All hail footy’s Indigenous roots
The AFL Grand Final. It’s arguably the most important event on the Australian sporting calendar with the country’s two best teams pitted against each other at the MCG. As we get ready for the bounce-down, perhaps we can spend a moment reflecting on the origins of the game that has captivated millions.
Like Australia’s history, it’s chequered. Even our sport is not immune from the soaking of blood — there were massacres and injustices. But if we can learn anything from this process, and as we walk ever more purposefully in the spirit of reconciliation, we can embrace something we’re all proud of.
Australian football flows through our veins. It attracts more spectators than any other sport in the country and plays a significant role in shaping and reaffirming a shared sense of identity.
Many will know the story of Tom Wills, the gifted colonial cricketer, who travelled to England for school, played football in the cold, wet, trying conditions, and imagined a winter sport equivalent for his home in Victoria. He is revered and credited with creating the game but few know about the Indigenous influences that led to the codification of Aussie rules.
Early settler diaries recount large groups of Aboriginal men, and women, playing with a bloated possum skin ball. The game was played over an enormous area with 50 to 100 players on the field at any one time. Marngrook, meaning “game ball”, was commonly played in the western district of Victoria, where Wills grew up, but similar games were noted throughout the colonies.
What those early colonists saw took their breath away — the skill and speed, something raw and unchained. It was a symbol of promise in this new frontier. It would soon be blended with some European principles, uniforms and a team structure to create an iconic Aussie sport — Australian Rules football.
With such a lineage it’s no wonder we see high numbers of Aboriginal representation in the sport. Indigenous people make up just 3.8 per cent of the Australian population, but a whopping 11 per cent of professional AFL players are Aboriginal. And Western Australia provides more Indigenous players than any other part of the country — Polly Farmer, Stephen Michael, the Krakouer brothers and the little-known player Buddy Franklin . . . the list goes on.
At its best Aussie rules represents a form of cross-cultural synthesis, demonstrating how sport helps us express what it means to be human. And whilst we grapple with yet another dark chapter in the AFL, maybe we can draw some inspiration from this.
If we struggled with Adam Goodes, or any other Indigenous player expressing their culture with pride, we need to recognise just how much we owe them, as sporting greats whose ancestors helped lay the foundation for the game — their spirit, strength and vitality endures through footy.
We can draw strength from this as we unearth the past and speak truth to history through open dialogue and two-way storytelling — acknowledging the multiple voices and cultural perspectives that shape the sport, and our relationship to it. We can not only honour the early greats, but this nation’s Indigenous people who, for hundreds of years, had honed and shaped the game we love.
And as we wait for the bounce-down this Saturday, 12.30pm WST, we might just pause and take some comfort from the fact that despite the slurs, the pain and the suffering there is much that this great game can teach us. That this is not just a game of unparalleled skill, speed and stamina but perhaps, more profoundly, just what is possible between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
This article was first published in The West Australian in Renée Gardiner’s weekly column in Agenda, 24 September 2022.