Sydney Swans superstar Adam Goodes is one of the most respected elite sportspeople in Australia. The Brownlow Medallist has delivered a revealing and fascinating insight into what it means to be an indigenous footballer by writing a chapter of The Australian Game of Football, a wonderful book created to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Australian football. In an exclusive to afl.com.au, we have been given permission to publish Goodes' chapter in its entirety below.
TO UNDERSTAND what it means to be an indigenous footballer, you need to understand where I come from. Where we come from; what it means to be indigenous.
It’s not about a map, not a town or a community you can stick a pin into and say “that’s home”, because it is not about a place. We all come from different places and different experiences, yet we come from the same place inside.
What we have is a knowledge. A culture. And an understanding borne of being different in skin colour, which in Australia means far more off the football field, but that’s where people like my teammate Micky O’Loughlin and I get to express our Aboriginality.
To understand what it means to be indigenous, you need to understand that we come with baggage. Every one of us. And every one of us has a choice as to how we deal with it – some of us have not yet come to terms with that choice, or circumstances have made making the right choice difficult, if not impossible. But the choice – and the opportunity – remains there, right in front of us.
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LIKE so many Aborigines, some of my baggage rests with my upbringing, and family issues, which is ironic – so much of what makes our culture strong, and resilient, is our tradition of extended family support. But my mother was from the Stolen Generation of the 1960s and 1970s. She is one of 10 children, and nine of them were taken from their parents. She never saw them again. Please, just think about that.
It’s not even as if they were kept together; they were scattered. Over time, they have all had their traumas dealing with this dislocation in their lives, and none can say they have put it behind them. It impacted on mum’s life severely, and since her three boys grew up and moved out, and she lost the focus of looking after us – which she had devoted herself to – some of those issues have returned.
I did not have an entirely happy childhood. Alcohol and domestic abuse were part of my upbringing while my step-father was around; when I was 12 and 13, I used to sneak out the back window and call the cops, just praying they could bring some peace and quiet. It’s why we kept moving. I know this is part of white Australia too, yet it’s such a common experience for the indigenous, and mum’s generation has so much to overcome.
Plus, I’m half-caste. My natural father was white, my mum is full blood. There are places I could go and that would count against me, but being Adam Goodes, AFL footballer – Brownlow medallist – opens doors. Maybe it buys me some immunity. Don’t think being half-caste has not been a major issue in our society – one of Darwin’s early football teams, the Buffaloes, was racially taunted because many of its players in the 1930s came from the Kahlin Compound, a government-managed place where half-caste kids were taken, by law, away from their families. Of course, those laws have been rescinded, but it’s not that long ago in our context of being around for 40,000 years.
I live in a racist country, and that’s just another form of it. Every indigenous person lives a form of that experience every day. I was, and remain, incredibly lucky – I was always the athlete, the tall kid with skills who stood out on the footy field and, at some point as a teenager, that point of difference seemed to overcome my other point of difference; that I was the only black kid on the team, almost without exception, throughout my junior football career. Until my younger brothers turned up, I was also the only black kid in school. Through six primary and a couple of high schools; at Horsham, Merbein, Mildura, wherever my family moved, I was the exception and I copped plenty for it. It continued when I was playing for North Ballarat Rebels in the TAC Cup under-18s.
I tackled this guy one day. He picked it up and I tackled him again, and got a free kick. He got up and said, “F… off you black c….”
My only response has been to become the best footballer I can be, on behalf of my people, to prove that we can overcome whatever is thrown at us. I can be a role model, and prove that hard work and education can overcome the blight of ignorance, which is how I define racism. It’s not just white versus black, either. One of the obstacles for indigenous kids is escaping their own psychological boundaries, which are often imposed by family and community. When I was about 15, I used to walk to school in Horsham. Crossing the street near school, two of my cousins, who most days chose not to go to school, would often ride past on their bikes and call me a “coconut”. I had to ask my mum what it meant. “Black on the outside, white on the inside,” she told me. These kids found it easier to drop out of school and smoke ‘yandi’ (cannabis), and felt that family members who didn’t join them were showing them up. Trust me, I have felt that sting plenty of times.
So has Mick O’Loughlin, who grew up in a high school with about 20 Aborigines, in Salisbury North, South Australia. Mick was happy to chase the opportunity to play in Sydney; there were some negative influences at school, and perhaps he would have gone one way or the other. It can be worse than peer pressure. This is playing us off against the white man – why would we want to enter their world? We’ve got cousins who are just as good at football but threw it away. I argue it gets back to that individual choice.
Being the object of racism so many times that you lose count did not make it any less painful, and when it comes from your cousins, imagine how deeply that cuts. It would be a nice story for me to say it hurt less as I got older, but I’m not certain that’s the case. It has made me stronger though, and built my resolve to be an active member for my race.
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MY hero growing up was Gilbert McAdam. Well, my No. 1 hero was Michael Jordan, but Chicago Stadium is a million miles away from the hot dog van at Central District football ground, where Micky and I had the pleasure of watching McAdam while we were serving spectators.
In 1989, Gilbert became the first indigenous winner of the Magarey Medal, presented to the best and fairest player in the SANFL. I didn’t know that fact until recently but Gilbert’s Magarey certainly made sense to me, because he stood out from the first time I saw him. McAdam was one of four Aboriginal stars at Centrals during the late 1980s: the others were Phil Graham, Eddie Hocking and Derek Kickett. They owned the footy. They did what they liked, especially Gilbert, whose ability to cruise, then change gears, really appealed to me.
Gilbert was at Victoria Park on April 17, 1993, playing for St Kilda. The physical statement made that day by his teammate, Nicky Winmar, is burned into the minds of most indigenous players. St Kilda defeated Collingwood by 22 points, a rare win at Collingwood’s fortress. After the siren, Nicky lifted his jumper and defiantly pointed to his skin. “I remember all the racist comments I was receiving from the crowd. I got sick and tired of what was happening,” Winmar told The Sunday Age in 2003. “As an indigenous person, I wanted to show that I am a human being as well, no matter what colour I am. I said ‘I was black and I was proud’.”
Winmar and McAdam copped incredible racial abuse that day, so much so that Nicky’s opponent, Alan Richardson, was embarrassed; he later told The Age that “if you were on the other side of the fence, you’d hope that you’d go up to the person and say, ‘Look mate, that’s a bit uncalled for’.” But Richardson’s teammate, Craig Starcevich, admitted the abuse was also coming from inside the fence. “It was used as a legitimate tactic to put your opponent off … it was a good way of trying to bring their game undone.” I’m not saying Starcevich did it, but it’s a comment on a time not so long ago. Black – and white – people celebrate what Winmar did that day, one of many notable moments in the fight for indigenous footballers to earn equality and respect, which is all we’re really asking for.
Another major moment we also know well. When Damian Monkhorst called Michael Long a “black bastard” during the 1995 Anzac Day game, it brought Michael’s frustration to a point where decisive, public action seemed his only possible response. I don’t know Michael really well, but I know him well enough to see that he is one of the quietest fellas in football. That masks a determination not only evident when he played football, but continues in his post-career fight against broader, institutionalised racism.
The image of him sitting alongside AFL CEO Ross Oakley, with a clearly (and rightly) uncomfortable Monkhorst completing the picture, is another sight burned into our brains. Long, angry that he did not receive an apology, pushed harder for a more formal process. Within two months, the AFL had responded, putting into place an addition to the code of conduct – cases not resolved by mediation would be referred to the Tribunal, with a maximum fine of $50,000. It’s called Rule 30, which prohibits “conduct which threatens, disparages, vilifies or insults another … on the basis of that person’s race, religion, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin”. And it was a watershed moment in our search for fairness.
I know how Rule 30 works. Intimately. In 2002, I was on the SCG when an opponent called me a “f….. monkey-looking c…”. I know it doesn’t matter who it is, but I was shocked because he was one of the highest-profile players in football, held up as a role model. I reported the incident; it took a while for it to sink in and by the time the player – who admitted his actions – called me to apologise, as per the first phase of mediation, I was so angry I could barely speak to him. Actually, I blasted him for 15 minutes. He explained that as I was playing well, and he was having a poor game, his frustration got the better of him. But it’s under pressure that people expose their true selves, and I was keen to make him understand precisely how his comment made me feel. Fair enough, he was contrite. Yes, he has gone out of his way to say hello in the seasons since, and I truly believe he was sorry for what he said. But my lingering feelings towards that incident – underlined the fact to me that there is still much work to do in and out of football.
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TO understand what it means to be an indigenous footballer, it might help if you think about Colac Sammy. He was not the first Aborigine to play football, but he must have stood out when he ran out for Colac against Geelong in 1877. The local paper reported it this way: “The game caused great amusement at times, ‘Colac Sammy’ in particular creating roars of laughter.” (Geelong Advertiser, September 10, 1877).
Five years earlier, in May 1872, Albert ‘Pompey’ Austin played for Geelong, barefooted, having come down from Framlington Mission, which in 1865 had been established by the Church of England for the Giraiwurung people of south-west Victoria. He had a good reputation as a local athlete, which you might have thought earned him some sense of respect. Not so. Like Colac Sammy, he was also reported to be a figure of the crowd’s derision. It sickens me to think of both men being treated more like circus acts than footballers. (I like to think Austin had some promise, because Geelong played him – as far as we can tell, for the only time – against the reigning premier, Carlton.)
There were a handful of reports about indigenous football in Adelaide during 1885. In May, The Australasian noted, “… the ‘oldest inhabitants’ have been impressed into the service, as a match between Aboriginals was played on the Kennington Oval at Adelaide yesterday.”
Most times these players were drawn in from missions; later that year, The Sportsman referred to a team of Aboriginals from Point MacLeay Mission station who “again” visited South Australia to play Adelaide in a football game, so connections with the game were being made at a more formal level.
The VFL/AFL pioneer was Joe Johnson, who played 55 games for Fitzroy, including the 1904-05 premierships. It was not exactly the opening of the floodgates. In 1924, George Simmonds came down from Kerang and played four games for Melbourne. Five years later, Norm le Brun played the first of his 50 games with South Melbourne, Essendon, Collingwood and Carlton. He was later killed in action in New Guinea during World War II. As the decades unfolded, there were only sparse mentions of indigenous footballers.
Not many drew notice until Doug Nicholls came down from Cumeroogunga, near the Murray River in New South Wales, in the mid-1920s. Carlton encouraged him to come to Melbourne. Ironically, he was shunned by his Blues ‘teammates’, and one story has it that the trainers of the time refused to rub him down. Nicholls left after six weeks and no games.
When he was eight, he had seen his 16-year-old sister taken away by the government. I’m sure this added fuel to his fire, which burned brightly long after his football finished. He went to Northcote in 1931 and played in a premiership team, and was signed by Fitzroy in 1932. A year later, he became the first Aborigine to play for Victoria. He played 54 games with Fitzroy until his retirement in 1937. I can only imagine his courage when, on the very first Aboriginal Day of Mourning, in 1938 – the 150th anniversary of James Cook’s landing – he stood and spoke these words: “Aboriginal people are the skeleton in the cupboard of Australia’s national life … outcasts in our own land.” It’s hardly surprising that Nicholls played a lifelong, prominent public role as an activist and, in 1972, earned a knighthood for this work – the first Aborigine to do so. Football was just one step on his path, which for me is both an inspiration and a lesson.
Eddie Jackson and Norm McDonald had great careers at Melbourne and Essendon respectively in the 1940s and ’50s. McDonald was an attacking half-back flanker who won the 1951 best and fairest and played in two premierships, and captained Essendon for one game in 1953. He was named as a half-back in the Indigenous Team of the Century in 2005. Jackson was a brilliant ball-handler who was 19th man in Melbourne’s 1948 premiership. This pair was unusual, though. Many Aborigines still lived in remote areas in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and Adelaide and Perth were closer to home as footballing options (McDonald and Jackson came from Belmont and Echuca, in Victoria, respectively).
In the 1960s, Graham ‘Polly’ Farmer and Syd Jackson continued McDonald’s tradition of excellence. Farmer’s story is well documented – he is the only member of both the Australian Football League Team of the Century and the Indigenous Team of the Century, of which he is captain. Another Aboriginal player of his era, Elkin Reilly, holds equal interest to me: born at Lake Nash station on the Queensland-NT border, he became, like my mother, a child of the Stolen Generation. In one way, Elkin was fortunate – he was taken in by kind foster parents in Adelaide, educated at Rostrevor College, and excelled in sport. Elkin came to South Melbourne in 1962 and played 51 games before a ruptured appendix ended his career, and he moved to coach in Cohuna, in country Victoria. In another way, Elkin could not have been less fortunate: he was taken from his parents.
At the same time in South Australia, David ‘Soapy’ Kantilla was making his name as the first high-profile indigenous footballer in the SANFL. He played in South Adelaide’s 1964 premiership, and in a 113-game career won two Knuckey Cups as South Adelaide’s best player. There were others – Sturt’s Roger Rigney was a brilliant rover for a dozen years and played in five Double Blues flags (1966-70).
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BY the 1970s, Western Australia was catching that wave. Claremont coach Mal Brown played a role in the recruitment of indigenous players (similar to that achieved by Kevin Sheedy at Essendon more than a decade later). Brown sourced the Krakouer brothers from Mt Barker, WA, but was sacked before getting the chance to coach them. From the late ’70s at South Fremantle, Brown then coached a stunning collection of indigenous talent, including Stephen Michael, Maurice Rioli, Benny Vigona, Willy Roe, Basil Campbell and, later, Nicky Winwar.
The Krakouers are the Aboriginal case study of what it then meant to leave an underprivileged background and be the target of endless racial taunting. “Jimmy’s idea of equality and retribution came at the end of his arm,” said Claremont teammate Allen Daniels.
Yet their sheer ability and determination seemed to overcome their discomfort at leaving Mt Barker. Like a lot of indigenous players, they were only really comfortable on the footy field. Claremont official Murray Ward once said, “With the Krakouers, you had to allow the brilliance to bubble over for your own benefit. You’d think of instances and say, ‘Well, I saw it and there was no plan to it. How on earth did that happen?’ That was the brilliance of them.”
Jimmy and Phil moved to the VFL in 1982, signing with North Melbourne despite workmate Graham Farmer’s advice to join Geelong, because it offered more opportunity for a rural escape. Farmer knew how difficult life as an Aboriginal footballer could be. “If you got into a fight about every stupid comment that was made, you would have got into four or five fights a day,” he once said. He also knew that football delivered a respect to him that he feared would disappear the day his career finished.
The Krakouers, especially Jim, were victims of constant racial abuse; opposition players knew it distracted them, and baited them constantly. Jim visited the VFL Tribunal 16 times, was found guilty nine times, and was rubbed out for a total of 25 weeks. Phil was slower to the boil, going up three times and serving just three weeks. They were easy targets. Their challenge to assimilate was daunting, given they had grown up two of 11 children, as Jimmy once recounted, “in a shack with no water, electricity or that sort of stuff. Candles burning”.
They are another slice of evidence as to why indigenous players have only really emerged in the past two decades. Who would voluntarily choose to enter the environment faced by the Krakouers and their contemporaries? Plus, when Jimmy (October 13, 1958) and Phil (January 15, 1960) were born, Aborigines were not even considered Australian citizens. We could not vote. What hope did we have to fight back?
Farmer’s frustration was shared by Jimmy Krakouer, yet they chose to act differently: Farmer by ignoring the taunts, Krakouer by fighting back physically. Later, Michael Long spoke out and fought racism, forcing the hand of an institution that had done little about it. Trust me, given Michael’s nature, that would not have been an easy thing to do.
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PERCY Cummings played five games for Hawthorn in 1964-65, but was notable for being pioneer Joe Johnson’s grandson. Joe was the first of the 168 known Aborigines to play the VFL/AFL game to the end of 2007. In 2007 alone, there were 72, which underlines that it took a long time for our footprint to make a mark on the game at the elite level.
Our representation has never been healthier. Kevin Sheedy is given quite a bit of credit for blazing this trail as he created an indigenous-friendly culture at Essendon. He was working off a low base, because between the finish of Norm McDonald’s career in 1953 and Michael Long’s 1989 arrival, the Bombers did not have a single indigenous player. Long and Gavin Wanganeen (drafted in 1989) were two of Sheedy’s early forays into Aboriginal talent. Both were outstanding; both were also painfully shy, and Long especially had trouble adjusting to the move from Darwin to Melbourne via Adelaide.
Long and Wanganeen arrived at a time when attitudes were changing on and off the football field. The landmark Mabo native title case, which reinstated indigenous rights to our traditional lands, was handed down in 1992; the Commonwealth Racial Hatred Act became law in 1995, with the stated aim of ensuring “that people of all backgrounds can live a dignified and peaceful life free from racial harassment, intimidation and harassment”.
At the same time, AFL clubs were putting in place networks and structures designed to cater for the sometimes unique demands of indigenous players. Long stated in 1998 that, “Not so long ago, the sense of isolation a young Aboriginal athlete would experience as he or she broke from family to pursue a dream was profound and, in most instances, utterly defeating.”
Long’s forthright position helped us make social progress, too – the AFL supported the launch of Rule 30 with a campaign of public education. And that 2007 participation figure means an indigenous player has to worry more about getting a kick than being racially taunted from either side of the fence. He still has family separation and support issues. I’ve sometimes thought some indigenous players should have their bills paid for them by the club – the minute they get paid, much of it goes out to family, tracing the deep-seated loyalty to supporting community. They sometimes arrive with literacy problems, too, and are afraid to admit it for fear of embarrassment.
And they carry obligations to their culture: death in the family, for instance and what it means – when Mick O’Loughlin’s great-grandmother passed away late in 2007, there was a recognised mourning period for the family. As a cousin, I am included, and the club has to understand, in-season or out, that we are heading home for days.
The closeness of our community cannot be overestimated. All of us know someone who knows someone who relates us to each other. It’s like a spider web. We know what sort of struggles we might have been through, some in specific detail and others just because we might know where they come from, and what that means.
Our support means we respect and care about each other. One day I was on the mark and Melbourne forward Aaron Davey was taking a shot for goal. He missed. As I ran past, I just put my hand out and gave a sort of ‘low’ high five. It was just a “Hey brother, how you doing? Good to see you,” sort of thing. It’s just a game of football. If my coach had seen me, he might have ripped shreds off me. Whereas to me, that was a chance to say “g’day”.
In his autobiography The Power To Win (1998), Wanganeen wrote of the brotherhood: “We may not share the same surname, know each other privately or have even met each other before we cross paths on the footy field, but there is a brotherhood there. We know the difficulties our ancestors have experienced in life and we know that we have come from all over Australia to play in the best football competition there is, leaving our families behind.”
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The AFL’s commitment to indigenous issues has increased to the point where we might be winning parts of the battle, depending on how you define what the battle is. We make up 10 per cent of League lists; given we represent less than two per cent of the Australian population, that’s surely significant. The AFL’s Kickstart program is aimed at giving indigenous kids an opportunity for exposure, be it to the game in general or to their role models specifically. The AFL cannot solve the problems in the communities, the town camps around Alice Springs or in the northern parts of NT and WA. But the game of football can make a difference, and nights like the annual ‘Dreamtime at the ’G’ game between Essendon and Richmond make a big difference.
Almost a quarter (21 per cent) of the kids taken in the 2006 NAB AFL Draft were indigenous. In the same year, the AFL released a six-part indigenous program, including academies based on components of the Clontarf system. Based in Western Australia, Clontarf is the best example yet of football offering a pathway to education – the academies operate in conjunction with schools and colleges, and football is the hook. Academy staff act as mentors and trainers. It’s not perfect but it’s respected. Similarly, Rumbalara in Shepparton has participated in both the Goulburn Valley and Murray football leagues since 1997 and has fostered many education and social initiatives to engender greater involvement between the local Koori and town communities.
AFL academies are also being developed on the east coast. There is one in Cairns, connected to Djarragun College, and two in the western suburbs of Sydney. Football is not their focus: leadership and culture are. The AFL also has the AFL SportsReady program, which helps identify and develop job skills and pathways for indigenous footballers during and after their careers. We should all be grateful that football is part of our cultural landscape as it enables us to see how far as a community we have come. But it can also assist in developing a greater awareness about the spectrum of people who come to the game and the contributions they can make, not just in the AFL, but in the broader community as well.
I’m going to TAFE to learn more about my culture. I don’t have the language or the full blood or the dreaming time stories. I didn’t experience initiation ceremonies. I envy that. So education can teach me about where I’ve come from and the fight my people have been through. At the same time, I can teach others.
I’m a massive believer in education. Get indigenous kids to Year 10 and they will be set up to make their own choices. Encouragingly, from 1996 to 2003, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders school enrolments increased by 36 per cent. Of course, it takes some work to assimilate, but school gives us life skills we all have to learn. My brother Jake got a landscaping trade; now he’s a ranger in a national park. My mum’s insistence for us to go to school has allowed us to follow our dream. But the truth is, it’s still easier to find cousins to smoke and drink with than it is to find cousins who are at school, which is where these programs are so invaluable.
Education is the most logical way forward, but it will be a long, generational change. Former Richmond star and 1982 Norm Smith medallist Maurice Rioli recently told The Age newspaper that in the communities “kids walk up and down the street holding footballs, wearing their AFL jumpers to school. (But) I am banging my head against a brick wall – once they turn 13, they turn to marijuana”. And worse.
Rioli’s point is valid: don’t underestimate the impact of these programs which, more importantly than anything, bring role models into communities. Yet for every kid we can produce as evidence of them having an impact, there are a couple more still falling through the cracks. Football just can’t solve these problems, but it can be a major vehicle to assist.
Sometimes it amuses me when I read about a 17-year-old kid, maybe from the Riverina, freshly drafted and nervous about making the trek to join, say, Fremantle – all the way across the country. Of course he is nervous. It is a big step to take, leaving family and friends, and one that can’t be taken lightly. But it is nothing like the trek an indigenous kid has already made, sometimes just to get drafted. Let’s say he is from a community in Western Australia or the Northern Territory, where there are limited role models or education aspirations. Sometimes the only white people there are the cop or the store-keeper. They don’t always respect you, or they treat you a certain way so that you learn to fall into line. Is that person a good role model, or does he allow us a fair judgment of the white man? I’d obviously say no, but that is the reality. He is the boss. The law.
Indigenous role models are crucial, and football is one of the best opportunities to create them. In the Darwin league, for instance, Gilbert McAdam has coached; so has Warren Campbell, Mark Motlop and Michael ‘Magic’ McLean. Their ongoing influence will be terrific.
Community kids’ vision of the world is limited, but it’s changing. Schools on communities have computers, for instance; the world is getting smaller. Rather than kids dreaming about what exists past the mountain on the horizon, one day these programs, funded by the government and the AFL, will complete the direct link from these communities to a League playing opportunity. It remains distant for so many reasons – primarily culture, health and education – but that gap is closing. Technology is a key. It means we don’t just fly in and fly out to a community for three days, leave some equipment behind and head back to our lives. Through email, videolinks and text messaging, our ongoing opportunity as role models and mentors, and the messages we can reinforce, is greatly improved.
The AFL is the strongest brand in these communities (well, maybe alongside Toyota and Coca-Cola). The AFL is an avenue to people in these communities, and partners with interests in the right place can use football, and the AFL, as an entrée. It is then up to us to foster a legacy that will make a difference in the long term. And one of the biggest challenges the AFL faces is how they will deal with the projected influx of indigenous players into the game. In the next five to 10 years, it is expected that indigenous players will make up between 20 and 25 per cent of all player lists. If this happens, the AFL will become perhaps the single biggest corporate employer of indigenous people per capita in Australia.
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To understand what it means to be an indigenous footballer, you need to feel what it means to be stereotyped. I was lucky – I was always the big kid, usually the ruckman who could run around and do what he liked. Being born in January, I was always playing with younger kids.
Historically, the older that Aboriginal kids get, the more likely we have been to get pushed towards a half-forward flank or forward pocket. Really, this is about two stereotypes: one, that most half-forward flankers don’t chase, don’t pick up and don’t tackle. And two, that most indigenous players don’t do those things either. It’s a perfect fit, logical and comfortable in some people’s minds.
Well, as kids, of course, we’d rather play in the forward line – not many kids put their hand up to be full-back, do they? We’d rather run around and try the cheeky snap at goal, and for many indigenous kids, football remained less formal well into their teenage years.
But Michael Long started something. Andrew McLeod followed. Gavin Wanganeen won a Brownlow Medal from a back pocket. These days, guys like Roger Hayden and Graham Johncock earn their living as defenders, and Aaron Davey has trademarked his forward line pressure.
Academic Peter Kell once argued it was racist to characterise Aboriginal footballers as being specially gifted to suit the game. I’m not so sure. My culture has always celebrated game-playing. Games have taught us as much about social interaction, and were a way to pass on our culture through the generations.
My people are the Adnyamathanha, from near the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. They might have once played a game called Parndo, a version of the game called Marngrook which has been tied to the beginnings of Australian football. Parndo was actually the name of the ball itself, made from opossum skin, about the size of a tennis ball and kicked and hand-passed.
Marngrook was played with a slightly bigger opossum skin ball, usually stuffed with leaves or, as James Dawson noted in his 1881 book, Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia, pounded charcoal. Dawson spent many years observing the tribes of the western district, including the Djabwurrung, near Ararat, the area where Tom Wills – one of Australian Football’s founding fathers – spent so much time on his family property.
Dawson wrote this of one Aboriginal game: “One of the favourite games is football, in which fifty or as many as one hundred players engage at a time. The ball is about the size of an orange, and is made of opossum-skin, with the fur side outwards. It is filled with pounded charcoal, which gives solidity without much increase in weight, and is tied hard round and round with kangaroo sinews.
“The players are divided into two sides and ranged in opposing lines, which are always of a different ‘class’ – white cockatoo against black cockatoo, quail against snake etc. Each side endeavours to keep possession of the ball, which is tossed a short distance by hand, and then kicked in any direction.
“The side which kicks it oftenest and furthest gains the game. The person who sends it highest is considered the best player, and has the honour of burying it in the ground till required next day.”
I know the historians disagree, but I believe Marngrook played a role in the development of Australian football. I do know we were playing a similar game for the joy and excitement of it, before the said founders of the game, Tom Wills and James Thompson and William Hammersley and Thomas Smith (or James Cook, for that matter) came along. People argue that we didn’t have goals, but we did: kick it higher or longer; goals in and of themselves.
I don’t know the truth, but I believe in the connection. Because I know that when Aborigines play Australian football with a clear mind and total focus, we are born to play it.
– Additional reporting by James Weston
