For the love of the game, we have to reconcile this

Indigenous Australians have been a gift to AFL, adding an element of flair that is difficult to quantify in the uniquely embracing culture of Aussie rules. Which is why the Hawthorn report and what it exposes is gut-wrenching.

I was looking forward to writing in a wholeheartedly positive fashion about one of my great passions this week, Australian rules football. Back in 2017 I used the excuse of AFL grand final day to write about the great Indigenous game and what it meant to me and so many others, but sadly the racism controversy at Hawthorn (“The Family Club”) has cast a pall over this week and there are negative aspects, too, to discuss.

After moving to Sydney from Adelaide 13 years ago, having travelled regularly to most parts of this wonderful country, it strikes me that there is only one fundamental cultural divide between our states, and it is between the Aussie rules states and the northerners in NSW and Queensland.

The banana-benders and New South Welshmen love their sport, to be sure, and when they are talking cricket they are just like the rest of us, but in winter they just do not have the unifying, egalitarian and ever-present social glue of Aussie rules footy.

From Hobart to Halls Creek, from Margaret River to the Mornington Peninsula, the people in the footy states have a common language, where men and women, archbishops and activists, pensioners and politicians converse with familiarity and identify each other through the permanent brand of their tribal team loyalties. All sports are levellers, and all are unifying in a way, but few, if any, comfortably sweep up and enmesh the genders, races, religions and social standings the way Australia’s game does.

To discuss weekend sport in Sydney is to invite a confusing differentiation between rugby codes (split largely on socio-economic factors), soccer and the game they call AFL but which everyone south of Albury and west of Dubbo knows as footy.

Please do not get me wrong, I love Sydney, and people in this great state and in Queensland are passionate about their various sports, but they will never know the uniquely embracing culture of Aussie rules until it eventually takes over from the other codes.

Which is why the Hawthorn report and the underlying problem of racism that it exposes is gut-wrenching. Indigenous Australians have been a gift to our game, adding an element of flair that is difficult to quantify but which rugby league and union fans have seen in their ranks too, although perhaps not as prominently. You cannot explain the spatial awareness of the Krakouer brothers, dancing feet of Andrew McLeod, goal sense of Eddie Betts, majesty of Adam Goodes, running power of Michael Long or long-range artistry of Buddy Franklin; you just have to witness it.

Adam Goodes points into the crowd alerting security to comments made during the 2013 AFL round 9 match against Collingwood at the MCG,

Yet, while players such as Franklin and Betts have been among the most popular in the game, Goodes, one of the game’s most decorated players, was booed out of it. People are prone to oversimplify the Goodes saga, it involved more than racism, but there can be no doubt racial issues played a role, and even after that was made known, his humiliation at the hands of some crowds continued. This great player, this great man, never deserved what he received. In fact he deserved only the opposite, accolades.

Footy has been a path out of difficult socio-economic situations for many players, especially Indigenous players. I once had the pleasure of chatting with Michael O’Loughlin, the retired Sydney Swans all-Australian and premiership champion, at a mutual friend’s 50th birthday party.

A few years earlier I happened to be at the Swans post-match function after O’Loughlin’s 300th game, and his teammates teased him about how many houses he owned. O’Loughlin and Goodes started a foundation to support Indigenous education – these are blokes who have used their footy talents to build something wonderful for themselves and others.

Anyway, in our party conversation, O’Loughlin told me how he played his junior footy for a club called Salisbury North, in the housing commission dominated northern suburbs of Adelaide. I knew it well, having played against them back in the day.

A pedestrian walks past a giant mural of Adam Goodes.

This team is based in an area where there are often old lounge suites on front verandas, overlooking stripped-down cars and cyclone fences. They were tough to play against.

O’Loughlin never played a senior game for the club because he was recruited to the Central Districts juniors and then drafted by the Swans as a teenager. He told me his mum made him promise he would rectify that when he retired.

And so, eventually, this retired AFL superstar went back to Salisbury North and played a senior game, for his mum, and for that community. I so wish I had been there to see it.

Imagine what it meant to the stalwarts and young kids of that club, what it said about hard work and opportunity, respect for your roots, and a son’s love for his mother. This is the power of footy, this is how Indigenous players not only boost the game and create opportunities for themselves but can inspire communities.

Yet, inclusive and uplifting as it is, there are hurdles, big hurdles. As we have seen exposed this week.

I have played footy with people from all walks of life – priests, hippies, doctors, farmers, jobless, tradesmen, businessmen, teachers, public servants – and from every ethnic background you could imagine: Greek, Italian, Dutch, German, Indian, Indigenous and others. Glorious as this has been, there were often racial slurs on the field, and even jokes among teammates that, in retrospect, were off. At training with a league club in Adelaide once in fading light, I remember one player yelling out to an Aboriginal player for all to hear, “Open your mouth and smile, so we can see you.” It was met with much mirth by most players at the time but, thinking back, it makes me wince.

As a young man yet to play an A-grade game for suburban Adelaide team Athelstone, I bumped into one of the star A-grade players (let’s call him Johno) at a pub when I was having drinks with an excavator driver I had been working with. The red-haired driver, predictably known as Bluey, proceeded to tell Johno, my Indigenous A-grade exemplar, that he must be Indian because he seemed too smart to be Aboriginal.

Bluey and Johno were both grown men and I was a gobsmacked youngster. When Bluey left, I asked my clubmate why he hadn’t corrected him and put him in his place.

“Only the three of us heard it,” Johno said, “and you and I both know he is the one who made a dickhead of himself, so let’s leave it at that.”

His forbearance has stuck with me over the many decades since, but many weeks later, after I had made the A-grade team and played alongside this brilliant footballer, Johno caused a stir by failing to turn up to a game because he had spent the night in the lockup. Perhaps someone like Bluey had gone too far in testing that patience.

When footy clubs such as Hawthorn recruit players they are typically teenagers, often moving from interstate or regional areas. AFL clubs usually set them up with accommodation and appropriate housemates, ensure they eat well, develop good habits, and stay away from booze, partying and other distractions.

Parents and guardians are normally consulted in this pastoral care, which benefits the players and therefore the club. So, the idea that Hawthorn would be talking to players about relationships, trips to see family, living arrangements, and even personal issues such as pregnancies, is not surprising.

What needs to be established is whether these discussions strayed from counselling to demands, from support to instruction, whether the interference was beyond the pale and, crucially, whether it was more overbearing and intrusive for Indigenous players than for others.

We only have allegations to go on; claims that were never put to the relevant Hawthorn coaches and staff from that period. Former Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson and former football manager Chris Fagan have been slurred, their careers at Brisbane and North Melbourne put on ice, despite never having had the opportunity to put their case.

They vehemently deny the claims, but the allegations have already run widely across the nation. So far they have been denied natural justice.

That injustice needs to be remedied, as does any mistreatment of former Indigenous players, and the best way to do that is to establish the truth as quickly as possible.

Apart from the game’s rich history of egalitarianism and inclusiveness, the AFL’s preachy attitude to these issues demands it provides full transparency as it establishes the facts, repairs any damage and takes practical action to ensure all recruits know what to expect, and clubs know what to provide, when it comes to pastoral care in the future.

This all comes on the back of revelations about my own club, the Adelaide Crows (I’m an official ambassador), using personal traumas in the lives of Indigenous players (and others) as fodder for mind games aimed at building mental resilience. Some players, including Betts, say it caused mental anguish and team discontent.

Aussie rules is going from strength to strength, with this month’s record television rights deal underscoring unrivalled interest in the most attacking and spectacular football code in the world.

In my involvement with junior footy in Sydney, there are plenty of families with AFL roots from Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania or the West, but we are outnumbered by parents with league, union or soccer backgrounds who have been recruited by the enthusiasm of their sons and daughters for Aussie rules.

This makes my heart sing. But so long as our great egalitarian game can leave champions as loved and admired as Goodes and Betts feel the sickening sting of racist barbs, then we still have serious flaws to reconcile.

I dedicate this column to one of the finest footballers and best blokes I ever played alongside. Chris Grigg, of the Norwood and Athelstone football clubs, passed away this week after a brave struggle against motor neurone disease. We all loved you, Doc. Fightmnd.org.au