The racially charged booing and denigration of Sydney Swans’ star player, Adam Goodes, has reached a crescendo in recent weeks. His detractors include supporters of rival AFL clubs as well as some conservative commentators such as radio shock jock Alan Jones, journalist Miranda Devine and TV host and journalist Andrew Bolt.

On Channel Seven’s Sunrise program, Jones was reported as saying that opposition club supporters were reacting negatively to Goodes because they simply did not like his behaviour, including his “spear throwing and the running in and doing a war dance and so on and provoking people”.

According to Jones, the champion footballer “is always a victim”. Moreover “(e)very time he speaks, Australia is a racist nation. I mean, there are 71 Indigenous players … They’re booing Adam Goodes because they don’t like him and they don’t like his behaviour.”¹

SMH sports columnist, Peter FitzSimons, described these comments as “tripe”. Rather he sided with Fairfax columnist, Waleed Aly, on the controversy. After Goodes did the Indigenous war dance back in June, Aly offered the following explanation on the ABC’s Insiders program:

“There is no mystery about this at all,” Aly said. “And it’s not as simple as it being about race. It’s about something else. It’s about the fact that Australia is generally a very tolerant society until its minorities demonstrate that they don’t know their place. And at that moment, the minute someone in a minority position acts as though they’re not a mere supplicant, then we lose our minds. And we say, ‘No, no, you’ve got to get back in your box here’.”²

While there is merit in this, the racial ingredient explicit in such terms as “ape”, “black c—” and “get back to the zoo” that have been thrown like barbed spears at Goodes, should not be discounted.

On identifying some of the main triggers for the racially laden booing – I don’t believe any one of these triggers can be considered ‘the catalyst’ – Paul Daley from The Guardian listed the following:

• The incident in 2013 when Goodes singled out a 13-year-old Collingwood supporter who called him an ape;
• The Carlton match in May this year when Goodes performed his Indigenous war dance that involves a spear-throwing gesture;
• Goodes’s 2014 address as Australian of the Year, when he strongly identified with the Indigenous melancholy around Australia Day because it marked the moment of the British invasion.

This list of triggers omits another episode, namely Goodes’ praise for John Pilger’s documentary Utopia. In March 2014, Goodes stated that the aggression expressed by some commentators towards the film was “a cover for their hostility to the truth about Aboriginal people”.

Goodes said: “It takes courage to tell the truth, no matter how unpopular those truths may be. But it also takes courage to face up to our past. That process starts with understanding our very dark past, a brutal history of dispossession, theft and slaughter. For that reason, I urge the many fair-minded Australians who seek genuine prosperity and equality for my people to find the courage to open their hearts and their minds and watch Utopia.”³

Paul Daley has argued that the underlying source of the hostility expressed towards Goodes goes back to 1770 when Captain James Cook and a couple of Gweagal tribesman were involved in this continent’s first east coast conflict.

Daley recounts: “The Gweagal threw spears. Cook’s men shot at the Gweagal, wounding at least one and setting the tone for the 1788 invasion and all that followed, to which Goodes referred graciously in his Australia Day speech.”

However, “(t)wo hundred and forty five years later the big questions at the heart of Australian nationhood remain unanswered. There’s been no reckoning for the extreme violence, dispossession and related trauma that still reverberates in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia, no treaty and no honest dealings on sovereignty.”⁴

As former Swans’ footballer, Michael O’Loughlin, recently said about the vilification of Adam Goodes: “Unfortunately some Australians don’t like the Aboriginals to speak up and show strength and talk about these issues. They like their Aboriginal people to sit in the corner and be humble and be thankful for what they have.”⁵

This regrettably is substantially the truth of the matter. As Paul Daley has correctly observed: cultural sensitivity, especially towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, has never been one of white Australia’s attributes.

Read one GCPC member’s email to the Sydney Swans Football Club in support of Adam Goodes here.

Notes

1. Megan Levy, ‘Swans star Adam Goodes always plays the victim: Alan Jones’, SMH, July 29, 2015.
2. Quoted in Peter FitzSimons, ‘Bravo Adam Goodes and shame on Alan Jones and his acolytes’, SMH, July 30, 2015.
3. Adam Goodes, ‘Hostility to John Pilger’s film a denial of nation’s brutal past’, SMH, March 3, 2014.
4 & 5. Paul Daley, ‘We feud over Adam Goodes because our big questions remain unanswered’, The Guardian, July 31, 2015.