Gavin Wanganeen was a wonderful footy player, but it’s art that drives him now
It began as an argument among Port Adelaide teammates but that dispute — and a bit of heavenly inspiration – spurred Gavin Wanganeen to a new career and purpose.
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It was on a beach just outside the Yorke Peninsula town of Port Victoria that Gavin Wanganeen found the inspiration he was looking for.
He was there with his wife Pippa when a falling star streaked across the night sky.
He had been messing around with art for a little while but couldn’t quite nail the style he was searching for. Inspiration can be an elusive beast and Wanganeen had been nibbling at the edges of throwing himself into painting for a while.
The night on the beach changed all that. Even if he can’t quite explain why.
“I can’t give you an exact answer for that,” Wanganeen says. “All I knew was that I had to paint about the night sky from that moment. The night sky, the stars. I went home and started painting about that shooting star.”
The beach at Port Victoria is a significant place for Wanganeen.
Across the water is Wardang Island, maybe his favourite place in the world, and where as a child he would spend time camping and fishing. For a suburban indigenous boy from Salisbury North it helped connect him with his family story and his culture.
Wanganeen traces his heritage to the Kokatha people of the Far West Coast, and also has links to the Narungga on Yorke Peninsula.
“My mum was part of the stolen generation so missed out on speaking language,” he says. “But she always, when we got the opportunity, or if we had gone back home – sadly for funerals or things like that – that was when I was able to be exposed to a bit of culture, my own culture, which was unreal.
“To be able to go out hunting a kangaroo or emu, and learning how to skin them and prepare them and eat them was really important.”
Wanganeen is one of the most brilliant players to emerge from South Australia.
He played in premierships for both Essendon and Port Adelaide. He was the first indigenous player to win the Brownlow Medal awarded to the best player in the AFL.
He was the first indigenous player to play 300 AFL games. He was named in the All Australian team five times. Yet, when his career came to a close in 2006, he struggled to adapt to his new life.
Professional football is a life of routine. Training, meetings, playing, recovery. Repeat. It was the only world he’d known since he first played for Port Adelaide in the SANFL as a 16-year-old. But when that life scaffolding was removed, the now 46-year-old Wanganeen – like many footballers – felt a void.
“I went to the top of the tree in that game,” he says. “But coming out into something completely new, into the unknown, was a huge challenge.
“There is a high rate of depression and anxiety in footballers who leave the game, especially the ones who have been in the game for such a long time and who have achieved an awful lot or who have just been playing for a long time. I definitely struggled. I was lost. I was wondering for many years, what am I going to do?”
The connection to art had started in his last year of playing football. But only as an act of one-upmanship between the indigenous players at Port Adelaide. On this particular day at Port Adelaide, Wanganeen was sitting around with Daniel Motlop and the Burgoyne brothers, Peter and Shaun. Footy players, it turns out, are competitive in everything, even art.
According to Wanganeen, Motlop started the conversation. Motlop is from the Larrakia people in the Northern Territory.
“Us Top End Aboriginal mob do the best Aboriginal art in Australia by far,” Wanganeen reports Motlop as saying. “Better than you southern mob.”
A challenge was laid down.
“Why don’t we all do our own individual painting and then we’ll get the rest of the team to pick the best painting, and whoever wins we will deem that region the best for Aboriginal art in Australia.”
Wanganeen went out and bought a canvas and some paint.
He had seen his mum paint and other family members but hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to art class at school. He did start it but, three days later, gave it away. “It was taking too long. It was taking way too long. I didn’t have time to finish it,” he says.
But he didn’t throw it away. Wanganeen’s footy career finished, he went through a divorce, he moved house a couple of times, but the canvas always came with him. He remarried in 2012, to Pippa Hanson. She found it one day and suggested he finish it. This was eight years after he started the painting. But he resisted.
“It took me about another two years, and some nice encouragement from her, to get back into it,” he says.
Looking back he says it was a lack of self-belief that held him back. “Did I have any talent? Was it any good?”
There was also personal pride. He had been to the top in football. He wanted to feel like he was good at this as well.
“I was used to performing at a really high standard,” he says. “I was used to that. I wanted to perform at a very high standard at something else.”
It took him another 80 hours to finish the painting, which became Camping at Wardang. His wife was impressed. But it was still a big step to follow that through to become a full-time artist.
“It was challenging at the beginning, it really was,” he says. “Because I had to start thinking about how do I do this? What do I paint about? What colours do I use? What’s my inspiration? I had to find that.”
So he started to muck around on the kitchen table at home. And he starts to improve. Pippa offered encouragement and a little bit of belief started to build.
“Until I started to believe that’s when I started to excel,” he says. “When I got that belief then it just started to skyrocket.”
Then there was the night at Port Victoria.
“It was a really significant moment,” Pippa says to her husband.
“Until then you were experimenting with other traditional forms but that was a really significant moment because it took Gavin off on a tangent of telling and expressing his own story and creating his own style of art.”
Wanganeen’s Shooting Star series takes on a different perspective from most. He’s not looking up at the night sky. He’s looking down through the stars.
“I imagine myself at the highest point in the universe above the stars but I’m gazing back down to country, to the west coast, to my grandfather’s country and that’s my spiritual connection through art now.
“It’s a memory or a view back to that country that is in my past.”
Wanganeen says there are many Aboriginal stories connected to the stars. Some are highly cultural and some he feels he will paint about in the future when he has more knowledge of their significance. “I don’t paint about those culturally significant stars. Until I get back on country and learn more about it, I won’t.”
Wanganeen doesn’t have a studio but paints at the kitchen table, which places his art firmly in the middle of family life. Gavin and Pippa have three daughters to add to his two children from his first marriage, with another on the way. So when one of the kids threw a teddy bear into the middle of Wanganeen’s latest creation, it’s not a problem. The bear was removed but the mark stayed.
Wanganeen, whose works at Hill Smith Gallery were selling recently for between $5000-$12,000, says while he is telling his own personal and cultural stories through his art, he believes everyone will find something for themselves as well.
“I want them to be connected to certain things in my painting that remind them of their own journeys, and things that are significant to them and their own families and their memories.”
Wanganeen’s works also decorate the family home. At least up until the point they are sold. Which, even though the art is made to be sold, it still can be a wrench when it moves on. “When I paint them we put them up and our house looks so full and beautiful,” he says.
Pippa says it’s “bittersweet” when the paintings leave. “It’s so much more than just a pretty piece of art,” she says. “A bit of Gavin’s soul is in there. It’s great people understand that and value his work but it’s sort of a little bit sad for us because it’s a little bit of Gavin that is going away.”
Art is filling the gap in Wanganeen’s life that was once filled by footy.
He describes footy as having “saved” his life when he was young. It gave him a purpose and a direction, and helped him fight the distractions and temptations that are placed in front of many young people.
Distractions and temptations that can lead you off the road and where you can lose yourself.
“Footy was my inspiration,” he says. “If I didn’t play footy I really don’t know (what I would have done). That’s the million dollar question. I put all my eggs into one basket from an early age.”
He didn’t finish Year 12. And if the football hadn’t worked out?
“I was lucky I didn’t break a leg or an ankle or do something because I wouldn’t have had an education fall back on. It’s a scary thought. I don’t even want to think about it too much.”
As a former footy player and now artist Wanganeen is passionate about helping indigenous children achieve their potential.
“I want to help make a difference and help young kids find their inspiration,” he says.
Coming from “humble beginnings” himself he can relate, but he says it wasn’t until he grew up a little that he understood the extent of the disadvantage routinely faced by indigenous people in Australia. “It wasn’t until I got a bit older that I started to understand from how far back Aboriginal people were coming from,” he says.
It is still happening. “Cousins my age, indigenous friends my age, I’m seeing their kids come up through the system and a lot of them haven’t been able to break the cycle in terms of education, employment, disadvantage,” he says.
Wanganeen believes there are more opportunities now than when he was young but still acknowledges there is a long way to go, and mentions the rate of indigenous incarceration and lower life expectancies.
He thinks education and training is key to helping young people to break out from poverty. A board member of the Port Adelaide Football Club, he is involved with the Power Aboriginal Cup, which began in 2008 with eight schools and 133 students, and now takes in 75 schools and 500 students.
The idea behind the Cup is to link footy to school attendance. To reach the grand final of the Aboriginal Power Cup teams must meet an 80 per cent minimum attendance mark, and do well in academic and behavioural components of the program. Students can also earn points towards their SACE for completing the program’s academic component.
“Education is the key for me, and opportunities around employment and training,” he says. “Football has been a great tool to lure all kids, all disadvantaged kids, especially indigenous kids who are pretty good at playing football. We all know that education is power, and that education gives you the ability to make good decisions for yourself and long lasting decisions that will benefit everyone.”
Wanganeen is also involved with the indigenous Players Alliance, which helps indigenous players at all stages of their career as well as educating clubs about indigenous culture. He brings his own experience to that role as well. Part of it is helping those players whose career has ended and need to move onto the next part of their life.
“The anxiety of leaving the game, being out of the game and not being able to play, the stresses of it, the depression that can come with it. It’s important to prepare for life after footy.”
Wanganeen says he should have paid more attention to his own financial situation while still playing and earning good money. “I probably didn’t put the money in the right places, made some mistakes,” he says. “It was a learning process for me and now I’m trying to make up for that.”
Art is now his career. He’s thinking about broadening his material. Maybe some sculpture or pottery. He believes his “journey” is just starting and will continue as he seeks to more closely connect with his culture.
“I look forward to getting out bush and hearing and learning about the language and the stories, and they will probably end up staying with me for life. I want to get back home, out bush and get a little more deeply immersed in culture.”
But what about his mates, Daniel Motlop and the Burgoyne brothers? Do they accept he won the competition to decide who was the finest artist? Not that any of them had a crack at completing their own work.
“They will never accept that,” he says with a grin. “They are too proud but they should know reality though. I ask them every now and again, ‘How did that painting go?’ ‘Oh, I’ve still got it’. ‘OK, show me then’. When I see it I will believe it.”