Bernard has held major positions with key sporting organisations since the late 1970s. Among these positions were Publications Manager of the South Australian National Football League (1979-1984), the South Australian Football Historical Society (which he founded in 1983), Curator of the Adelaide Oval Museum, Historian for the South Australian Cricket Association (1994-2009), Historical Consultant to the South Australian Cricket Association and Adelaide Oval Stadium Management Authority (2010-2017), a member of a national Australian Football League History Sub-committee (2013), a member of the Adelaide Oval History Committee (2013-14), and a member of the Sports SA committee examining the establishment of a South Australian Sports Museum.

Bernard is a founder member of the Australian Society for Sports History and has served as Treasurer (1985) and Vice-president (2003-2007). He convened the Society’s Sporting Traditions Conference in Adelaide (2001); he has been convening monthly and bi-monthly meetings of the South Australian Chapter of the Australian Society for Sports History since 1996.

Bernard was awarded a PhD from Flinders University for his research on Aborigines in Australian cricket. Since 1983 his scholarship has focused on cricket and Australian Rules Football, extending into tennis, boxing, sports writing and sporting sites. He has taught courses in sports at Flinders University, and Aboriginal history and sports journalism at the University of South Australia.

Bernard has published 50 books with 44 dealing with the history of sport. A potential top-10 list of the sport history books might include:

  • Adelaide Oval Test Cricket 1884–1984 (with Nigel Hart) (Wakefield Press, 1984)
  • Passport to Nowhere: Aborigines in Australian Cricket 1850-1939 (Walla Walla Press, 1999)
  • The Imaginary Grandstand: Identity and Narrative in Australian Sport (ed.) (ASSH SA, 2002)
  • The Official MCC Ashes Treasures (2010) (Carlton, 2009, 2010, 2013; ABC 2009); as The Official Ashes Treasures (Allen & Unwin, 2013); as The Official MCC Story of the Ashes / The Official Story of the Ashes (Carlton/Hardie Grant, 2015, 2017)
  • On Our Selection: An Alternative History of Australian Cricket (Bernard Whimpress, 2011)
  • 1878: Norwood Football Club’s First Year (Norwood Football Club, 2013)
  • Adelaide Oval Tennis: 1878–2012 (Bernard Whimpress, 2014)
  • Adelaide Sporting Sites (ed., with Santo Caruso), Melbourne Sports Books, 2018)
  • George Giffen: A Biography (Walla Walla Press, 2020)
  • Adelaide Oval 1865–1939: A History (Lulu, 2022).

Passport to Nowhere, based on Bernard’s PhD thesis, received notable commendations from prominent literary figures in sport, including:

The thoroughness and density of his research reveal the flimsiness and subjectivity of previous scholarship on Aborigines in cricket (Gideon Haigh)

What is commendable about this book is the author’s refusal to take cheap or easy positions, and it is this that makes Whimpress a worthy voice in the emerging debate about the relationship between sport, culture and history in this country (Martin Flanagan)

Between 1998 and 2010 Bernard published and edited Baggy Green, a journal of Australian cricket history. He is the current Reviews Editor of Sporting Traditions and has published seven articles in the journal. Bernard’s work appears in the Australian Dictionary of Biography; The Oxford Companion to Australian Sport (1992, 1994); The Oxford Companion to Australian Cricket (1996), and Wray Vamplew and Brian Stoddart’s collection Sport in Australia: A Social History (1994). His writing has also been published in The Oxford Book of Australian Sporting Anecdotes; Gideon Haigh’s, Cricket Anecdotes, The Best Ever Australian Sports Writing: A 200 Year Collection and The Best Australian Sports Writing 2004. He has written for numerous local and overseas journals, including Wisden, Cricketer, Australian Cricket, the International Journal of the History of Sports and Sporting Traditions. He contributed the entries on Adelaide Oval, cricket and Australian Rules football in the updated edition of The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History (2024).

ASSH acknowledges the long, diverse and outstanding contributions made by Bernard Whimpress to the history of sport and is proud to make him a Fellow of the Society.