In 2000, ten percent of the players in the AFL convened at a Players Association forum. All were Aboriginal, and most were beset by similar problems. The specific outcomes of the meeting, organised by former Carlton great Syd Jackson and business partner, Terry Kennedy, who run the Indigenous Sports Foundation, are confidential.

Suffice it to say that most of the players’ responses revolved around the issue of expectations. Of course this is a blanket statement. Beneath it you’ll find a tangle of matters central to anyone’s existence: identity, belief, philosophy and what makes for a life well-lived. The problems they face only reflect the journey most aboriginal people face when they endeavour to enter mainstream society.

Despite the highest levels of participation by indigenous sportspeople in history, many have inexplicably leapt out of the mainstream while at the height of their powers. To the non-aboriginal, this is an enigma. The list of “disappearances” reads like Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned.

* In October 2001, Andrew Walker absconded from a Wallabies camp and was immediately suspended from the team. Walker’s explanation: “I had to see my family straight away”.

Four months earlier, Walker felt a similar compulsion when the Wallabies stopped in Sydney on the way to Perth from New Zealand. His explanation then: “It was a spur of the moment thing. I just wasn’t thinking clearly.” It was a “brain explosion”. Walker admitted it was time “to grow up and start acting like an adult”. He told team management he would abide by their disciplinary code.  After missing a Test against South Africa, he was reinstated for the final Tri-Nations game against the All Blacks.

Second time around, Coach Jones made it clear that Walker’s compulsions were unacceptable in the world of modern sport: “Every team revolves around being a disciplined unit. Unfortunately, Andrew has broken those rules again”.

There was no shortage of explanations. Team mates cited his chronic homesickness on tour. Ex-rugby league team mates referred to “Uncle’s” inability to say no to the demands of his many relations. His former coach Phil Gould mentioned “people who have tremendous influence over Andrew, and to whom he has no resistance.”

In the press, the most common allusion was to alcohol, despite Walker’s insistence that the last time this was a problem was ten years ago. “They keep bringing it up”, he lamented.

* In 2001, after failed attempts to sustain a career with three clubs, Sean Charles returned to his Murray River community. Then St Kilda Football manager, Brian Waldron, said Charles had trouble keeping up with the demands of his family on the one hand, and those of a professional footballer on the other. ”There are some compliance issues that we just can’t negotiate”. In nine seasons, Charles had played 56 games.

* Gary Dhurrkay was thrilled at the chance to play for North Melbourne after being recruited from Fremantle. “I want to play many more games and give myself my best chance.” Two years later, after a sleepless night, he called the players together at Arden Street to announce his departure.  ”I’m going back (to Nhulunbuy in Arnhem Land) to learn the culture I believe in ”, he told the press. ”Football has robbed me of my beliefs. If I don’t learn the ways I’d regret it for the rest of my life.”

There are many more examples. Adrian McAdam had a brilliant two-year career with North Melbourne, kicking 70 goals in one season before retiring. Fred Campbell was an exceptional talent for the Swans, but, “retired” at eighteen, returning to Alice Springs, never to be seen again. Ewan McGrady and Leo Dynevor exited top-level rugby league when they looked like taking the game to new heights.

*

Words have failed to tell us what these actions signify. This is because they tend to point to motives that we understand, but are inadequate to describe real causes.

Underpinning these words are European assumptions about “commitment”, “fame” and “fortune”, to which we default when explanations fail. These words mean something different to an aboriginal, especially one from a community far from urban centres. If we were to give both parties – Aboriginal and the rest – a way to depict these ideas without words, both the medium and the message would be unrecognisable to the other party. And then the real talking would have to begin.

In the case of Andrew Walker, the dailies couldn’t resist the temptation of etymologically linking his surname to an outdated European explanation for Aboriginal behaviour. One paper trumpeted it as a headline: “Walkabout Walker does it again”. This makes Syd Jackson bristle:  “That’s an insult saying ‘going walkabout’. That’s white man terminology”. Jackson is not overly-sensitive. For a man who was taken from his mother at age three, he’s surprisingly balanced. He also knows it’s time the issue was dealt with on both sides.

Aboriginal academic and administrator Darren Godwell sees the Walker case this way: “People see it through that screen of racism. ‘He’s black, he’s done this. It must be because he’s on walkabout.’ That’s how racism pervades understanding of behaviour”.

At times, well-meaning non-Aboriginal academics and journalists who were yesterday’s solution have become today’s problem. When they write of “aboriginal sportspeople”, they unwittingly create the illusion of a homogeneity that doesn’t exist. Although “aboriginal” is a necessary generic term, it fragments, like the issues themselves, upon closer scrutiny. Those who first revealed the problem to mainstream Australia have served to obscure it over time.

At times, words have served an inverse kind of racism. Faced with the problem of not being able to mention a player’s race unless race was the subject, journalists in the politically-correct nineties reverted to a crypto-racist vocabulary of code words such as “silky-smooth skills” or wrote of uncanny, otherworldly abilities, and “magic”. All code for the same thing: “he’s Aboriginal”.

What do the actions of Aboriginal sportspeople really signify, and how do we account for these motivations? What impels them to seek in life things that mainstream society cannot appreciate?

Indigenous sportspeople from all cultures, especially those from remote communities, jump uneasily between two poles, straddle two entirely different cultures, each demanding in its own way. But the demands of their own cultures are by far the more compelling, and the extent of these demands is only now becoming apparent – to either side – as more and more of them play elite sport. Only those close to the situation can really explain the new predicaments that increased participation has uncovered.

Kinship, community and family ties

Aboriginality is a complex thing. Ask any Aboriginal. Cathy Freeman and Kyle Vanderkuyp have felt an inordinate burden of expectation from Australia’s indigenous population, even though neither has the same cultural experience as those from the communities. Aussie Rules superstar of the ‘70s, Barry Cable, never revealed his aboriginality until after he retired, was maligned for it, and is still ostracised in some sections. Similar mutterings were made about Jason Gillespie and Laurie Daley, because they hadn’t made much of their aboriginal blood. Actually, it seems inappropriate to speak of having Aboriginal “blood”, as one might when discussing other races. One is either Aboriginal, or not. Skin ties are important. Degrees of “removal” in family relationships is a non-aboriginal concept. A cousin is a brother. A community never forgets which part of the land you belong to. Says Jackson: “You can’t leave the clan. With the name structure, you’ve been given the skin name and you’re part of the clan. You never lose it”.

There is an invisible map of Australia you won’t find in the atlases. It’s divided into territories which are, in fact, the “nations” of indigenous clans. When those boundaries are crossed, one’s social behaviour has to take into account these new conditions. When Jackson came to Melbourne in the ’60s, the brilliant rover also entered the lands of an entirely different indigenous race – the Kooris – with different clan groupings (e.g., the Yorta Yorta) that were foreign to him. The social implications were enormous: “It was difficult coming into Koori territory as a Wangai bloke from Western Australia. They gave me a skin name and accepted me into Koori society, but I can’t do anything over and above just to support the Kooris because I’m in their territory, and there’s a whole story just in that. There’s lots of issues just on the black side, let alone the white side.

“I’ve been over here 35 years, but I’m always a Wongai man. They all know it”

.Says Terry: “He could have upset quite a few people in the indigenous community here if he didn’t do certain things, and he wouldn’t know it”.

AFLPA President, Rob Kerr sees this as a major issue today: ”I’d think nothing of moving to Perth. But with indigenous players it is a sensitive matter because they’re moving into a different community with different hierarchies and expectations.” Quite a few current footballers find the social burden so great that they never go out, preferring to stay in and watch television.

In addition to the expectations of three cultures – the new “country”, a new white society, and a football club, these players also cope with those of their own, distant, community. A European explanation of Aboriginal conduct extant for a century now is the belief that, whenever an Aboriginal person succeeds, a flood of cousins, uncles, brothers and sisters “come out of the woodwork” to “hold out their hands”.

“It’s more complex than that”, says Kennedy. “Kinship obligations are much greater than they are in ours. It can be abused, sure, but it will always be a standard, no matter how it’s dealt with”.

Godwell explains it this way: “Indigenous lives are difficult. Sport in aboriginal lives has been played up so much, these guys do well and become significant figures in their communities. There are very few positive interactions. But sport is one. When a kid does well, it taps into a pipeline of esteem and pride and sense of self and community. They’re expected to give something, but at the same time the demands are that they don’t forget or leave the community. You’re expected to go out and do your thing, and be an active member of the community at the same time”.

Add the potent ingredient of shame to these impossible responsibilities, and the effect can be paralysing. In his rookie year, Dean Rioli went through hell. While everyone believed he had injury concerns and were critical of his fitness level, neither his club nor his community were aware that, for a year, he was living on cheap canned food. Terry Kennedy explains his predicament: “As a rookie, he got $10,000 a year. But the assumption from his family and friends was ‘he’s playing for Essendon every week, he’s on TV, he must be doing well’. He felt too ashamed to say, ‘I’m only on ten thousand dollars’”. In Aboriginal culture, shame can be so powerful that it can kill a man or woman. It’s a complex of emotions that cannot be done justice by any definition you will find in the OED. “Rioli was shelling out his measly ten grand up north. He had no problem with the obligations. But he did have a problem saying he had nothing to give. So he ate baked beans and tried to look like he was on a hundred grand a year.”

It’s an impossible bind, an untenable dual citizenship that requires physical presence in both places at one time. “It’s as bad as it gets”, Godwell observes. “You’ve got the obligations, but you don’t get the affirmations from being a member of that community – being physically there”.

Rob Hyatt and Ralph White are Indigenous Development Officers at Victoria’s Department of Sport and Recreation. They run cross-cultural awareness sessions, not only with AFL teams, but country and suburban teams where misunderstandings are engendered. “We did a session with Richmond. The administration arm had stories about their indigenous players ringing up because there’s a need for them to be somewhere, based on a community tie.

“When the indigenous football/netball carnival is on in Victoria, the community says to the players ‘ah come on, you gotta play’, without understanding that if something happens to them on that playing field, they’re no good on any playing field”.

Jackson finds the “rules are rules” mentality of clubs both a necessity and a problem for the aboriginal player: “If the committees and the managers take too long to make a decision, they’ll go anyway, whether the club wants them to stay or not, and they’ll go without telling the club. They’ll explain it all later.”

Hyatt believes fallacies about the unity and homogeneity of “aboriginal footballers” has caused its share of misunderstandings. “There’s an expectation that because they’re aboriginal they know everything that’s aboriginal. They feel pressure when someone asks for their opinion on Native Title, when only about five percent of people, Aboriginal and European, know anything about it.”

Hyatt attributes Andrew Walker’s behaviour to deep commitment. He was in Canberra once with a development squad of young cricketers. “We went across and watched the Brumbies train. In the middle of the session, Walker came running over, ‘what are you boys doing here?’ He’d looked over and saw young Koori kids standing there, so he felt compelled to break away from training and see how they’re going and what they’re doing, regardless of what was happening out on the track”.

To many, the sum of an aboriginal sportsperson’s behaviour represents a “lack of discipline”. But what is underestimated is that many of these sportspeople have been encultured to value the hierarchies and rules of their clans. Therefore, they have more restraints on their behaviour than most of us endure.

Fame, fortune, sharing, commitment, individuality and other words.

To the non-aboriginal, it’s easy to interpret the behaviour of indigenous sportspeople as “self-sabotage”. Why else would anyone turn their back on fame and fortune just when they have them in their grasp? But people like Gary Dhurrkay don’t see their return to the lands of their forefathers as a regression.

Godwell explains some of the deeper motives: “Aboriginal footballers jump between being, say, a Koori, in impoverished circumstances where family is all-pervasive, to a world where the individual is sacrosanct, and there’s wealth to reward those that pursue goals to the exclusion of anything else. The real test of longevity for an Aboriginal sportsperson is this: if they can switch hats at will, they’ll handle it. Those who turn their back on their sport when at their peak are the strongest of the lot. They’ve been over to this other world and decided ‘I don’t want any of that’. They’re the guys people find most enigmatic. They’ve decided to pursue a set of values absolutely alien to mainstream Australia”.

Chris Carroll co-ordinates Aboriginal sports programs at the national level. “They don’t value fame as much as family, and that’s why that break with family is difficult, and isn’t always handled successfully.” Those who do handle it successfully will share the spoils willingly. I remember talking with an Essendon player who related how Michael Long was giving away the complimentary tracksuits and jumpers he was entitled to as a player as quickly as he got them. Lionel Rose shared a great deal of his small fortune in his early years.

“A lot of our Development Officers, particularly in West Australia, have been former elite sportspeople”, says Carroll, “Then they go out to live in these places where there’s fifty or sixty people. And they’re happy to live there”.

Racism

Racism isn’t what it used to be. Vilification laws, and pioneers like Nicky Winmar and Michael Long, have seen to that. What we’re coming to understand, however, is how a racially-based remark might impact differently on an Aboriginal than, say, a Maori, or an Italian. It goes beyond mere hurt. Darren Godwell has taken this explanation to a new level. He studied retention rates for Aborigines in rugby league, and believes a “positive spiral of belief, practice, performance and then belief again” characterises their participation.

“This begins with the belief that Aboriginals are inherently good at sport. From this flows a willingness to try things out of the ordinary. Occasionally, one of those things happens. That contributes to a good performance, which builds confidence, which leads to a belief that this performance is due to the fact that they’re Aboriginals, as opposed to the fact that they’ve practiced. They believe they succeed because they’re Aboriginal”.

When they move into elite levels, their identity, like anyone else’s, becomes defined by the sport they play. “But Aboriginal footballers start at a point where they see themselves as Aboriginal, and black. Confidence and self-esteem is built up around the fact: ‘you’re a great talent. You must have that black magic.’ That stereotype doesn’t allow for the fact that these guys trained their arses off for five years. Being black stays with them. But every elite athlete wants to think of themselves as, say, the best footballer they can be. The telling point as to whether aboriginals have hung around or not was when that identity was absolutely ruptured by a racist experience.

One rugby league player he studied was on the receiving end of a half-time blast that changed his self-perception in relation to everyone around him. “The coach berated Aboriginal players. The phrase he used was “what the f*** do you think’s happening out there? A black holiday?” Every one of those players (in the study) experienced an incident like that. Everyone else around them is aspiring to be the model professional footballer. Their identity is ripped to pieces on the basis of one thing: race”.

“It’s the litmus test as to whether an individual sticks around”.

The solutions are support, transition and understanding. The methods are becoming clearer. There is a movement away from patronage, toward empowerment. More than ever, those who are intimately involved with the Aboriginal experience are having input.

Across Australia, a plan is loosely unfolding; its outlines are still difficult to discern. It remains for them to join the dots.