With Adam Goodes
It’s a bright, perfect Sydney morning just before Christmas. Adam Goodes is talking to me on his phone via Zoom. Adam is one of the most celebrated Australian Rules players ever and an Aboriginal icon. He’s sitting on the grass, baseball cap and shades on, talking matter-of-factly about deeply distressing moments in the history of his family and Australia while watching his 18-month-old daughter, Adelaide, toddle around a play park, eating a rice cracker. Occasionally she comes over to say ‘hello’ before wandering off again.
‘To think in three and a bit more years, someone could come into my house and take Adelaide away from me,’ Adam sighs. ‘You know, I’d go to jail stopping people doing that.’
Most parents have had that irrational fear of their child being abducted. But for Adam it is not irrational. A generation ago it happened to his family. His mum, Lisa, was five when she was snatched away.
‘My nana was saying, “Hide the kids, hide the kids,” ’ Adam says. ‘Mum remembers hearing those boots on the floorboards walking towards her. She started crying under the bed and saw this white hand reach underneath the bed and grab her and my auntie Joy. They dragged them both out. And Mum’s screaming and looking at my nana, saying, “Why aren’t you helping me? These people are taking me away.” And that was the last time my mum got to see Nana.’
If you’re confused, you should be. Adam’s family, as incredible as this sounds, were not victims of a crime, you see. They were the victims of state-sponsored abduction. From 1910 and into the 1970s, the Australian government forcibly removed children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent from their families to be adopted by white families or placed in institutions. Why? To purge Australia of people of colour. It happened to one in three indigenous families. One in three.
They are known as the Stolen Generations. If you’ve not heard of them, or what they endured, then that’s probably because Australia’s PR machine is very effective. Things that come to mind when most people think of Australia might be a sun-filled paradise, boundless opportunity and a no-worries culture. And, of course, in many respects Australia is like that. Unless you are indigenous and you are the victims of the dirty, big secret that Australia wants to keep under wraps.
I know about it because when I was touring Australia in 1975 I met an Aboriginal family in Perth, and over the years they became great friends with my family and some members even came to Jamaica and spent time at my mom’s house. One of the boys visited me in Derbyshire when I was playing county cricket. And over the years they educated me to what the indigenous people of Australia had been through. We remain friends to this day.
It is that history to which Adam has dedicated his post-playing life. As trophy-laden as Adam’s career was (highlights include two player of the year awards, two league titles, named in the Indigenous Team of the Century), he is perhaps now best known in and outside of Australia for his work not just in highlighting discrimination towards his people and his culture, but in doing something about it. Adam is now giving back generously to the country that stole from him. And, to be frank, treated him appallingly during his career when he dared raise his voice to say, ‘This isn’t right.’
While playing for Sydney Swans in 2013 at the MCG against Collingwood on a weekend of matches dedicated to celebrating indigenous people, he heard a voice scream: ‘Goodes, you’re an ape!’ It was from a 13-year-old girl. Adam pointed her out to security and she was removed. It was the first time he had been the target of a racial slur for eight years. He escaped to the dressing room and broke down in tears.
The girl’s mother, perhaps providing the best interpretation of racism in these pages, said: ‘She’s a 13-year-old girl, from a small place in the country, who doesn’t get out much.’ I don’t think you need two guesses to figure out where she got that idea from. Adam did not condemn her and instead reached out to her and her family. He offered her support, education. Because it was a young girl, conversations started all over the country – why would she think it’s okay to use that word?
The Collingwood president, Eddie McGuire, apologised to Adam immediately after the match. But four nights later he went on a Melbourne radio station and compared him to King Kong. Suddenly, the story began to change. Why was Adam picking on a girl? Why couldn’t he handle a bit of name-calling? The media started to portray Adam as a bully. His social media accounts were riddled with the same slur. Adam was being framed as the villain.
So he was vilified as that PR machine whirred into action again. Despite being named Australian of the Year in 2014, the fact that he continued to have his say, to not quietly toe the line and instead criticise a country that had bestowed one of its highest honours upon him, was not ‘fair dinkum’, you might say. He said Australia had a problem with racism. With those words Adam had committed a cardinal sin – the Black man who complains. Cue Colin Kaepernick in the USA taking a knee during the national anthem. Just like Colin, it would end his career, too.
Adam was booed and abused week in and week out for the rest of his career. He was a ‘jerk’, according to a former AFL player, Sam Newman. Remember that name.
The girl’s mother showed her true colours. ‘If he hadn’t have carried on like a pork chop it wouldn’t have mattered. I don’t think he should retire, he should man up and just take it.’
That abuse ended Adam’s career early. He felt that he had given racists a platform. His last game was in 2015. ‘The booing was like a howl. I felt like an absolute piece of crap. I was an emotional wreck. I didn’t want to go to training. I never had that feeling in eighteen years of playing. I called the coach and he brought around my best mate and I broke down. I was like: “I can’t do this any more.” ’ Today he can’t even bring himself to watch the sport.
These days, the media like to report this as an incident that ‘divided the nation’. And that’s probably true. On one side you had people who were embarrassed about their nation’s past, present and future, so liked to pretend it was just Adam picking on a teenage girl. On the other were those who said it was time Australia faced the uncomfortable truth.
It was nothing new, though. In 1993 an indigenous player called Nicky Winmar had done something similar to Adam. In a match, also against Collingwood, Winmar, who grew up in an iron shack with no running water in Western Australia, had been targeted by racist fans, calling him, among other things, a ‘Black cunt’. At the end of the game Winmar lifted up his jersey, pointed to his Black skin and said, ‘I’m Black and I’m proud to be Black.’ A similar period of national soul-searching was supposed to have followed, although it was hijacked by the same sort of folks who thought it was overblown. The Collingwood president said: ‘As long as they conduct themselves like white people off the field, everyone will admire and respect them. As long as they conduct themselves like human beings, they will be all right.’ Wow.
Winmar received death threats. His club, St Kilda, banned him from talking about what happened. Five years later Sam Newman (yep, him again) ‘blacked up’ on television to pretend to be Winmar when he didn’t appear as a guest. Winmar, by the way, was at the MCG the night Adam was abused.
Time away from the sport gave Adam clarity and purpose. He could see that casual racism was alive and flourishing. And that the population was ignorant. Did Australians even know what racism was? Could they ever know?
He was an agent of change, a man who would transcend his sport, hold up a mirror to Australia and force people to look. What they saw wasn’t pretty. Maybe that’s what upset so many people. Adam spent plenty of time looking in the mirror, too. He asked himself difficult questions. Should he have just kept his mouth shut, let it all die down and lived a peaceful life? After all, look at Nicky Winmar, who ended up working in a mine and as a sheepshearer. As I make the finishing touches to this book, Eddie McGuire and Collingwood are facing the same accusations of racism over their treatment of another Black player, the Brazilian-born Héritier Lumumba. No apology, just promises to ‘fix’ the problem. What has changed?
‘I talked to those indigenous leaders that have been doing this stuff for fifty-plus years. I said, “Man, is anything gonna change?” They stopped me in my tracks and said, “Look what’s changed in my generation of living.” We used to be living on reservations, we weren’t allowed to get educated, we weren’t allowed to vote. We’re now seeing our grandchildren get an education, going to university, owning their own businesses, building wealth – don’t tell me that nothing’s changed. It’s changed a lot in that one generation and is going to change again in another generation. So be optimistic, be forward-thinking, don’t be angry, be positive, that this is an opportunity now, more so than ever.” If Adam could get an opportunity to talk to the indigenous people of America, he would realise even more how far his people had come.
I, too, want to be forward-thinking and positive and I say as much to those who have serious doubts. But all in good time. Before we can understand what is changing and how, we need to understand what the situation was in the past. It’s another section which, alas, makes for grim reading. But before we can see the light, we have to deal with the dark.
The estimated number of children who were stolen? Give or take… One. Hundred. Thousand. Indigenous people on average die ten years before white Australians. Those two statistics are linked. Cause and effect. Right there in black and white. I can also tell you that indigenous people are forty times more likely to experience domestic violence, ten times more likely to die from those experiences and fourteen times more likely to go to jail. There is a heavy price to pay for history (as we have already described post-slavery) and, unfortunately, the indigenous people in Australia have also paid. If you subjugate and terrorise an individual or a group of people, they suffer.
People’s children being wrenched from the grasps of their parents is going to hurt. And it’s going to hurt when people find out why it was done. The ‘European Australians’ called it, with unsurprising coldness, ‘assimilation’. This government policy reckoned that Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people, also known as First Nations People, should be allowed to die out through a process of natural elimination or be ‘assimilated’ into the white community. Particularly vulnerable were children of a combination of First Nations and white parentage. Adam’s mum was Aboriginal but his father had Celtic ancestry.
These poor folks were classified by the colour of their skin. The categories were typically derogatory – half-castes, crossbreeds, quadroons and octoroons. And there were taskforces roaming the country to find children who needed to be assimilated. This is why many First Nation folks talk about moving around a lot when they were growing up as kids. They were on the run. The police were often tasked with rounding up victims and they were given titles like, wait for it, Aboriginal Protection Officers. It’s like something out of a George Orwell novel. Oh, the officer who is supposed to protect me is going to snatch me away from my mother? Again, wow. A Dr Cecil Cook, who was the Northern Territory’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, said: ‘Everything necessary must be done to convert the half-caste into a white citizen.’
The seed of that barbaric ruling came, of course, from supremacy. First Nations were considered inferior. They were considered to be a threat to the white ruling class’s way of life. But guess what? When First Nations people were being assimilated into white families, the white Australians didn’t like that, either. They were worried they would be outnumbered. So many children were instead placed in ‘compounds’ or religious missions. Physical, mental and sexual abuse was not uncommon in those places. They had a lot stolen from them. They were lost, too. They were forced to adopt a white culture which was, frankly, alien to them. Their names were changed to make them more acceptable and they were forbidden from speaking their native tongue. Sound familiar? Cue African slaves in America and the Caribbean.
Australians Together, an organisation that catalogues the abuses and stories of the Stolen Generations so that indigenous people can fill in the blanks about what happened to them as kids and why, lists the effects of assimilation. Here are some of them…
Efforts to make stolen children reject their culture often created a sense of shame about being of Indigenous heritage. This resulted in a disconnection from culture, and an inability to pass culture on to their children.
Many children were wrongly told that their parents were abusive, had died or had abandoned them. Many never knew where they had been taken from or who their biological families were.
The children generally received a very low level of education, as they were expected to work as manual labourers and domestic servants. This has had lifelong economic implications and means many who are now parents are unable to assist their children with schoolwork and education.
Of course this should all sound familiar. People stolen from their homes, families split apart, denied their culture; organised abuse, violence and forced labour. But surely the European Australians didn’t just wake up one day and decide to dehumanise an entire race? Of course not. These were entrenched views being borne out. At least Christopher Columbus had nothing to do with it. The culprit here is another false hero from history: the Briton Captain James Cook.
Cook was another who ‘discovered’ the fabled ‘southern continent’ when landing at Botany Bay on 29 April 1770. The fact that the indigenous people had been there for 60,000 years, one of the oldest and most established peoples in the world, is an inconvenient truth. Cook claimed terra nullius – a Latin phrase for ‘empty land’ – to set in motion the hundreds of years of disregard for indigenous life and culture. But even before setting foot on Australian soil he shot an Aboriginal man, wounding him. It was a warning shot for sure. The British would bring disease and genocide. Eighteen years later, Captain Arthur Phillip returned to Botany Bay to set up a penal colony. A fleet of eleven ships arrived on 26 January 1788. This is known as Australia Day. Indigenous people call it Invasion Day. ‘We were murdered and you expect us to celebrate that day,’ Adam says. ‘We don’t celebrate the Holocaust.’
What followed was 140 years of massacres of indigenous people by the invaders, starting in 1791. And, of course, there was rape and enslavement into the bargain. Man, woman or child were not spared. In September 1794 the British suspected an indigenous boy of being a spy and he was burned in a fire, thrown into a river and shot dead. There were at least 310 massacres until the last recorded one in 1928, when at least thirty-one Aboriginal people were murdered in Coniston by a mob led by a Northern Territory police constable, seeking revenge for the death of a white man.
That organised violence is no longer happening. But state-sponsored dehumanisation has continued to occur in my lifetime, when the homes of indigenous people were destroyed and their land was taken from them. Naturally, the daily abuse, that ‘drip, drip’ effect, continues. Derogatory names, being followed in shops by security guards, assumptions about your status. ‘Every indigenous person has a story to tell about being vilified,’ Adam says. ‘We’re made to feel we’re not worthy.’
And would you believe that it was only in 1967 that Australia actually recognised indigenous people as human beings, as part of the population? Prior to a referendum – yes, Australians actually had to be asked the question – they were classed as flora and fauna.
What you will notice again is how the dehumanisation of Black people in America was being repeated in the exact same way on the other side of the world. And that’s because it was learned behaviour, deeply entrenched and passed down from generation to generation, that people of colour were inferior. And so we are back to those phrases again. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Or post-traumatic slave disorder. Or transgenerational trauma. People of colour have been oppressed for hundreds of years and no one has got over it. Not white, not brown, not Black. Because they don’t know about it and some don’t want to know about it.
So has that true history been taught in Australia? Has the government made a commitment and said, ‘Okay, we will try to level the playing field where that is concerned’?
‘No, not at all,’ Adam tells me. ‘What they have done is allowed teachers to teach Aboriginal history but without supplying them with the references that they need to be able to do that properly. So if I was a non-indigenous person at primary school or high school, how comfortable would I feel teaching history that I’ve never learned, never been taught, to students? You just wouldn’t have the confidence to do that or to do it respectfully. Saying, “Yes, you can go out and teach it”, with no guidance or reference to be able to do so, it’s really hard for them to confidently go out and do that.’
There is a knowledge gap. And that gap is filled with all sorts of rubbish. Jeff Harriott, my Australian headteacher friend from Manchester, knows all the stories about indigenous people. He grew up in a town with a large population of indigenous people and he was afraid of them. They were drunks, they were violent, they stole. That’s what he was taught. Now he has educated himself he knows the truth. It is easier for Australian society to generalise about the indigenous population, and to treat them all as troublemakers, than to face up to their history. ‘Why does no one ask, “Why?” ’ Jeff said. ‘What have we done to these people over 200 years?’
Adam makes the same point in a slightly different way. Even if there was education reform and an environment for those conversations to take place, there would still be people not willing to listen. Getting people to understand the concept of trauma passed down is hard. Too hard.
‘It’s not only on a colour side, but a non-colour side as well, that intergenerational [understanding] of white privilege and white supremacy. People who don’t get that it means they’ve lived a very privileged life and that they’ve lived a life that we all hope for our future generations. So, for me, my role is not about educating people about intergenerational trauma; people either want to get it or they just don’t.’ Adam and I hope those who don’t will grow smaller and smaller in number until they just don’t matter.
And round and round we go. This is why a 13-year-old girl abused Adam Goodes. But thank goodness he made his stand. That is not an easy thing to do. Believe me. Because I didn’t do it. I was abused in a similar way when I toured Australia. But I didn’t say anything. And I can say that I was being selfish by not doing something about it. I knew I could go home and I wouldn’t have to face it.
‘But also you wanted to protect yourself from it, Mikey,’ Adam says when I shared my experience and my reaction with him. ‘Racism is something that really affects you and then it made you feel so much more comfortable when you did get home to be surrounded by your people. And I think, for me, my mum told me very early that when people call me names to walk away, because they’re saying these names to get a reaction out of me. And if I didn’t react, they’d stop calling me that. And it worked and it was a way that my mum was able to protect me. But when I then learned about my history and my culture that I was part of, I was like, “No way, you’re not gonna call me these names, and try and degrade me of something that I’m so proud of.” And that’s where it was a real turning point for me after being educated in my culture, and that connection to my spirituality. That changed everything and gave me a voice to be able to stand up to these people, whether they’re 13-year-old girls, or whether they’re people working in the media, or nine people on the football field from opposition teams, I call them out. Because it was time that I had the courage to do that. And it needed to stop.’
Since retirement, Adam has been working to do that. To redress the balance, to educate and to fill in the knowledge gap. Adam founded the Indigenous Defence and Infrastructure Consortium. It assists indigenous businesses in gaining access to markets which, in the past, might have been closed to them, helps businesses grow and mentors indigenous entrepreneurs.
‘It’s a way of saying: this is what our community wants. We just want the same as you. To be equal. Not more. It’s like welfare dependency. Governments will say, “We’ll just give you a little something, we’ll just keep giving you enough, enough to survive and do what you choose to do.” Now, that, to me, is suppression. And it’s been happening for a very long time.
‘We want indigenous people to believe they can achieve anything they want to achieve. In the past we’ve been seen as athletes, artists. And that’s great. But we can be doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists. We’re now finishing high school and going on to university, like never, ever before in the history of colonisation. So we’re self-educating, we’re taking it upon ourselves to break down those barriers so that, in the next generation, we have more indigenous leaders owning their own businesses, and sitting on boards, running companies – that’s where true power is. And that’s where true change will come, I think.’
The biggest thing that’s happening is called the Indigenous Procurement Policy, which the government created in 2015. It forces government agencies to procure through indigenous businesses. In that first year about AU$268 million was being secured by indigenous businesses. Now, if you go back to the previous twelve months, what did the same government agencies spend with indigenous businesses when this policy wasn’t around? Just $6 million. And, right now, the government agencies have to spend about 3 per cent of the total contracts with indigenous businesses across those government agencies. Nearly a billion dollars a year are now being spent with indigenous businesses.
‘So that economic resilience, and also the power that comes with that, is finally happening for indigenous people,’ Adam says. ‘And with that economic growth and connection for those indigenous people, they’re now deciding where to live, where to put a roof over their head, what schools they want to send their children to, and, more importantly, what sort of health cover they want for their children and family. These are the three key areas that create so much disadvantage for indigenous people here in Australia.’
There are works in progress too. And the biggest issue remaining, of course, is re-education. Adam is involved in getting government recognition about what happened to the indigenous people and what is now the priority for their community. It is called the Uluru Statement of the Heart. And it’s a collaboration because the government actually reached out and said: ‘What should we prioritise?’ How’s that going?
‘We want a nation of truth-telling, and telling the truth about history, and being able to do so with a voice to parliament written into our constitution,’ Adam says. ‘Right now, we’re not acknowledged in our constitution. There are no laws, there’s no reference to any indigenous people ever being in Australia before it was colonised – and we want to rectify that. We believe that we should at least have a referendum on this and give the Australian people that opportunity to vote on whether or not they think it’s important.’
And just as Adam is talking, his daughter Adelaide appears again to give me a wave and a ‘hello’. He beams at her. And in that moment you can see that she is his motivation. That he can do something to help the next generation. It is as the indigenous elders said to him: ‘Be optimistic, be forward-thinking, be positive, that this is an opportunity now, more so than ever.’ His daughter can be all of those things, in large part thanks to her father, who is doing a great job for his people and pressuring the government to level the playing field.
‘I’m very hopeful about the future and the opportunities I can provide for her. She’s already miles ahead of where I was as a kid. I didn’t know about my Aboriginal history. My mum didn’t know about it. Adelaide is already engrossed in her culture. She’s already learning about language, about our people. And that’s a gift.’