Four years ago, Adam Goodes walked from Geelong’s Kardinia Park in tears. It had been an emotional afternoon. His captain’s baby daughter had died during the week and the Swans devoted their win to her memory. Geelong hadn’t been beaten on their home ground for eons but Sydney played out of their skins. Goodes pretty much won it off his own boot in the final term.
The Geelong fans clapped him off, just as Essendon supporters had applauded him a few weeks earlier, after he narrowly missed a set shot after the siren. Later, on the night of his 300th game, he was clapped off again. He was not yet an affront to the mainstream. It was all very polite and respectful.
Twelve months later, he sank to his knees like Willem Dafoe in Platoon. It was an iconic image, an indelible mix of ecstasy, exhaustion and relief. Hobbled, he’d nonetheless played an instrumental role in one of the great grand final upsets. Many thought he would retire there and then. He surely had nothing more to prove. He celebrated. Hawthorn rued. We applauded. Footy was simple.
But things got complicated. And football, like the country that obsesses over it, doesn’t excel in complexity. The morning after Goodes’s war dance in the game against Carlton in Sydney, back in May, a quartet of former players and journalists coughed and spluttered, blithered and blathered their way around the issue on Melbourne radio. “The significance of these war dances,” Dermott Brereton said, “they come from another era and they are significant in the fact that it’s between two tribes who do it before they go out and want to kill each other … is it a great thing to have in this day and age? I don’t think so.”
Thus Dermie. About a quarter of what he says makes more sense than anyone in the game. But in the world of Australian rules football, you have to keep talking. The shark has to keep moving forward. Every view must be more strident than the last. Whether you’re talking about a 60,000-year-old Indigenous culture or how to penetrate a zone defence, your opinion apparently carries equal weight.
In normal daily discourse, we’re a little more hamstrung. There are things we’re itching to say but we don’t quite get there. Our conversations are coded. Our sentences find dead ends. Our default position is defence. At dinner parties, at bars, at water coolers, on trams, the language is cautious but revealing – “uppity”, “sook”, “I’m not racist but…” We check our conversations, depending on who’s around. Our inability to find the right words manifests itself in tortured, qualified sentences, in incomprehensible online posts, in more anonymous, reptilian contributions, in half-caught conversations at pubs that start at a low hum and grow progressively louder. And in boos.
It has all the hallmarks of what Waleed Aly calls “high-level, low-level racism”. But it’s easy, of course, to make out that we’re living in 1930s Alabama. Francis Leach opined last week that Australian football has become a “redneck wonderland”. I sifted through the hyperbole and tried to line up his views against my own experience. I’ve been going to the football since the late 80s and I’ve never heard anything overtly racist. I’ve heard sexist and homophobic slurs. I’ve seen violence. At the tennis in January, I heard a pissed businessman call Serena Williams a “coon”. I’ve seen Indian and Sri Lankan cricketers racially vilified at the MCG. At a London football match, I saw a member of the National Front slice a black man’s face open like a watermelon. One of the enduring miracles and charms of Melbourne life is watching 95,000 people file into the MCG and – for the best part – behave like decent human beings. There are no monkey chants at football games. We don’t throw bananas on the field. We don’t drape banners over grandstands that evoke the Holocaust.
If there’s one thing about Australians, particularly Australian men, it’s that we don’t like being told what to do. There’s a real truculence there; an antipodean obstinance, a reluctance to temper our views. And when everyone from Charlie Pickering to James Packer gets righteously indignant and starts playing moral arbiter, the contrarian in me is tempted to stamp my feet and draw battlelines. How dare they? What would they know?
It would be a fraught response, of course. As the last month has proved, Australian racism swims in murky waters. You wade through the threads on the internet, the rants on social media and the comments underneath opinion articles. You see Goodes’s Wikepedia page peppered with monkey photos. You hear men like Sam Newman trash him live on TV. “People aren’t booing you because you’re Aboriginal,” he sneered. “They’re booing you because you’re acting like a jerk.” If Goodes is searching for the face of racism, he could do worse than Newman’s leathered, embittered mug – the face of Australia that prefers its Aboriginal champions to be silent, deferential and stoic.
My team, like Newman’s, is Geelong. We host Sydney on Saturday night. Geelong’s supporter base is demanding, some would say entitled. Lately, we have been spoilt. It’s a dozy crowd. We are occasionally exhorted to generate more noise at games. Geelong has a sizeable blue-rinse set. The last time I went, the lady next to me spent the first half knitting. By three-quarter time, she was asleep. But the place will be on edge tomorrow night. And we will all be on notice.
Australia has a way of surprising you. Common decency – the best kept secret of the 21st century – has a way of reasserting itself when you least expect it. I hope we’re in for a night of surprises on Saturday. I hope I don’t scan my ticket and enter a redneck wonderland. I hope the better aspects of the Australian nature reveal themselves in Sleepy Hollow. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
- Follow Geelong v Sydney live on Guardian Australia from 6:30pm AEST on Saturday.
