triadabit.blogg.se

Public pressure, coupled with Long’s relentless pursuit, forced the AFL to introduce Rule 30, the country’s first sporting law banning racial vilification on the field.ĪFL administrators now pose comfortably before that famous image of Winmar. “And so overnight the culture of the game changes.” “As the politics of the dispute escalates, the football public, which is overwhelmingly white, back the black man against the white institution,” he says. “Long is Australian football’s Mandela moment,” says writer and journalist Martin Flanagan, who has recently written a book about Long and race in the game. Long did something new: he made an official complaint. In 1995, during the annual Anzac Day match, probably the game’s biggest stage outside the grand final, a Collingwood player wrestling with Indigenous Essendon stars Michael Long and Che Cockatoo-Collins cried, “Get off me, you little black cunt”. He roared, “I’m black and I’m proud to be black.”Ģ2 years and have we've gone nowhere #AFL /KJx9mrmkab- Greg McKenna July 28, 2015

In front of a heaving Collingwood crowd hurling racist abuse, Indigenous player Nicky Winmar suddenly lifted his St Kilda shirt and cocked a middle finger at his stomach. Goodes’s war dance echoed the defiant gesture, 22 years before, that arguably kicked off the discussion of race in the game. If they even made it to the field (one player, Doug Nicholls, was rejected in the late 1920s because he “smelt”) they would enter a cauldron of unchecked racism, protected by the game’s old code: what happens on the field stays there.

Just 18 Indigenous men played football at the highest level between 19. That’s about when the booing started.įor the AFL, it sounds like the howling of a dark past. The teenager was ejected from the stadium and took a panning in the media (one that Goodes tried to quell). “To hear a 13-year-old girl call me an ape. Someone had called him an “ape”, he said. The year before, after a contest on the boundary in a match against Collingwood, Goodes repeatedly pointed at a section of the crowd. He used his platform as Australian of the Year in 2014 to declare John Pilger’s harrowing documentary Utopia had made him “ ashamed to be Australian”.