This is an archive copy of a document originally located at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/sportsf/stories/s1077111.htm
The Sports Factor: 2 April 2004 -
The Equaliser
Warwick Hadfield: Welcome to the Sports Factor.
This week, a look at the role Australian Football has played in breaking down racial and social barriers in the Northern Territory.
Carmel Young reports from Darwin.
HOOTER/CROWDS CHEERING/DIDGERIDOO
Michael Long: I mean you’re on even grounds in sport, and it’s all about learning, education and a lot of my best friends are non-indigenous people and my background’s Irish; I’m part-English as well. So as much as I’m black, I’m white too.
Carmel Young: That’s Michael Long, one of the Northern Territory’s best-known players. He’s a former AFL star for Essendon, and now he’s Chairman of the AFL’s Australian Indigenous Foundation.
Michael Long has experienced first hand the elevating role that organised sport can play, especially for people living on the margins.
Michael Long: I mean sport does do that, the mixture of so many different cultures, when you look at Australian Rules these days, very multicultural. But when I look back at Reconciliation through football, I reckon Kevin Sheedy would probably have to be the person who’s really a great Australian, but broken down so many barriers of seeing a talent, then learning off him. So it really has a sport to break down those barriers, and that’s what sports is about, it’s not about racism, it’s a game to be played in fairness and enjoyment.
Carmel Young: He got his break playing for the St Mary’s Football Club in Darwin, a family tradition since the club started in the early ‘50s. We’ll hear more about that later in the program.
The Northern Territory Football League was established in 1917. By 1920 the Chinese and Aboriginal population had taken up the game, and in 1922 their team, Vesty’s, won the premiership. The League split when Vesty’s players walked off the field, claiming racist umpiring. The other teams withdrew from the Northern Territory Football League and formed a whites-only competition. Although the colour bar lasted only a few seasons, football in Darwin was tainted with racist exclusion until the end of the war.
The Northern Territory Administrator, the Honourable Ted Egan, set up the St Mary’s Football Club as a means for Tiwi Islanders working in Darwin to get a game of footy.
Ted Egan: I came to Darwin in 1949, and in the 1950 season I helped start a football team called Works and Housing, and I played with them for the next two years, and then I was summoned to see the Bishop of Darwin, and Bishops tend to give orders rather than make requests, and so I hastened to go to the Bishop’s Palace in Smith Street in Darwin, and he sat me down and he said ‘There are a lot of Tiwi Aboriginals coming over from the Catholic mission at Bathurst Island, men who are working at the Army and the RAAF, and usually 40 or 50 at a time at each place’, and I was aware of that. He said, ‘It would be a good idea if they had something like football to take up some of their spare time. I want you to start a team.’ So I said, ‘Yes, sir’, and got together a few other people and principally another young priest Father Aubrey Collins, and we then went to local people that we knew, and got together a committee, and went to register this new team with the Northern Territory Football League.
There was a bit of disquiet at the Northern Territory Football League because the objections weren’t totally on racial grounds, but there was a racial element to it, and only one other club would play what were in those days called full-blood Aboriginals. There was one club that was whites only, there were three other clubs, all of whom had quite a heavy percentage of part-Aboriginal players. Nowadays you don’t draw these sort of divisive lines, but the people certainly did in those days, including Aboriginals themselves. And so people were generally called either half-castes or full-bloods. And only one of the other team had a couple of full-blood players, and here were we proposing a team that was going to be predominantly full-blood players. And no-one came out and said, ‘We don’t like blackfellas’, or anything like that, but there were the standard xenophobic questions ‘Will they turn up on time?’ and ‘Will they wear boots?’ and we said, ‘Yes, this will be a pretty professional outfit, and we against a little bit of opposition, we were lucky in that we had a Sergeant of police as one of our delegates to the meeting and he was a pretty forceful chap, and everyone knew him as a respectable man, and he was confident in my ability to put a team together.
So we did, and we started in to the competition, and we had not much success in the first year, for a few different reasons. A principal one was that Aboriginals in our team were now required to wear boots, and they were much better players without boots, but they were getting used to the boots, and the main problem though was that football in Darwin, and Aussie Rules is played in the summer, in the wet season because there was no grass in Darwin in those days, and the oval was just a gravel pit, and there was less chance of getting gravel rash if it was wet and soft rather than just dry and hard. So football was then, and still is for some crazy reason, played in the summer in Darwin. And so Aboriginals felt it was very, very stupid to play football if it was raining, they said if it’s raining you go and sit down somewhere and get a bit of shelter. And they weren’t used to the rough stuff either. Fundamentally they were brilliant footballers, but they played football for fun, and they weren’t about knocking one another around, because that could lead on to more serious things.
So we gradually got better in all those respects; they learned to use the boots and they learned to play in the rain, and they learned to handle the rough stuff, and in a couple of years time they were giving the rough stuff out as good as they got. And it only took us two years before we won our first premiership. And that was in 1954, and we followed it up with another one in ’55, and the club’s now been going for 52 years, and they’ve won 23 premierships in that time, which is probably some sort of Australian record. It’s certainly an amazing feat. And not only do they win it in A-grade, they win it in the B-grade and Under-19s and the Colts and every grade, because it’s a well-organised team, constructed on family lines.
Carmel Young: When it began in 1952, the St Mary’s Football Club consisted of a couple of white blokes, a few mixed-race players, and the rest were Tiwi Aboriginals. It pretty much stayed that way until the mid-1960s, when a change in Government policy saw an influx of mixed race players from the mission on Melville Island. These were children of the stolen generation, who came from all over the Territory and were brought up in the Catholic institution at Garden Point.
Ted Egan: They were tending to, starting to come over to Darwin to, in government policy terms, be assimilated into the broader white community. We had friendly affiliations with the Garden Point people, and all of this was via the Catholic church. Over the years, the Garden Point influences got stronger and stronger. There are some Tiwi people playing for every team in Darwin now, which is delightful, in that even the all-white club is now integrated, and people of all races play on a very, very egalitarian level in Darwin. So sport’s been very good in breaking down any racial background that may have been there.
In Darwin it’s a pretty good place. I often say if you utter a racist comment in Darwin, you’re likely to get a smack under the ear from the least expected quarter because someone, if you say ‘I don’t like Chinese’ or ‘I don’t like Greeks’ or any of the derogatory terms, someone will probably belt you on the ear and say ‘My wife’s one of those, thank you very much’, or ‘I’ve got very good friends’ or ‘You’re talking about my friends’, and so Darwin is a very good town in that respect, and sport has been probably the principal factor.
Carmel Young: During the early part of the last century discrimination and segregation characterised much of the town’s working and social life. Official government policy and the attitudes of trade unions established the Anglo Saxon population as the privileged class, but in the post colonial era after the Second World War, Darwin became something of a model of multiculturalism. Much of the groundwork for this was done on the sporting field.
John Ah Kit is the Territory’s Minister for Community Development, Sport and Cultural Affairs.
John Ah Kit: In the early days the Aboriginal people found it very hard to get involved in sport, even though they loved it, and they picked up the skills very quickly. Because they became good at their sport in a lot of the areas, especially Aussie Rules, they were pushed out of the competition, and it was quite odd that the Chinese, who were then discriminated against in most areas, joined a sort of allegiance with Aboriginal people and started their own football competition up.
None of that exists today in Darwin, and the Top End’s the better for it. The Territory is better for it. Later on we saw the introduction of St Mary’s and Wanderers, and that was brought about by interest shown by people like our current Administrator who played an important role in ensuring that Aboriginal people were involved in the sporting activities. So the Territory has this coloured history, so to speak, and a really important history. And all of that I think sits really well with our multicultural society that we have, and I grew up in Darwin with Greek families, I grew up along with my sisters, with people from the East Timorese communities, there were Italians, Japanese, and there were mixed races, but we all grew up together playing sports. A lot of those families inter-married across various ethnic boundaries, and have great families and great relationships that will continue to keep the Territory community and especially the Top End community much more bound together.
Carmel Young: Darwin is the most ethnically diverse city in Australia and it’s a diversity that has existed since its inception in the 1860s. Today its population reflects the neighbouring region with strong ties to Indonesia, East Timor, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Papua New Guinea. There are also large Chinese, Greek and Italian populations. Sport has played a major role in creating community cohesion in an outpost society that has harboured racial conflicts in the past.
With a large indigenous population and predominantly white bureaucracy the social situation in Darwin was often brittle. Many people see sport as a key facilitator in bringing people together in the only arena where race didn’t matter: on the sports field.
John Ah Kit: Sport is a great medium for reconciliation. Sport breaks down prejudicial barriers, sport enables our multicultural society to jell, and sport is always going to be part of our Territory lifestyle, and we need to promote as much as possible, sporting activities throughout the Northern Territory, from our primary schools on through the high schools and into the mainstream sporting activities.
Carmel Young: Ted Egan believes that through their association with St Mary’s Football Club, many of the Aboriginal players were able to advance up a social and political ladder that wasn’t there for the previous generation of black Territorians.
Ted Egan: There is a discipline within the club that is very admirable, in that older players from whatever racial or social background will have set by and large a good example, and particularly this has been reflected in the lives of a lot of the mixed race and Tiwi people, who are now getting opportunities denied to them in earlier times, and the club has had three Aboriginal Members of Parliament, for example, who would not have been in Parliament had it not been for the association they had with football, that took them on to certain other skills and positions. So that’s a big plus for the club as well.
Many people are highly respected in various other aspects of the community, so it’s been a great thing, the presence of the club and the influence of sport has been a great benefit to Darwin.
Commentator: There he goes, thumps it up towards the goal-square with a bit barrel kick. Now St Mary’s have a chance at half-back.
Ted Egan: You get people like say, Jack Long, he’s a very, very highly regarded and senior ranger for the Conservation Commission here. He’s based on Melville Island where he was taken as a kid, so he’s leading a pretty happy existence there, raising lots and lots of Long kids to play football for St Mary’s, and they recently celebrated the fact that seven of his boys played 1,000 senior games. The 1,000th game was played the other day when Mick, the famous Michael Long, staged a comeback for just the one game, because they’d done the sum and the total was 999. So they said, ‘Mick, you’ve got to put the boots on’, and so he did. So they equalled the 1000 games, and that was a cause of great celebration in the club, and the Long boys led a big night of singing; and there were hundreds of people there, and they knew what the code of the club was and it was pretty good sociological stuff.
Carmel Young: Can I just take you back to those days when you first started St Mary’s. Most clubs would have gone and had a few drinks; was that possible at that time?
Ted Egan: No, at that time the law prevented Aboriginal people who were under the Act as it was called, from doing all sorts of things, one of which was drinking alcohol. And so when St Mary’s started, we had a rule, If they can’t drink, we don’t drink, and that was the case for our first Premiership. We won the Premiership and we had about ten cases of lemonade and Cherry Cheer and Mandarin Crush, and bit buckets of curry and rice, and we had a lovely party, and we sang, and the alcohol wasn’t affected. Nowadays of course there’s a licensed club where they celebrate the premierships, but that was a fact of life in those days, and if white players or mixed race players didn’t like that, well they didn’t play for St Mary’s.
Commentator: Shouldn’t have missed from there. He should not, and he did not. Craig Parsons kicked the goal and that’s the 20th for St Mary’s.
Carmel Young: For Michael Long the St Mary’s Football Club is an institution that cements his family and his community.
Michael Long: Basically I mean my mother and father were brought up on the Tiwi Islands and part of the stolen generation, and it all sort of started I suppose through Ted Egan and the affiliation with St Mary’s and connection there. Obviously my father played St Mary’s and flew across weekends to play for St Mary’s, and a couple of my brothers were born on the Tiwi Islands, Stephen and my brother Noel, and the Tiwi people have always been I suppose an extension of our family really, and been an important part of our upbringing and we’re still very close today.
But the St Mary’s Football Club, I mean football in general in our family, has been around for probably when you look at it, 40, 50 years, in terms of my father playing and now last year the 1,000 games, and sort of passing the baton on to the kids. But it was obviously a great occasion for the family to celebrate the 1,000th game for the family, and as I said, we didn’t really aim to set out to make 1,000 games, but very humbled by what the Northern Territory government did in recognizing that, and Northern Territory AFL, so it’s amazing what football’s done for us as a family, and collectively. For my sisters, Cathy and Suzie and from the older brothers, Stephen and Noel, Brian, Patrick, Chris, and they all really stand up in their own right in terms of what they’ve achieved and best on grounds in Grand Finals, best and fairest, club captains, representatives, are all Australians, and it’s a total of 46 premierships which is amazing.
Carmel Young: Long and his coach at Essendon, Kevin Sheedy, have played active roles in promoting sport to kids in remote Aboriginal communities. More than anyone else in professional sport, these two have consistently worked with isolated and disadvantaged communities in the belief that getting young people involved in sport can change social and educational outcomes.
Michael Long: Look I think football plays an enormous part in the Northern Territory, and probably all around Australia, when you look at it. Sport itself is probably a very important component to indigenous society because they love sport and they’re very naturally talented, and probably a part of what we do for the Kick Start Program in the AFL, is that we focus on them participating in sport, but really look at focusing on health, education and participation through sport. So it’s important that part of that program that we’re utilising the players as role models to reinforce a lot of those messages. The problems are out there, about staying away from drugs and alcohol and going to school, because we said to a lot of the kids that we went at St John’s today and with Derek Kickett the important part is that we need our sportsmen but we also need our next generation to be well equipped with education as well.
Carmel Young: Teachers, doctors.
Michael Long: Teachers, doctors, yes. Because not everyone’s going to make it in sport, but they’re the ones who are really going to go back to their community and we need those leaders to take on that leadership role.
Carmel Young: That was Michael Long.
The remote communities of the Northern Territory are plagued with unemployment, poor school attendance, high levels of substance abuse and youth suicide. Michael Long is not alone in seeing the promotion of sport as a key ingredient in putting young people on the right track for a better future.
N.T. Sports Minister, John Ah Kit.
John Ah Kit: If kids can take to sports, it gets them away from boredom. Their minds are occupied, their health in terms of their fitness, they’re keen, a sport provides discipline, disciplines provides commonsense, commonsense provides responsibility. If kids are bored and they don’t have any commonsense, they don’t have any responsibility, they don’t understand discipline, they don’t go to school, they become a nuisance in the community, they become a nuisance to their parents, their grandparents, the community at large, there’s vandalism, there’s unrest in the community because the kids are wandering around at night and vandalising different houses, infrastructure in the community. Which is why sports is a very good medium. I mean the success already with the swimming pools that we have in some of the communities, what’s great about those swimming pools is that we’ve found that the parents on the committee at the schools have adopted or formulated a policy of no school, no pool. So that if your kids aren’t going to school, then they can’t use the pool. Now that sounds tough, and it is tough, but in those conmmunities kids have realised very quickly after a few days that if they want to go for a swim, like everyone else, then they have to go to school. So the school attendance is high, kids are getting educated like the parents want and like the government wants. The health problems are being alleviated to a great degree, because eye and ear problems especially in the desert, are no longer a real health concern. So I want to work with communities, and I am in the process of developing guidelines and policies on how I as the Minister for Sport and Recreation, can work with the Health Department and the Commonwealth, along with ATSIC, ATSIS, to provide more pools to Aboriginal communities. I hear somebody talking the other day about tennis courts, well that’s fine, but I don’t see the results coming from tennis courts in Aboriginal communities at this stage are better than getting good results such as the swimming pool cases.
Carmel Young: From Yuendemu in the desert to the Tiwi Islands in the Top End, Aboriginal communities each year extend an open invitation to the wider community to watch their footy teams battle it out for the Grand Final.
Commentator: Stand by, Tiwi Island Football Grand Final. A ball up in the middle with the first tap knocked on a little further that time.
Ted Egan: The day of the Tiwi Grand Final which is always the day after the Darwin Grand Final is the biggest traffic day for Darwin Airport of any year, because hundreds of people go over there on charter aircraft, it’s only a half-hour flight of course, and the charter flights just run like Melbourne trams across the ocean and land at Nguiu and one lot get off and they come back and pick up the next. And it’s a great day and they are very hospitable and they’re vehement barrackers for their teams, and the women especially ‘Go for it, boy!’, and they’re all standing up and roaring, everybody has a great time. It’s invariably a good standard of football, played hard but fair, because the nice thing about Aboriginal society is there are the old rules that were established thousands of years ago and you don’t break those, you don’t offend other people lightly, because the ramifications just might be terribly serious. So the football’s played at a certain level of toughness, but you’ll never see anything vindictive or evil or spiteful. There’ll be hard physical bumping and the conflict for the ball is intense at all times, but there’d be no deliberate maiming of, say a star player, because people would know that that’s very dangerous stuff. And that’s a fact of Aboriginal life.
Carmel Young: What role did sport play in breaking down the barriers in your relating to Aboriginal people?
Ted Egan: I’d come from Melbourne to Darwin at age 16, I’d never spoken to an Aboriginal person before, but I quickly delighted in the fact that I was in this what I call racial fruit salad, and I just sort of set out as a young person who loved sport, to get involved in sport. And that took me to involvement with Aboriginal people, and they were just nice people who liked singing and liked sport, and that suited me fine. So here I am still doing it.
Commentary: … takes them on and runs, inside 50, gets in space, kicks the goal, drips it across a big pack of players, plenty of blue guernseys there, only seconds left, they’d want to drive this in quickly.
Warwick Hadfield: And we can tell you that St Mary’s won another NTFL flag, the club’s 24th, in the Grand Final last weekend, and on the Tiwi Islands Tapalinga won by 10 points, in front of a crowd of 3,500.
Thanks to Carmel Young for that report.
Next week as the global surfing caravan rolls into Bell’s Beach, Swell Dreaming, the history of surfing in Australia.
Woman: Duke Kahanamoku the great Hawaiian surfboard rider, came out in late 1914 to swim in the National Championships. During those championships, he met D.D. Macintyre who was the Honorary Secretary of a certain bathing association. Macintyre came up to me and said ‘The Duke wants a girl to go out with him.’ He said, ‘You’re it.’
Warwick Hadfield: That’s next week.
Guests on this program:
Michael Long
AFL footballerTed Egan
Administrator of the Northern Territory and former coach of the St Mary's Football ClubJohn Ah Kit
Minister for Sport in the Northern Territory
Presenter: Warwick Hadfield
Producer: Maria Tickle
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