Nicky Winmar and I are in Ivanhoe, half a dozen train stops from Victoria Park, sitting under an old river red gum, talking about dreams. He still dreams about playing football. In his dreams, “the footy tingles in my fingers”. In his dreams, there is no sound, no abuse, no way the opposition can catch him. Sometimes he wakes up with tears of joy streaming down his face. The football field was the one place where he was fully at ease, where his demons were at bay, where his pulse would slow. “Footy without thought,” he calls it.
We’re at an amateur ground in Melbourne, a world away from the MCG, his favourite ground. We talk about his new book, which begins with a gun, a locked house and a conviction to end it all, and ends with healing and hope. As we speak, his gaze never leaves the empty oval. He surveys the space, the slope and the ancient trees surrounding it. He shakes his head: “Geez I miss it.”
Winmar doesn’t want your pity. He doesn’t want to be a spokesperson for his people. He doesn’t want to be on speed dial every time there’s a racist incident. He doesn’t want to launch into some impassioned plea for tolerance, a doleful lament on the plight of Indigenous people. He wants to confront the bigots. He wants their address. He wants a piece of them.
Most of all, Winmar wants you to know where he comes from. His dad was born in a tent under a tree. He was raised on an Aboriginal reservation in Western Australia’s wheatbelt, under what was essentially a form of apartheid, and never met his older sister Robyn, who died from a spider bite. Home was a corrugated shack with dirt floors and no windows, running water or functional sewerage system. There was a 6pm curfew. When he was two, a local magistrate sentenced an Aboriginal youth to six months’ detention for stealing lollies and cigarettes. “Whipping is the only punishment the Aboriginals fear,” the magistrate had said. “Physical pain is what makes these natives sit up and take notice.”
“We were rounded up like livestock in a fenced-off yard,” Winmar writes in his book, My Story: From Bush Kid to AFL Legend. The football field, at least at first, was a safe space. The football field was freedom. He would hunt the ball, he says, “like my ancestors hunted kangaroos”. He was exquisitely skilled on both sides of his body. He was fast, he was tough. He won a senior best and fairest in an A-grade local competition as a 15-year-old. By then, he had left school and was working as a shearer.
Several years later, Winmar was smuggled across the Nullarbor and landed at a football club best known for its wooden spoons, mudheaps, animal enclosure and disco. Living in bayside Melbourne, he never saw any other Aboriginal people. “You were more likely to spot a Tasmanian tiger,” he says. He ached for home. But he was an instant sensation.
It’s a career, however, that’s difficult to assess in its totality. Winmar was only inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame last year, which was about a decade too late. He took some of the best marks of the 1980s and 90s, and could spiral a torpedo, check, weigh and caress his kicks, and surf the crest of packs. He was a ferocious tackler. His best year was probably 1989, one of the wettest Melbourne winters on record, a season when the grounds were half a foot underwater. They were conditions for the low slung and the jetty thighed. But Winmar’s chicken legs danced in the slop.
There were dog days too. Days when he was barely present, when he was hungover, stoned or mourning. There was “the constant urge to self-sabotage”. There was the tension between being a black man in a white man’s world, the guilt of one raised in poverty who was suddenly being feted, idiolised and well remunerated. You’re raised subhuman, he says, and suddenly treated as a superhuman. “You should be grateful and relieved, but you’re wary and watchful. You’re always wondering what the catch is,” he writes.
In April 1993, four months after Paul Keating’s Redfern speech, he travelled to Victoria Park at the top of his game. He was the favourite for the Brownlow medal. It was a hot day, which he loved, but he knew what was coming. At half-time in the curtain raiser, someone tipped a cup of piss over him. He had copped racist abuse for years. When the ball trickled towards the fence, he would often avoid retrieving it, knowing a torrent of abuse would follow. But this was something else altogether.
A lot changed when Winmar lifted his St Kilda guernsey, pointed to his skin and declared, “I’m Black and I’m proud.” The moment is comprehensively covered in Matthew Klugman and Gary Osmond’s excellent book, Black and Proud – The Story of an Iconic AFL Photo. “An arresting statement of race, discrimination, dignity and defiance,” they called it. But for Winmar, it was triumph and trauma in equal measure. It was a moment he was forced to live over again and again. He spent the following days curled “in a quivering foetal ball”. He came to dread and resent the anniversaries. He would chop up his sim cards so people couldn’t pester him for comment. “We got the win and Gilbert [McAdam] and I played well, but it was a horrible day, looking back,” Winmar says. “They didn’t consider us to be the same species as them.”
Winmar played some sublime football post 1993, but could never get any continuity. He played the 1997 grand final in a fog. It was another Indigenous player, Andrew McLeod, who turned the game that day. It was another magician, Darren Jarman, who etched his name in football folklore. A few days later, Nicky buried his father. In 1999, Sam Newman sauntered on to the set of the Footy Show, his face smothered with black boot polish. Winmar had been scheduled to appear, but suffered a panic attack and backed out. “You’re told to lighten up, to get a sense of humour,” he writes. “You’re told, ‘It’s just a joke, mate.’ But it isn’t.”
Retirement hit Winmar hard. “A shit experience,” he says. He was lost without the roars and the routine. He was restless, unmoored and unwell. In 2012, toiling in the Geraldton mines, “busting my balls and my back in equal measure”, he had a heart attack. And he is still feeling the effects of his many head knocks – dizziness, headaches and memory lapses.
But there has been healing too. He paints, he visits his grandkids. And gradually, torturously, he has come to terms with the events of April 1993. “I talk to young kids all the time and they look at me and point to their skin,” he says. “The next generation of players are doing it too. I’m proud of that, and proud for them. These days, men and women tell me they were with their parents that day, and that they’re sorry for what happened. That means a lot.”
For the people of the Kulin nation, Victoria Park has always been a sacred place, the scene of corroborees and ceremonial rituals. In April this year, some of the most prominent footballers of last 50 years gathered in the forward pocket. The purpose was to smoke out the bad blood. “Soul nourishment,” Winmar called it.
A few days before that, after 30 years, Collingwood had finally apologised. The current Magpies captain also spoke. “I really wanted to be here tonight,” Darcy Moore said. “To see the young kids here today has really inspired me to keep working towards a shared future where we can all walk together in strength and solidarity.”
“It was an amazing experience,” Winmar says. “To walk out with Gilbert and my brothers was everything. And Darcy Moore, the way he spoke, was just magnificent. My dad was a Pies supporter, can you believe that? Collingwood … even when I was playing! My birthday is the 25th of September, I lost my dad on the 26th September in 1997, and Collingwood won [the 2023 AFL grand final] on the 30th of September. I thought of him. I used to hate them but I’m so happy they got that premiership.”
Winmar points up at the river red gum. “Sir Doug Nicholls used to sit under this tree, watching the footy,” he tells me. It’s several weeks since Australia comprehensively rejected an Indigenous voice to parliament. Nicholls was a footballer, boxer, professional sprinter, minister, social worker, governor and leader of his people. Winmar, a Noongar man from the other side of the country, speaks in awe of a man who spent 30 years demanding full citizenship status before it was finally granted in 1967. “You know, all through that ceremony, all I could think was ‘30 years!’” He laughs. “Where’d that time go? It’s like it was yesterday.”
My Story: From Bush Kid to AFL Legend by Nicky Winmar with Matthew Hardy, published by Allen and Unwin, is available on 31 October
