Lionel Rose was eight years older than me, an Aboriginal kid from Jackson’s Track, a tiny Aboriginal settlement in south-eastern Victoria.

The community of Jackson’s Track grew out of the bush when a few families moved to the area to work on nearby farms, building makeshift homes and raising their children.

Lionel was born in 1948 and lived there with his family in a one-roomed tin hut until he was ten.

In hindsight, I suppose I identified with Lionel Rose. My own father’s family came from a similar Aboriginal settlement on the Clarence River in northern New South Wales, called Baryulgil.

Settlements like Jackson’s Track and Baryulgil weren’t proper towns with houses and streets, electricity and running water.

They were unofficial settlements where families built homes from tin, wood and bark, with dirt floors, where people washed in rivers and cooked on open fires and the menfolk often slept outside under the stars.

They grew out of a time when Aboriginal people were squatters on their own lands, working and living through the grace and favour of the white landowners.

And yet, somehow, from a shanty town like Jackson’s Track emerged a world champion.

I was an eleven-year-old when Lionel, a hero to just about every Australian, and most especially to Aboriginal Australians, boxed for the world bantamweight title in Tokyo against Fighting Harada on 26 February 1968.

I was in my first year at the Marist Brothers Benedict Junior College in Lidcombe.

The fight was broadcast in Australia live on the radio. My family crowded around the radio in the living room listening to the Australian announcer’s breathless excitement as Lionel and Fighting Harada went head to head, toe to toe, for fifteen blood-chilling rounds.

All the Mundines grew up with boxing. My uncles fought in the tent fights at the local agricultural shows. My cousin, Tony Mundine – who under our traditional kinship system is my brother – became an Australian and international champion in four weight divisions. His son, Anthony Mundine, has also been a world champion and is a household name in Australia.

My mother disliked the brutality of boxing. She didn’t mind us watching it but wouldn’t let her sons fight. The brutality was on show when we attended Tony’s fight against former junior middleweight world champion Denny Moyer.

Tony gave Denny a flogging and the crowd begged the referee to stop the fight.

At the conclusion of the fight, my brothers and I were leaving the stadium when we noticed that our clothes were splattered with blood … and we’d been sitting in the third row.

At all of Tony’s fights, Mum used to sit ringside, with her eyes closed, and whispering prayers. I asked once why she attended Tony’s fights yet closed her eyes. To me, it was a waste of a ticket.

She replied that she had to make sure Tony was safe.

My brothers and I found our way into the ring when we could, despite Mum’s objections.

We loved watching tent boxing at the country shows in Grafton and other country towns we visited, and the Royal Easter Show in Sydney.

Later, in Sydney, I secretly went to the ring to get coaching from Ray Perez, an American boxer who’d moved to Australia and was teaching kids how to box at the Auburn–Lidcombe RSL Youth Club. I told Mum I was going to the gym, which was kind of true.

When she found out, she marched down and dragged me out of the ring, giving me a verbal lashing.

Everyone there was laughing as this small woman dragged a near six-foot middleweight boxer – me – out of the ring.

Mum gave them all an earful as she dragged me out.

Pointing to Ray Perez, she said, “I’m not finished yet. I’ll get to you next.”

The laughing stopped. Mum turned to Perez and gave him a dressing down. It was an amazing sight … she was a tiny woman who looked like she could have been blown over by a gust of wind; Perez was a solid, hard, nuggetty professional boxer. But that didn’t stop her, standing there, surrounded by all these big sweaty guys in boxing shorts, giving Perez and the rest of them hell. And after he simply backed off in the face of her onslaught, that was the end of my short-lived boxing career.

From then on it was strictly a spectator sport for me.

But Lionel’s fight – why was it so important, both to me and to Australia? Because for the first time, an Aboriginal man was representing a young nation, and fighting for our place to be accepted in the world.

Our place! Aboriginal people. That’s why I was so proud.

In my eyes, he was about to take us Aboriginals from being non-people to being world champions.

To truly understand what Lionel’s match in Tokyo meant to me and all Aboriginal people back in those days, you have to appreciate the conditions, laws and restrictions that had been imposed on us since British colonisation.

Rose’s world championship fight in 1968 occurred just under a year after the historical 1967 referendum, when more than 90 per cent of Australians, with an overwhelming majority in all six Australian states, voted to amend the Constitution to recognise Aboriginal people as full citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia instead of people predominantly governed by the states.

The referendum gave us an equal status to all other Australians for the first time, at least in theory. In practice, there was still a long way to go.

It would be another year, in 1969, before the NSW state government would repeal the Aborigines Protection Act 1909 and begin to fully dismantle the system of control of Aboriginal people that existed under the guise of providing us with “protection and care”.

And some years before the state’s Aborigines Welfare Board would cease to be able to control and intimidate Aboriginal families like mine.

The protection regime laid down under the Protection Act and implemented by the Welfare Board controlled all aspects of life for Aboriginal people in New South Wales. It regulated our movement and enforced segregation.

This regime banned us from having a drink in a pub or from gathering in groups in public. It banned non-Aboriginal people from having more than the fleeting company of Aboriginal people.

One of my in-laws was a white man, a sailor, who’d fallen in love with my relative, an Aboriginal woman. She lived on the Mehi Mission in Moree.

When he wanted to visit, her family used to smuggle him onto the mission in the boot of a car.

He was forbidden by the Act from going onto the mission.

Aboriginal reserves and all property on them were under the complete management and control of the Welfare Board.

It could remove youths from the reserves and place them into service, and have full control of their wages to spend as it saw fit, “in their interests”.

The Welfare Board’s personnel could enter Aboriginal homes without notice.

Years later, reading the original legislation, it surprised me to find it was directed at Aboriginal people on reserves and missions or receiving rations.

Yet, when I was growing up, the Welfare Board tried to exercise control over all of us, wherever we lived.

It was like living with shackles on our hands and feet.

My own family didn’t live on a mission or reserve.

By the time I was born my parents owned their own home in South Grafton, a small town on the Clarence River. But we were always aware of the rules that applied and wary of the Welfare Board, which could show up at any time.

My brothers and sisters and I grew up feeling proud of our family being Aboriginal home owners, yet, at the same time, the petty rules and bureaucratic restrictions we were forced to live under made us feel alienated and like outsiders.

As a child out and about with my brothers, someone from out of town or who didn’t know our family might ask us what we were doing “off the reserve”.

My brother told me of a time someone from the Welfare Board tried to walk into our home uninvited. According to the story, Mum chased them away with a broom.

The Welfare Board could take Aboriginal children away from their families, just like that. That happened to people we knew, and Mum was always telling my siblings and me to be careful when we were out and about, not to talk to adults we didn’t know.

Government school principals could ban Aboriginal children from attending and had to if white parents asked them to.

For most Aboriginal children, the only schooling options were mission or reserve schools. Non-government schools, however, had more autonomy in decisions on enrolling Aboriginal students. We were Catholic and my parents sent us to Catholic schools, educated side by side with students from all sorts of backgrounds.

Other Aboriginal parents got Certificates of Exemption from the Aborigines Protection Act so they could get around the prohibitions and send their children to government schools.

Some of my older Baryulgil cousins got barely any schooling at all, and a kind Russian immigrant, with limited English himself, took it upon himself to teach them how to read.

Aboriginal people in New South Wales weren’t allowed out after 5 pm and if they were caught, they could be arrested.

Once, when Dad was working away, near Coffs Harbour, he was arrested on his way back from work at night.

The police didn’t believe him when he said he’d been in town for work.

They accused him of being a liar. But fortunately, in an effort to prove Dad wrong, a police sergeant spoke to the job supervisor, who confirmed Dad’s story. Dad was released, but only after spending a night or two in the police cells.

After that, Dad’s boss insisted he apply for what we all called a “dog tag”, a Certificate of Exemption under the Aborigines Protection Act.

When I was a child, Dad let me think he’d applied for the dog tag so he could have a drink with his cricket mates after their games. I only found out years later it was much more serious than that.

Even though we didn’t live on a reserve and didn’t take Aboriginal rations, we lived under the protection regime too. After all, Dad wouldn’t have needed an exemption from it unless it applied.

In practice, the protection regime extended well beyond what the legislation strictly called for and the Welfare Board acted well outside its stated powers.

No one questioned this.

Families like ours, living in a town where we were known and respected, experienced a hybrid life between the full restrictions of the law and the freedoms everyone else had.

We knew we could get away with more freedoms than the protection regime allowed but only if we stayed out of trouble, always keeping one eye looking over our shoulders.

I lived under this regime for the first thirteen years of my life, until the laws were repealed after the 1967 referendum.

But my parents lived under these restrictions for most of their lives. Similar protection regimes existed in all the states and territories. Most Aboriginal Australians you meet have either lived under this regime or been raised by people who were.

And it does affect them.

From childhood, as Aboriginal people, we learned to be submissive and deferential. In shops, we learned to stand back and wait to be asked to approach the counter.

We learned not to go into certain places or we might be asked to leave or even arrested. We learned not to speak to white people we didn’t know or we might get into trouble. We learned to keep our heads down and our mouths shut. Our safety could depend on it.

We learned to know our place.

Lionel Rose’s boxing match in Tokyo taught me that knowing your place was just a state of mind.

In the days leading up to the fight, it seemed the whole nation was buzzing with excitement.

On the radio, the TV, the news at the movies and in the papers, at school and on the street. Our friends and family were buzzing as well. It was massive.

Ron Casey, host of TV Ringside, called the fight.

Back in those days, the radio announcers had to create the visuals with their words. And Casey called every jab and every cross, second by second.

As I listened to the fight, blow for crushing blow, I was barely breathing.

“Thirty seconds to go. Left-hand jab by Rose. Jab by Rose. Lionel Rose, he looks tired in centre ring, hitting left and right to the head. Harada the champion fighting desperately now. Left and right by Harada. Right to the head. Left-hand jab by Rose,” Casey screamed.

Why was it that this particular boxing match had such a profound effect on me?

It wasn’t just because boxing was part of my family. Many other Australians were enthralled by this Aboriginal boy competing for the world championship in a match broadcast live from halfway across the world.

“Lionel, you’ve only got seconds to go. Left and right to the body by Rose. Jab by Harada.”

Listening to Ron Casey calling the fight, I could barely believe what was happening. I was excited, my heart was pounding, I was breathless. I could barely sit still, and I had a smile on my face as big as a Cheshire cat’s – and fear at the same time. It felt like I only relaxed, sat still and breathed again about a month after the end of the match.

“Here is Harada again, and Rose getting … jab by Rose, jab by Rose again. A left to the body by Harada. A jab by Rose once more.”

And it was over. The points were counted and the referee signalled Lionel Rose as the winner. He’d won.

“Rose is champion of the world. Lionel Rose is champion of the world,” Casey screamed again and again.

My family and I screamed and yelled and danced around the room.

An Aboriginal had become the undisputed world champion.

I felt like opening my bedroom window and shouting out, “Lionel Rose is the undisputed champion of the world.”

My family and I were on top of the world for days, for months, for years.

And, as if a brilliant light had suddenly switched on inside my brain, it dawned on me. Rose was in Tokyo … in Japan.

An Aboriginal boy from a shanty town called Jackson’s Track, on the other side of the world being glorified, talked about on radio. He had won the world championship.

If he could do it, then why not me?

Lionel Rose didn’t know his place.

Warren Mundine in Black + White is published by Pantera Press on November 7, rrp $45