The sad, sorry saga of Adam Goodes makes a number of emphatic points – none of them pleasant – but the most striking one is one that Indigenous people have always known: that a black in a white society can never be accepted on his or her own terms. In other words, the subjugation of a people and a land by the colonial invaders is continuing still, albeit by different, more subtle means, than displacement and murder.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The rampant hostility of large segments of AFL crowds towards Goodes – a champion footballer, elite athlete and one-time Australian of the Year – has made it abundantly clear that anyone who still flaunts his Indigenous colours and attitudes is not welcome in the white man's club. The price for admission is, and has always been, to adopt the trappings, sincerely or otherwise, of the white man, to become an honorary white.
Goodes has always pricked the uneasy Australian conscience with his outspoken and measured commitment to an uncompromising stand against racism and the vilification that attends it, but there is a tacit expectation among many that because of the accolades heaped upon him, including two Brownlow medals, Australian football's highest award, he should show more respect to the society that has extended him its hand. He has been admitted to the club and is therefore expected to refrain from criticism of how it is run and the state of the furniture.
Goodes' singling out in the crowd of a 13-year-old girl, who had called him an ape, made headlines – but not always for the right reasons. Her vilification was unconscionable, but in sections of the media she was, remarkably, cast as the victim and Goodes as the bully. Football, like all spectator sports, is not just watched but offers an opportunity for the crowd to act out, and as such it has its pantomime heroes and villains – but this is no longer vaudeville and stage make-believe.
Goodes, one-time good bloke, had departed from the script. Decorated, lauded, celebrated; what more did he want? Goodes had been put on notice and on May 29 this year he crossed an existential threshold when he performed a tribal celebratory war dance at the SCG, directed at Carlton supporters who had been taunting him.
It was in all probability a spur of the moment action, and far from having been calculated, but what it did in the minds of those who demanded that a high-profile black man act like a white man was that he had demonstrated once and for all: he was not one of us. His honorary membership had been summarily cancelled.
This can be read at many levels, and should provoke us collectively to reflect about what underlying attitudes tell us about contemporary Australia despite 40 years of anti-discrimination legislation and decades of talk about reconciliation. Even more extraordinary is the fact that this sordid little drama is being played out amid serious discussion about amending the constitution, which Australians never do lightly, to recognise the country's original inhabitants. It seems that between the people in the outer ground at the footy and the lawmakers on the hill there is a vast and troubling gap.
There can be little argument that Indigenous people in Australia are profoundly disadvantaged across all measures, but the stark reality of the 17-year gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians should be a matter of national shame. Yet football – and Australian football in particular – has offered a lifeline to many talented Indigenous players whose numbers in the AFL far exceed their proportion in the population, and the AFL, to its very great credit, has been uncompromising in its stand against racial vilification and has promoted and celebrated Indigenous involvement. But is the downside of this a public expectation that the black man, while retaining his skin colour, somehow puts his identity, and his culture, aside in craven gratitude?
It has not always been easy, and different eras the in AFL (and the former VFL) have handled the race issue differently. The late Sir Douglas Nicholls, the first Aborigine to be knighted and who later served as governor of South Australia, was an outstanding sportsman and was recruited by Carlton in the VFL in 1931, but the hostile attitude of other Carlton players meant he did not play a game. The next year he joined Fitzroy and, fearing the same cold shoulder, sat alone in the rooms. But on this occasion the legendary Haydn Bunton befriended and championed the shy young man and he went on to a successful career, becoming the first Aborigine to be selected in the Victorian team.
Fast-forward to the 1960s when Geelong recruited the freakish Graham "Polly" Farmer from Western Australia – and he revolutionised the game with his use of handball. Farmer's race was handled by not referring to it; it became a sort of diplomatic colour blindness. But a few years later when the mercurial Syd Jackson joined Carlton, his race was treated as a novelty – and made news. For example, when he had to take time off to attend to family issues, the headlines proclaimed: "Syd goes walkabout".
The game has come a long way since then, but perhaps not so the nation. Indigenous players have brought excitement and flair and, in the case of Goodes, dignity and grace as well. Why can't he be allowed to be who and what he is?
If Goodes is forced out of the game – and we might well have seen the last of him – it will be yet another wretched humiliation heaped not just on a long-suffering people, but on an entire nation that will have been diminished. Is this really who we are?
Dr Norman Abjorensen, of the ANU's Crawford School of Public Policy, is co-author of The Historical Dictionary of Australia (4th ed.)
