‘I thought I was friends with Nova’: Craig Foster on the spat that rocked the republican movement

The first thing to know about Craig Foster is that there are several Craig Fosters.

There’s Happy Fozz when he’s discussing football culture, Stern Fozz when debating points of international law, Intense Fozz defending the rights of refugees, Quiet Fozz grappling with social anxiety, Passionate Fozz talking about his love for Australia and its multiculturalism.

Craig Foster chats over lunch in Marrickville.Credit: Rhett Wyman

All of them orbit a nucleus composed of the Fozzian moral code – decency, fairness, consistency of position and a heightened sense of justice that he thinks probably stems from a country childhood steeped in working-class values as the grandson of dairy farmers and the son of a motor mechanic.

“I always had this over-accentuated sense of injustice,” the human rights campaigner and former Socceroo says. “As a kid in young football teams, if I thought one of the players was being mistreated – and there’s always someone being mistreated – I was always willing to go and confront people and go and try and change it. Nothing’s changed.”

Everyone has different facets to their character, but Foster sure can mix and match at speed. One moment he’s staring down a patch of air with knitted brows as if it’s offended him (“Toll roads! We’ve been convinced we have to pay to drive on a road. Crazy idea”). The next it’s unwavering eye contact and a politician’s persuasive open palms (“We must confront genocide and apartheid wherever we find it”). Then a bashful smile, shoulders relaxed (“God, I was so ignorant”).

It’s a tour-de-force that some can find a touch overwhelming, even self-righteous. My impression: he carries it off because he’s a genuinely unassuming guy. He’s at lunch to talk about himself, but he asks as many questions as he answers.

At 55, Foster is lean, spry and still has the uncompromising handshake of a professional sportsman. He’s chosen a lunch venue that reflects his values: the Addi Road Food Pantry in Marrickville, where wonderful volunteers serve free meals to the homeless and anyone else who rocks up. We sit in a warehouse space at the community centre half-filled with pallets of salvaged food that would otherwise end up in landfill.

Foster helping out at Addi Road community centre in April 2020.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“I’m here pretty much every week,” says Foster. “I was packing boxes here most days during COVID. These people are my friends.”

He opts for a wholesome vegetable and chickpea tagine built around chunks of potato and carrot, then largely ignores it as conversation flows. I plough through mine. It is delicious, and the bill is nil. There is such a thing as a free lunch.

As his tagine congeals, Foster talks football. It all starts in Goonellabah, a suburb of Lismore. A 15-year-old Foster was picked for an Australian junior squad bound for the first under-16 World Cup. The Aussie kids did well, beating Argentina and eventual finalists West Germany, and Foster was named in the team of the tournament. He had been anointed as one of the best young footballers on the planet.

In Lismore, the chuffed mayor asked Foster to play one more game for his local side before jetting off to fame and fortune in Europe. “I copped a tackle in that game that I never saw coming,” he says. “I woke up in the ambulance plane going down to Sydney.”

A knee reconstruction and 18 months of rehabilitation put the European dream on ice, but his next steps were formative.

“I signed for [Sydney] Croatia in the National Soccer League in ’87, and it was my first exposure to multiculturalism,” he says. “I had walked out of an Anglo area as a kid – there was no SBS in Lismore at that time – and it was confronting. The heaving crowds speaking Croatian and loving football in a way I hadn’t seen before. This was a totally different world to Goonellabah Soccer Club and I loved it.”

Vegetable and chickpea tagine.Credit: Rhett Wyman

But for the first time, Foster felt like an outsider in his own country. “Some things were very challenging for me. I remember in one of the junior national teams, a player put a Croatian national team jersey on and then the Australian jersey over the top of it. I was thinking, ‘What are you doing? You’re playing for Australia.’ I had to come to terms with it.” The Sydney coach, Vedran Rozic, could not pronounce Foster’s first name and referred to him as Greg.

“When I was a kid, I was very shy,” he says. “The irony is I’m much more comfortable in front of a thousand people than I am in a room of five. So even today, meeting people that I don’t know or going to a party where I don’t know people – that is my worst nightmare.”

A fruit platter is served by volunteers at the Addi Road community centre.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Sydney Croatia’s home stadium, the King Tomislav Club in Edensor Park, is a couple of kilometres south of the Italian-backed Club Marconi and a couple of kilometres north of the Serbian Centre, home of the Bonnyrigg White Eagles. Foster had stints at all three clubs.

“We were at the forefront of the intersection between Anglo-Australia and multicultural Australia,” Foster says. “And to some extent, there was conflict with that and within that, including rivalry between the clubs. We went down to play in Melbourne and our bus would be rocked. Not as in moved, as in hit with rocks.

“I wasn’t engaged with the politics within the communities at the time, but I understood it obliquely, and I learnt some things,” he says, picking at a fruit platter that follows the main meal.

“My understanding of social integration is that interaction between groups is so important. People learn from experience more than from reading. Ignorance is used as a stick to whack people. But 20 years ago, I was ignorant. My wife says now ‘you didn’t think like that 20 years ago. Be gentle’.”

Egyptian mint tea.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Foster’s once-stellar career prospects were fading by his mid-20s. The dream of a senior Socceroos cap receded as injuries mounted. By then he was at Adelaide City and the club gave him an ultimatum: get fit or get out. “I was basically seen as a compo case,” Foster recalls. “So this was my final chance.

“I went back home to Lismore and said ‘by the time I get back down there to Adelaide, I’m going to be the fittest person in this league’. I basically did a triathlon every second day, on top of normal training. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I hate cycling, it hurts my arse – I was doing 30km. I hate swimming, I can’t swim for shit, I was swimming a kilometre. And there’s nothing I hate more than running without a ball. I was running 10 kilometres. I was training to be a Socceroo, not just to be an Adelaide City player.”

It worked. Within months, he was pulling on the green and gold. To Foster, it also validated aspects of his internal belief system. “It taught me you have to go all in. I’ve been prepared to do that ever since. The things I believe in are more important to me than the material goods and the car I drive.”

Foster’s tendency to “go all in” remained as he moved from the playing ranks into work as a sports broadcaster and as a human rights campaigner. It has cost him friendships – such as the fallout from an argumentative on-air interview with Ange Postecoglou over the degree to which coaches are accountable for poor results (the pair patched things up, but Foster’s football community network was split).

Foster in action for the Socceroos in 1997.Credit: Tim Clayton

It was present in his relentless and successful campaign to free Bahraini footballer Hakeem al-Araibi from jail in Thailand and return him to Australia as a refugee, but it cost Foster his status and working relationships within football’s governing body FIFA.

There has been mockery in right-wing media and social media, accusations of dilettantism and do-gooderism. His list of accolades alone is enough to grind the critics’ gears. Foster has more human rights and community awards than you could poke a stick at, to go with his Order of Australia, three Logies for broadcasting and Father of the Year gong. What’s not to hate?

“When I got the AM a few years ago for being a refugee advocate, I said I mustn’t be a very good one,” he says. “Society rewards those who are within areas of challenge but stay within the boundaries of respectability.”

He brushes off criticism just as easily as he sheds praise. “Every time you go and play for a team, the other team basically hates you,” he says. “You get used to the fact that not everyone likes you or wants you to do well. You play for Crystal Palace and every second week you’re in a stadium with 50,000 people who basically want you dead. So, yeah, social media is mild by comparison. I expect pushback.”

As we sip Egyptian mint tea at the conclusion of the meal, Foster opens up about the public spat with former politician, athlete and current Indigenous campaigner Nova Peris that led to both of them stepping down as co-chairs of the Australian Republican Movement in May.

Foster and Peris as co-chairs of the Australian Republic Movement in March 2023.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Differences between the pair came to a head when Foster wrote an open letter to FIFA asking it to ban Israel from international competition on the basis of an interim ruling by the International Court of Justice that was interpreted as meaning the court thought it “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

The court later clarified that no ruling had been made on genocide, and it was still considering the matter. This week, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence chief, as well as a Hamas leader, Ibrahim Al-Masri, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Peris, a staunch supporter of Israel who aligns Zionism with the struggle against colonialism faced by Indigenous Australians, quit in protest at Foster’s stance.

“I thought I was friends with Nova,” Foster says. “I liked Nova. We worked together to some degree. But I wasn’t surprised. We had had a conversation on the phone about the issue of Israel-Gaza, about some commentary she had made publicly, and the unsuitability of that to the role as co-chair. It fell to me to have that conversation with her. That seemed to be the trigger.” The pair have not spoken since.

In an opinion piece, Peris said she resigned the ARM post to take a stand against Foster’s “divisive and inaccurate” views.

The bill.Credit: Rhett Wyman

“I would characterise her views as uncritically pro-Israel,” Foster says. “And I’m not uncritical of anything. But really the issue of Israel-Gaza has got nothing to do with Craig Foster and Nova Peris, so we shouldn’t make it about that. It’s actually about genocide and apartheid.” Israel rejects the accusation it engages in apartheid and is committing genocide in Gaza.

The consequences of the latest collision between Foster’s beliefs and the contested spaces in which he dwells are still playing out. In October, Foster was scheduled to speak at Sydney Grammar School, but he was cut from the program, apparently because of his public views on the Israel-Palestine war. Then, after a backlash against the backlash, parents took matters into their own hands and booked a room at the State Library so their kids could hear Foster speak.

“Human rights advocacy is only real when there’s a cost,” Foster says. “It’s important that people sign petitions. But we are called at some point to actually be consistent with what we believe, consistent with what we’ve said, in an environment where it’s going to cost us. Everyone has those moments. And in my view they are the most important ones.”

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