ABSTRACT
Too often, the back-story of the person’s comments are ignored, the implications of the racist comments are forgotten and, crucially the narrative, interpretation and perspective of the intended target of the racist comments are given little air-time. The back-story of person who has made the comments is used as a means to deny their ‘racism’, but the stories of the person targeted are largely ignored, even in the case of Nicky Winmar and Gilbert McAdam, who were pivotal in the most public stance against racism on the football field in 1993. Klugman and Osmond write:
the image of Nicky Winmar pointing with defiant pride at his dark skin is familiar to most Australians, but the experiences that prompted him and Gilbert McAdam to seize the moment are not. Winmar himself is a household name through much of Australia yet almost no one knows of the appalling segregation he experiencd while growing up. (Klugman and Osmond 2013: 7)
The people who booed Adam Goodes throughout 2014-15 were not racist, the story has gone, they were simply exercising their rights as real Aussie rules footy fans. Klugman and Osmond have pointed out that racist abuse – of one kind or another – in the context of Austalian rules football, is an almost weekly occurrence. My perspective on racism in the context of footy – i.e. ‘the Australian game’ – is that racism is intrinsic to the sport since the discourse and practice of footy involves a negotiation of postcolonial identities. From the beginning the game has been mixed up in its sense of being ‘a game of our own’, yet, through Tom Wills and the school of Rugby, having overt British heritage (Gorman et al. 2016; de Moore 2008). Footy, and Australian sport, is an encounter between Aboriginal identities and those identities which are framed as imagined as coming from some kind of settler, Anglo-identity. Both identities are homogenized and generalized. However, Aboriginal identity is often given a privileged position in the sense that it reduces a player’s identity to only being about his Aboriginality.
