When it’s time to pile into the bus, or onto the back of the flatbed truck, or to ride on the creaking bones of a senile old Holden, then the kids get wild and the dogs bark unceasingly and dart about, as one bare, preoccupied foot after another kicks them out of the way.

When it’s time to take some long, gunbarrel-straight, dusty track from Adelaide to the Alice, or the Alice to Yuendemu, then all the clans, sometimes even from as far away as the Tiwi islands, where the Riolis are from, travel this land’s formidable distances through remote and desolate tracts, undaunted by journeys that white fellas in four wheel drives are warned never to take lightly. On the way, they sleep anywhere; camp on the roadside; eat anything the stingy land yields up.

The game out here is like the country itself: strict in its disorder; random in its precision. Don’t be fooled by the shabby humpies that dot the vast, red, sparsely-treed landscape, or the tiny toilet of corrugated tin that rises up out of a pile of litter and discarded rags of clothing, and doubles as a change room. Don’t be fooled by the joyous, freewheeling spectacle before your eyes. There are strict rules, some from thousands of years ago when it was Marn Grook that they played. An ancient kinship code might determine how you treat the opposition. An emu dreaming might have been chanted before a game, giving speed to their legs. The Papunya team have the honey ant as their symbol, because Papunya is where the honey ant dreaming – the Warrumpi – resides. Up in Gunbalanya – you might know it as Oenpelli – their carefree play is presided over – not impartially – by the jagged escarpments Inyalak and Nimbabbir. These secret-sacred places, and this game, are just chapters of the same story, as are the croc-infested marshlands not far away.

Sometimes old, ingrown quarrels are settled on the footy field. Sometimes, with a word, they split down the middle and two teams form. Relationships will be respected. You don’t line up on certain clan members. You go rough on this bloke, but not that bloke.

Their games become part of their story, not just some trivial event that only sticks to memory as long as it occupies the back – or front – page of a tabloid. Go there, and you’ll discover new reasons to play football.

Far away from the cool, comforting scents of grass, no wind stirs the dust. No grandstand casts shade, but the shadows of men are very, very long on the pocked, lunar earth. Only a bounced ball or a swinging foot beat the dust into puffs of red powder.

They don’t really train here, or practice “skills”. They play games in which they try things out of the ordinary hour after hour – mostly out of blissful ignorance of the ordinary – and push the boundaries because they don’t know what they are; in which they joyously harass a hapless object – sometimes a ball, sometimes a bundle of socks. And so, occasionally, amidst the chaos, you’ll see something incredible happen.

Kids occupy full days on a clear acre of earth on the outskirts of an outstation. The arc, that signature of sport, is inscribed here most spectacularly, against the red parchment. Before the ball has described its sweeping curve toward four rickety sticks, or trees, or whatever else serves as goals, the kick has already become a cartwheel, which is about to twist and leap into a somersault.

On the weekend, the men play. The ball makes its unconventional way towards, then away from, the goals and just when your conventional eye tells you it’s a kick away from the full forward’s waiting arms, a wingman has it, and, instead of kicking, dashes inexplicably around the open spaces. So agile, seemingly fragile, but when they hit the bone-breaking blood-red ground, they bounce up and keep running, their tempo uninterrupted. You realise then how tough some of them really are.

More than a game? It gives hope and reason to endless, sometimes hellishly dreary days.

*

Outback football is like a smile, or music, or a painting. That is, a place where dialogue can begin without words, and two worlds that still know little of each other can connect. AFL, the sport of the cities, and outback footy have always had a symbiotic relationship. It’s just lucky – a historical accident – that Marn Grook helped shape the modern game, called Australian Rules, and that, somehow, it’s spirit stays alive in players – Long, McLeod, Wanganeen, the list is getting longer – who come along like flames to impart some Marn Grook to the whitefella’s game; to bring a little of their outback style of play with them.

You see it most spectacularly in those split-seconds when chaos threatens the structure of a game and years of “skill acquisition” come to nought, and the boundaries melt away and a team looks for something incredible to happen. A McLeod, or maybe a Leon Davis, will shift into the play, acquire the ball somehow with one touch, and spring away. Who knows what visions sometimes fill their eyes? Do they see, momentarily, palm trees and humpies, or treeless wastes? Or hear the family shouting from beyond crooked white boundary lines?

A smart coach won’t even try to capture or contain their visions. All he can do is hope that something of that skinbound spell will somehow touch the rest of the team.

For every McLeod or Long who makes it, and for every Campbell or McAdam who passes through brightly and too briefly, there is some champion out there – perhaps one of the greatest ever to lace on, or not to lace on, a boot – whose name just sinks anonymously into the desert soil. Or ten talented Top End kids who just won’t come. But to tamper with outback footy might be to harm it. It’s tricky, even for those indigenous ambassadors who are there to catch them as they jump from one world to another, and to eventually turn that jump into a short stroll.

Still, kids from the centre like Richie Cole are in the vanguard of a new generation who fear less the loss of their identity or the hostility of the European. The sorts of faces you see on these pages are beginning to become familiar around the AFL clubs.

*

Times are changing fast. In 1994, when Collingwood came to Darwin to play the Aboriginal All Stars, and the status of a Carey or Buckley was revered and unattainable, a lot of little Aboriginal kids carried their water and their bags, just to get close to them. Today, those kids are AFL footballers, and they’re beginning to show the next generation that they, too, are heroes. This year, they formed another All Star team, and the loose collection of indigenous triers of ’94 had become a proud brotherhood of worthy champions, some of whom had won premiership medals for their clubs.

Before their game in Darwin against Carlton, an indefinable emotion overcame them and Andrew McLeod had to finish a speech begun by Michael McLean – a member of that ’94 team. Suddenly they all realised at once what they meant to each other and to those dreary, sometimes hellish lives.

When the game began, only one team was playing football. That was Carlton. They didn’t seem to know what the All Stars were playing. Some say it was Marn Grook. The emotion and passion of their joyful display overwhelmed the Blues. The boundaries dissolved, the ball made its unconventional, but very deliberate, way upfield, and found the sticks again and again.

The whitefella should be thankful. When he strode though the lushness of our arid centre and kicked over the things he thought useless, he didn’t kill the spirit of Marn Grook. To watch the All Stars play – to watch any outback team play – is to discover new reasons to love football.

As each world comes to know the other a little better, the two games might become one, and Australian Rules will have a more exciting future than anyone can know.

Our poets and novelists have called the Australian centre many things, but the emptiest of lands? The wastes of the Never-Never? A vast, empty womb?

It’s the soul of this country!

Published in ABC Sport Monthly, February, 2003