Abstract
My intellectual engagement with history has spanned three decades and passed through three identifiable phases. In the initial phase, I appropriated history as raw context for understanding the present which I conceptualized as accumulated structures and relationships transmitted from the past. In the second phase, precipitated by a fortuitous historiographic turn, I positioned my practice as a specific form of emancipatory social history in which I advocated for freedom from constraining social structures and repressive political systems/relationships. In this phase, I also began to critically reflect on and critique the empirical-analytical method of my earlier historical works on sport in apartheid South Africa, the Australian surf lifesaving movement and surfboard riding (surfing) culture; in the process, I reconceptualized myself as a historian-author. Today, my interest in history revolves around historians as authors, histories as the products of authors and the fluid nature of historical representations.