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Reflecting on Race, Politics and Sport 1

Colin Tatz is Visiting Professor in Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University and founding director of the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, . Email: [email protected]

abstract: This essay is a reflective overview of Aboriginal and Islander sport, locating their sporting achievements across the decades and in the contexts of several policy eras: the genocidal period, the protection- segregation regime, the assimilation and integration ages, the present era of ‘autonomy’. The essay focuses on the obstacles in the way of sporting success to the point where these minorities have not only become predominant in the ‘stadium sports’ but have come into their own in sports either previously closed to them or not readily accessible. While sport has done much for individuals, sport as such has had little impact on many communities now in states of distress. keywords: Aboriginal history, Aboriginal life on reserves, discrimination in sport, sporting triumphs

1 Revised version of a keynote address presented at Sporting Traditions XX: Old Stories — New Histories, Darwin, 1 July 2015.

Sporting Traditions, vol. 32, no. 2 (November 2015), pp. 1–11. © Australian Society for Sports History, www.sporthistory.org 2 volume 32 no 2 NOVEMBER 2015 Colin Tatz Reflecting on Race, Politics and Sport 3

Just over three decades ago I wrote the opening article in the first volume to discover just how bad it could be in the allegedly more enlightened state of this journal — ‘Race, Politics and Sport’. It was almost identical to the of , where I had the good and bad fortune to become a member text of my inaugural professorial lecture at Macquarie University in Sydney. of the unlamented Aborigines Welfare Board, then with the power of life That was considered a brave topic for a Politics professor. At the time I was and death over a small Aboriginal population. I explain all this in my 2015 the only full professor writing about sport (as well as other agendas), and memoir, Human Rights and Human Wrongs.2 the Australian Society for Sports History (ASSH) elders believed my status I came to learn about and then to disseminate evidence about might give greater credence to what sports historians had to say. Perhaps. Aboriginal legal status, special ‘protective’ laws, isolated reserves, settlement Sports history, sociology and culture have come a long way since then, and and mission life, employment and wages, housing, health, nutrition, developed much more intellectual muscle and heft. None of us foresaw the education, social service benefits, sanitation and water availability, political durability of ASSH or its journal, Sporting Traditions, or that distant Darwin and voting rights, and interaction with our criminal law system. The only would be the venue for the XXth ASSH congress. I am honoured to be asked sporting knowledge that emerged (for me) was some vague talk about to publish my keynote address to the Darwin gathering. While the 1984 essay Reuben Cooper in the post-World War I days and his breaking the colour was a comparative study, this one focuses on . bar in senior football and cricket, Ted Egan and the St Mary’s football story, I was still in South Africa early in 1960 when I was awarded a PhD the talents of Tiwi Islander David ‘Soapy’ Kantilla who was allowed to play scholarship by the Australian National University in Canberra. The head Australian Rules football in , and Ted Egan taking me with him as of Politics, Leicester Webb, asked what topic I was interested in. Then he drove his Yuendumu team to play an Aussie Rules match at Warrabri, completing my Master’s thesis on ‘Native Policy’ and race politics in South now called Ali Carung, late in 1961. Africa, I immediately replied, ‘Aboriginal Policy’ — but expected that the What an amazing transformation there has been these past 54 years. subject had been truly done over. ‘No’, came the reply, ‘it hasn’t been and Aside from the immense knowledge gains, it is the emergence of Aboriginal that’s what we’d like you to do’. voices and faces that has turned a doomed and dying ‘Stone Age’ people Arriving in Australia in January 1961, it took me two to three days to read into a vigorous presence in the history books which began addressing their all there was to read on contemporary Aboriginal affairs. But there were past and present from the mid-1970, their achievements in literature, the art libraries of material on the physical and social anthropology of a quaint world, music, theatre, dance, film, television, clothing design, environment species of Australoids, a people designated a doomed race whose primitive care and, of course, sport. Today, it would seem, the Aboriginal and Islander culture needed to be captured and recorded before it disappeared. It was presence is mandatory. Certainly it is embraced as the quintessential also an era in which Aborigines simply didn’t appear in the history texts, ‘national product’ when it comes to promotions and major events. Fifty, even even of such men as Manning Clark and Sir Keith Hancock. It was to be thirty years ago, who could have envisioned an Aboriginal woman athlete as another eight years before Bill Stanner, the anthropologist, was to publicly the centre-piece of Australian triumphalism and achievement at the 2000 talk about ‘the great Australian silence’. But Aborigines did rate a chapter in Olympics? Who would have imagined Indigenous Teams playing in national books on Australian fauna and flora. football competitions and in Test match arenas or especial Indigenous So began my work exploring the various policies that governments Rounds in the Australian Football League? Or a South Sea Islander and had adopted towards Aboriginal people in northern Australia. More an Aborigine as coaches, respectively, of the State of Origin importantly, I looked at the way those policies were administered and why matches? Or that those two former league champions would have their so many fine-sounding policy aims never came to fruition, let alone got to sculptures or names on sports stands at major arenas? first base. I found a great many answers; politicians, however, suggested To simply celebrate Aboriginal and Islander sporting achievement is easy changing the policy slogans rather than addressing the efficiency and lack enough: the riches are there, and we can now point readily to champions of appropriate skills among the bureaucrats administering those policies. In across the sporting alphabet from athletics through to and wrestling. short, my work was an anthropology of the white tribe of officialdom. It was a But athletic ability can’t be left sitting there in the centre stage spotlight as vivisection of living bureaucratic organs, conducted not with anger but huge if by the waving of a magic wand. It has a history and a context, and it has to disappointment in what I believed should be, or was touted to be, Australian fairness, humaneness, good will, and competence. A sad and defective tribe 2 Colin Tatz, Human Rights and Human Wrongs: A Life Confronting Racism, it was, both in the Northern Territory and in . I was subsequently Monash University Publishing, , 2015. 4 volume 32 no 2 NOVEMBER 2015 Colin Tatz Reflecting on Race, Politics and Sport 5

be presented that way if it is to have more than a fleeting film-clip moment that time — sporadically, episodically, in small numbers but effectively, on television, or a nice still pic on a poster or in a glossy sports magazine. reducing some tribes in the Mossman area of north Queensland from 3,000 Sport — as we know but what much of the public doesn’t know, or to 100. So gross were the atrocities that from 1897 through to 1911 each state doesn’t want to know — is not separate from society. Nor is it separable from and territory had to legislate to protect Aborigines from the predators who the normal world of ambition, greed, power, politics, good and evil, as Mr wanted to kill them, or take their women and children, or sell them opium. Blatter and his big round FIFA ball have shown the world so graphically When these legal cocoons were found to be insufficient protection, these past months. Sports analyst John Hoberman in Austin, Texas and governments began isolating Aborigines geographically, attempting to investigative journalist Andrew Jennings in Britain have been writing about place them well outside the reach of genocidal predators. Most Aboriginal 3 this for decades, but few have listened, or have wanted to listen. We know a reserves, missions and settlements were not what one would call native great deal now about the serious exploiters of sport, but not enough about habitats: poor agriculturally and bereft of adequate water, they were, to use the exploited. To help with that, we need to look to such works as that of one missionary’s language, ‘splendidly secluded’ unnatural domains. In African-American historian Jeffrey Sammons. His 1987 book Beyond the such isolation they would be safe, and in a secure locations suited to their Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society, is, in my view, the best insight conversion to Christianity, hygiene and civilisation, free of the prying eyes of we have — not of the ring, but what surrounds and underpins it. I tried to do the public, the media and the curious. 4 something like that in my Obstacle Race book in 1995. The special protective laws infantilised them: they pauperised all As in the United States and elsewhere, so too with Aboriginal and Aborigines by deeming them incapable of managing themselves or their Islander sport. Many don’t want explanations let alone contextual settings: affairs and in constant need of legal guardians. Those men, officially they only care about the results, the stats, the form guide, the team’s named ‘Protectors’, turned out to be under-educated or uneducated police composition, the league table, the state of the cruciates, the drugs that are constables in most places. No minority group in history had been so exposed or aren’t ‘within the guidelines’. But if we want to understand and to explain, to police control, dependent on constabulary largesse to sell their labour, to if we want to teach and to learn, then we have to excavate and make known move, come and go, to prevent them inter-marrying with whites or having the relationship between the sporting triumph on the one hand and at sex across the colour line, and so on. So how did Aborigines, a separate least seven other factors in the rest of the equation: history, law, geography, legal class of persons, a mendicant people under legal guardianship, public policy, administration, economics, and the impact and legacies of the geographically remote, get to any sports arena? Good question. above. We need to look at these themes across four distinct policy eras: the There was some sport in the genocidal era. There was cricket at genocidal period, the protection-segregation regime, the assimilation and Edenhope in Victoria, cricket enough to result in the famous and now iconic integration ages, and the present era of ‘autonomy’. 1868 Aboriginal tour to . We know much about that from John The Genocidal Era Mulvaney and Rex Harcourt, but only the narrower and immediate local The dark side of Australian history lies in the genocidal relationship between history of pastoral serfdom rather than the broader picture.5 There was the native peoples and those who settled the continent after 1788. Genocidal cricket at Poonindie in , at Coranderrk in Victoria, at Purga massacres began as early as 1804 by settlers and released convicts and Mission in Queensland, and at New Norcia Mission in . continued until the late 1920s through the ‘auspices’ of the quite homicidal There was a quite glorious era of professional athletics, pedestrianism as Native Police Forces (eventually disbanded because of their ferocity and it was called, at Botany in Sydney, in Ipswich, in York in Western Australia. murderousness). Possibly 20,000 people were ‘dispersed’, that is, killed in These were the eras of Patrick Bowman, Charlie Samuels (considered the fastest man in the world in the 1890s), Bobby Kinnear (winner of the rich 3 John M. Hoberman, Sport and Political Ideology, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1984; Andrew Jennings, The New Lords of the Rings: Olympic Stawell Gift in 1883), Bobby McDonald (inventor of the crouch start), later Corruption and How to Buy Gold Medals, Simon & Schuster, London, 1992; J. McKinley, Bobby Wandin and Tom Dancey who won the Stawell in 1910. Foul! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals, There is a major book to be written specifically about how people could play HarperSport, London, 2006. sport in an era of rampant physical killing. 4 Jeffrey Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1990; Colin Tatz, Obstacle Race: 5 Rex Harcourt and John Mulvaney, Cricket Walkabout: The Aboriginal Aborigines in Sport, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1995. Cricketers of the 1860s, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1988. 6 volume 32 no 2 NOVEMBER 2015 Colin Tatz Reflecting on Race, Politics and Sport 7

The Protection-Segregation Era Some remarkable feats occurred in this slice of history. Alec Henry The period that followed, known as protection–segregation, was even more played Sheffield Shield cricket for Queensland, as did the legendary Jack difficult for those who wanted to or needed to play sport for economic Marsh for . In the embryonic days of women’s cricket, very reasons. The laws that protected Aborigines from genocidaires also much a silvertail game, Edna Crouch and her cousin Mabel Campbell played incarcerated them on those remote locations, prevented their coming and for Queensland in the 1930s. Edna’s brother Paddy was the first state rugby going, regulated where and how they could work and earn lower than the league player, gaining a place in a side that toured New Zealand in 1925 (and basic wage, enshrined in law for non-Aborigines in 1907. A classic of this time winning a silver cigarette case for being the best man on tour). Remarkably, was Jerry Jerome, rifleman, horsebreaker, sprinter, and the first Aboriginal two Queensland cousins, Alec Hayden and Jimmy Williams, were in a three- boxing champion, the middleweight winner in 1913. A Queenslander, he man Australian team that rode in rodeo Tests against England and Canada should have been ‘controlled’ under the Aboriginals Protection Act of 1897, in the 1930s. but his manager gained him an exemption, one the Director of Native Affairs This was to be the era where boxing was the way out of tight government persistently tried to overturn. He got Jerry in the end: after retirement he control and a road to both fame and fortune, however short-lived the money. spent his remaining days confined to Cherbourg Settlement, his winnings Ron Richards, in my view the best boxer Australia ever produced, was the appropriated by the Department. Ken Edwards has begun another thesis forerunner and the model for Queenslanders Rollo Hinton, Elley Bennett, on Jerry, with his heirs giving Ken access to unpublished family documents. Jackie Hassen and George Bracken, for the Sands brothers from Kempsey, Ken’s first doctoral work was published on cricketer Eddie Gilbert, another in turn the models for Lionel Rose and later Hector Thompson and the ‘controlled’ Aborigine from the 1930s, a man who had to have a chaperone Mundines. when he travelled to Shield cricket matches lest he make contact with either John Moriarty, the soccer star, always told me that Australian Football alcohol or white women, or both. was a colonial bastion of racism and always would be. Certainly that was It was the era of isolation, permanent quarantine, and, in truth, so in the earlier protection-segregation days. Given the by now clearly incarceration in Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland and the demonstrable skills and talents of pedestrians, boxers and a handful of Northern Territory especially. Victoria and New South Wales had always cricketers, there can be no other reason than naked racism for the dearth of been ‘freer’ environments, but not greatly so. The stars of the 1868 England Aboriginal Aussie Rules players in the early years. Joe Johnson was a star for tour were Johnny Mullagh and Johnny Cuzens: but had colony Victoria’s Fitzroy in 1904–1906. We are not sure of Vic Thorp’s origins, a major player Aborigines Protection Act of 1869 been legislated a year earlier, there would for Richmond between 1910 and 1925, but only two identifiable players have been no tour (and probably no local cricket either). managed a couple of senior games in the 1920s, Cec Gomez and George It was, in reality, more difficult to play sport in this age than in the Simmons. Doug Nicholls was, of course, the big little man of the 1930s for genocidal period. Locked away on settlements and missions, sport was either Fitzroy and Victoria, and the outstanding all-round athlete Norm McDonald unavailable, or rare. Many superintendents of institutions disliked sport followed in the 1940s. Things were a bit better in the West, with the Hayward and banned it. Daniel Matthews created Maloga Mission in Victoria in the brothers — Eric, Bill and Maley — breaking the colour bar in the late 1920s, 1870s, doing his utmost to stop the men running away to the running tracks. and then the emergence of the forcibly removed children like Ted Kilmurray Decades later, the head man at St Francis’s Home in Adelaide couldn’t abide and , followed soon after by the likes of and sport, yet Charlie Perkins, John Moriarty and Gordon Briscoe managed Syd Jackson, and the Territorians who played in the West, like Billy Roe and to get onto soccer pitches, and the fourth musketeer Wally McArthur Billy Dempsey. reached the athletics tracks despite strong institutional resistance. As always, Rugby league wasn’t far behind in the racism championships. Apart contradictions are there. Cherbourg and Native Affairs wouldn’t allow from George Green (whose origins are debated) in the 1920s and brothers Frankie Fisher to even apply for a passport to go to England to play rugby Lin and Dick Johnson in the late 1930s to early 1940s, the Longbottom boys league, but there was keen Cherbourg participation in the local domain in only entered the gates of South Sydney fairly late in the day, in the early the 1930s; and in 1962, no less than three Cherbourg boys — Adrian Blair, 1960s. This was also the era of Eric Simms, Lionel Morgan, John and George Eddie Barney and Jeff Dynevor —were in the national boxing team at the Ambrum and Artie Beetson in Queensland, Bruce Olive, Charlie Donovan, . Ron Saddler, Buddy Cain, and Mick Bryant. 8 volume 32 no 2 NOVEMBER 2015 Colin Tatz Reflecting on Race, Politics and Sport 9

The Assimilation Era four Australian Open titles, Wimbledon twice, and everything else bar the The epoch of protection by way of law and geographic isolation lasted from American crown. The celebrated Ella rugby brothers took the world’s stage the first decade of the twentieth century until, in theory, the Paul Hasluck in the 1970s, and quiet achievers like champion badminton star Cheryl announcement in 1951 of insistent assimilation. Aborigines were destined, Mullett, basketballer Michael Ahmatt, woodchopper Greg Lovell, cyclist the Minister for Territories proclaimed, to share the same customs, beliefs Brian Mansell and the three volleyball Tutton brothers showed the breadth and loyalties as ‘other’ Australians (never defined), and live as members of a and diversity of Aboriginal and Islander sporting prowess. single communitas (never defined or explained). The next two decades were fraught with bizarre administration procedures and policy diktats: such as The ‘Autonomy’ Era teaching Pintubi youngsters from Papunya, only recently emerged from the When Labor came to office under Gough Whitlam in late 1972, he and adjacent Western Desert, to eat spaghetti with a knife and fork and having Gordon Bryant, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs (the first ever such designated school readers based not on white Jack and Jill, but black Nari and Jangala, solo portfolio), swept aside all of the protection-segregation apparatus carrying buckets of water when there wasn’t any available and rote-learning and edifice, declaring that Aboriginal communities would thenceforth be that ‘s’ is for sea and ‘t’ is for train, when neither was in their ken or horizon. autonomous under a policy of self-determination. Many of the bureaucratic This was the time when the great Graham ‘Polly’ Farmer came from a dinosaurs, of course, remained in place, and change came slowly and very long career in Australian Rules football to play with Geelong, where his Aboriginality was so played down that no one knew he was a removed painfully. Many of the mission and settlement communities fragmented, child nurtured at the infamous Sister Kate’s Orphanage. At the 1962 walking away to create outstations, sometimes only a handful in number — Commonwealth Games, high jumper Percy Hobson was persuaded to deny anything to get away from draconian laws and white-devised programs said his Aboriginality as it wouldn’t look good for the gold medal winner to be a to be in their best interests. There was never going to be any sport in that ‘darkie’. Percy spent the rest of his life lamenting that surrender. It was an age new-found way of life. Land rights legislation also meant a ‘return to country’ when champion jockey Frankie Reys, an Aboriginal boy from , chose and a reinforcement of a semblance of once traditional life. to call himself a Filipino, claiming that senior horseracing was so racist he But the Whitlam era also meant a change in Aboriginal demography. wouldn’t have a ride as a blackfella. He went on to become chairman of the Remote lives became rural or even semi-rural ones, fringe-dwelling became Victorian Jockeys Association for a number of years. Pressure on Aboriginal urban living, and the road was open to today’s 72 per cent of Aboriginal rugby league players to join senior teams in New South Wales and ‘assimilate’ people living in urban environs. This led to a greater access than ever to sport led to their forming the famous Redfern All-Blacks, an act of political and sporting defiance and self-preservation. and facilities. The formal enactment of federal and state anti-discrimination There were exceptions and contradictions. The mercurial and wonderful statutes helped remove some of the brakes of institutional racism and jockey Darby McCarthy was a totally in-your-face Aborigine, forever thereby aiding Aboriginal recruitment to sports teams. By now, the public announcing as you met him that he was a blackfella and ‘what are you gonna was becoming aware of the scintillating play of the black gladiators like Artie do about it’? The five boxing Sands brothers were on the national stage Beetson, Ray Blacklock, Eric Ferguson, Colin Scott, Terry Wickey and Larry and brother Dave, who has three public monuments (Broadway in Sydney, Corowa on the rugby league scene, of and Syd Jackson on the Dungog, and Kempsey), was voted the most popular sportsman in Australia Australian Rules fields. in 1950 and 1951. What is so significant about these sporting achievements is that they were World currents didn’t really come to Australia until the early 1970s, the product of the Aboriginal selves, of their will, skills and initiative. They and while the civil rights era emerged so strongly in the United States in were not the outcome of one or another piece of white largesse, of special the early 1960s, it was to be another decade before we began talking about rights. Charlie Perkins became the singular sporting voice at the time, and government-provided education or health or economic programs or sports a powerful voice it was. Lionel Rose became a national hero in 1968, a truly institutes. For the first time in the Aboriginal experience, they could pit their defining moment for Aboriginality and also for white Australia. Another bodies and minds, successfully and convincingly, against a dominating and milestone moment was the achievement of Evonne Goolagong — in spite of essentially cruel mainstream. her first manager sending out leaflets that she wasn’t Aboriginal. She won The present era is well enough known. It is also an era in which 10 volume 32 no 2 NOVEMBER 2015 Colin Tatz Reflecting on Race, Politics and Sport 11

Aboriginal and Islander achievement has spread to many other sports.6 The sporting achievements, accolades, plaudits notwithstanding, what is One look at the AFL team line-ups and another look at rugby league — still so evident (for those who care to notice) is the continuing oppression, especially the extraordinary Aboriginal and Islander component of the State rejection, discrimination, ill-treatment, continued separation of children of Origin teams, especially of Queensland — can give an impression of a through astronomic rates of juvenile incarceration, illness, early deaths, black takeover. And while South Sea Islander and Aboriginal limited life spans, growing internal and domestic violence, gross suicide rates among the young, government neglect, and government repetition coach their state sides, we have yet to see the native sons (and of every mistake in the book, back to the Meston era of the late 1890s in daughters) become senior officials, administrators, commissioners or board Queensland. In 1896 Meston insisted that Aborigines needed to be placed members. The Aboriginal presence in league football lifted the colour in quarantine to protect them from white predators. Over 120 years later we barriers and has paved the way for the now greater numerical group of are still placing too many in a new-named quarantine, ‘intervention’, only Pacific Islanders in the game. this time to protect them from themselves. In May 2015, NITV presented an hour-long ‘Awaken’ program on racial And while a Martian sports journalist could look down through his discrimination in Australian Rules football. I sat on that panel with Michael telescope and see incredible achievements, a Martian or even an Earthly Long, Gilbert McAdam and an AFL official who kept telling us how far sociologist will find a profound absence of facilities for sport, a great deal the AFL has ‘come good’ on anti-racist codes of conduct. One could be of sheer economic poverty, much in the way not of starvation but wrong forgiven for thinking that the AFL never had or has a racist history, or that nutrition, malnutrition, alcohol and drug addiction, mal-born children, the most serious problems in the Aboriginal world were the racial slurs of teenage ennui and lack of horizon, more and more criminal behaviour involving physical harm, the highest incarceration rates in the world, Damian Monkhorst against stellar footballer Michael Long in 1995, or a especially here in the Territory. Such outcomes are not in the Australian 13-year-old girl calling an ‘ape’ during a 2013 game. Long DNA, at least not in the sense that we have an inherent racist set of told the ‘Awaken’ program that footy is in the Aboriginal DNA. Yes, and biologically determined and ineradicable genes: the mindsets we display the once exploited gladiators and entertainers have now come of age, with are learned and acquired, brought about by their contextual circumstances. huge salaries and entourages, public profiles, advertising and sponsorship And since these observable realities are not inherent or genetic but ‘man- contracts, film and book biographies. made’, they must be capable of being ‘man-unmade’.

6 The list is a long one. It includes, among others: Cathy Freeman, Benn Harradine, Patrick Johnson, Nova Peris, Joshua Ross and Kyle VanderKuyp in athletics; the Burgoyne clan, Dale and , the Krakouer brothers, , , Gilbert McAdam, Andrew McLeod, , and David Wirrpanda in Australian Football; Pat Mills, Danny Morseu and Michelle Musselwhite in ; Daniel Geale, Tony and , Robert Peden and James Swan in boxing; Chad Reed in motorcross and supercross riding; Daniel Christian and in cricket; the Anderson brothers, Charmaine Barney, Ian Brown, Ivy Hampton and Horrie Seden in darts; May Chalker and Scott Gardiner in golf; Des Abott, Joel Carroll, Baedon Choppy and Nova Peris in hockey; Lance Duncan in judo; Nicole Cusack and Sharon Finnan in netball; Bernie Devine and Jodi Edwards in powerlifting; , , Mal Cochrane, ‘Chicka’ Ferguson, , , , , , , Matt Sing, Timana Tahu, , , Jonathan Thurston, Willie Tonga and Ricky Walford in rugby league; Kurtley Beale, Andrew Walker, Lloyd Walker and Jim Williams in ; Karen Menzies, Jade North and Harry Williams in soccer; Kelly McKellar and Stacey Porter in softball; Steve Bowditch and Adam Schreiber in squash; Ben Austin and Samantha Riley in ; Bo de la Cruz and Shane Frederiksen in touch football; and Dean Semmens in water polo.