and pay our respects to Elders past and present.
Across our Local Areas, we acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country on which we play in Warrane (Sydney), Boorloo (Perth), Naarm (Melbourne) and Meanjin (Brisbane).
We extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who are part of the Emerald City Kickball community.
🖤💛❤️ Stories, culture and community 💚💙🤍
Community is built through people.
Over time, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, performers, community members and collaborators have shared their creativity, knowledge and experiences with Emerald City Kickball.
We want this space to recognise those contributions properly - in the voices of the people who made them.
More stories coming soon.
🌈Pride has always had many stories
At Emerald City Kickball, you'll often hear us pay our respects to Elders past and present, and to Sistergirls and Brotherboys.
Sistergirl and Brotherboy are terms used by some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to describe gender-diverse identities that are connected not only to gender, but also to culture, community and identity. Their meaning and use can differ between communities, Countries and Nations.
We include Sistergirls and Brotherboys in our acknowledgement because our community is built around creating space for people to belong and express who they are — and because LGBTQIA+ community in Australia includes First Nations people whose experiences of gender, culture and identity have their own histories and meanings.
For us, saying the words is a small act of recognition, respect and visibility.
Our community has a story — and some of it has been told through art
Art has become an important part of how Emerald City Kickball expresses who we are.
We've been fortunate to collaborate with Aboriginal artists to create original work that has appeared across tournaments, uniforms and other pieces of Emerald City's visual identity.
Those designs aren't simply decoration. They have artists, stories and cultural knowledge behind them, and we want to ensure that work is recognised, attributed and used respectfully.
We're currently working with the artists behind this work to document those stories properly.
Artist stories coming soon.