The Football Solution by George Megalogenis

Author:George Megalogenis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760144319
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Treasurer Paul Keating converted to football, and Collingwood, on the eve of the 1990 election. Following his speech to a club function I arranged a photo with Lou Richards for the front page of the Melbourne Sun. (John Casamento/Newspix)

Queen Elizabeth is introduced to Fitzroy player Bob Hodgkin at the half-time break in their game against Richmond at the MCG, 5 April 1970. It was first VFL game to be played on a Sunday. The Lions defeated the reigning premier by 20 points. (Fairfax)

It didn’t have to be Collingwood. In the early 1990s, every club had a section of its supporter base that racially abused the Indigenous players in the game. But once an Indigenous player forced the game to confront the bigots in the stands, and on the field, the poor reputation of the Magpie cheer squad made it easier for white Australia to hear his demand for a fair go.

Before a game at Victoria Park in April 1993, Nicky Winmar and his St Kilda teammate Gilbert McAdam were familiarising themselves with the layout of the ground. Members of the Collingwood cheer squad spotted them and began hurling racial abuse.

‘We just looked at each other and, whether it was me or him, just basically said to each other, “We’re not going to put up with this crap! Let’s get out there today and run amok. Let’s get first and second best on ground,”’ McAdam recalled. ‘And it was funny. It turned out that way and we won the game, which was the most important thing.’

At the game’s end, Winmar blew kisses to the crowd, then lifted his jumper and pointed to his skin and declared: ‘I’m black – and I’m proud to be black!’ The photo of that moment, taken by Wayne Ludbey, ran on the front page of the Sunday Age.

Winmar had grown up in an Australia that promised equal treatment to its first people. In 1966, the year of Winmar’s first birthday, Vincent Lingiari led the strike for equal pay at the Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory. The referendum to count Aboriginal people in the census was passed before his second birthday. Through the governments of Holt, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and now Keating, both sides of politics had talked up the cause of reconciliation. Winmar need not have known any of the detail to absorb the cultural signal that he should be able to speak up. He drew his line in the sand one month after Paul Keating won the 1993 federal election with a mandate for Indigenous empowerment.

Keating was into his fourth season as a member of the Collingwood football club, and his second year as prime minister. He had already delivered his Redfern address, the first by a prime minister to admit that ‘it was we who did the dispossessing, took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life’. He devoted 1993, the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People, to legislating for native title.

Keating need not have taken Winmar’s side against his own club.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.