“What They Love About Sports Is What I Love About Esports”: How Esports Factors into Australian National Identity

Perhaps more than any other country, conventional sport holds strong cultural significance in Australia, particularly in relation to Australian national identity. The eventual succession of Australian sporting teams over British teams in the nineteenth century created one of the first key distinctions between colonial “Britions” raised in Australia and those in Great Britain, creating an early national identity centred around sporting prowess (White, 1981; Horton, 2000). It is unsurprising that this intrinsic identification through sport has permeated into Australian esports fandom and spectatorship. Drawing on two ethnographic studies, one conducted across two major 2017 Sydney esports events and the other conducted in 2018 at a Melbourne esports bar, this chapter will explore how Australian esports fans perform “Australianness” to authenticate their esports spectatorship and construct themselves as authentic esports spectators.