Obstacle Race: Aborigines in Sport
By Colin Tatz
UNSW Press, 1995. 408 pp., $39.95 (hb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
If sport is a "litmus test" for racism in Australia, as Colin Tatz argues in his new book, the results are pretty damning.
The first Aborigine known to play cricket in Australia, a player by the name of "Shiney" in Hobart in 1835, had his skull sent to a museum in Ireland when he died. It was returned for burial only in 1992.
Of the 7076 first-class cricketers who played from 1850 to 1987, only 10 were Aborigines. Eddie Gilbert, a Queensland fast bowler who took 5 for 65 against the touring West Indies in 1929, and who once bowled Bradman for a duck in 1931, was excluded from higher honours because of his colour. He died from alcoholism and syphilis after spending 23 years in a mental institution.
Gilbert, along with four of the other eight Aboriginal fast bowlers, was branded a "chucker" (slinging the ball illegally) by those who wanted to keep Aborigines, especially successful ones, out of the game.
In Australian Rules football, Doug Nicholls, the champion Fitzroy winger and later governor of South Australia, was initially rejected by blue-blood Carlton in the late 1920s "because he smelled"! Other brilliant Aboriginal footballers such as St Kilda's Nicky Winmar and Essendon's Michael Long are not exceptional in suffering racist taunts and abuse, but they have stood up and defied their treatment.
Commonwealth Games chief Arthur Tunstall still thinks it is all a joke.
Most Aborigines have had to surmount pitiful levels of sporting resources, racist attitudes and institutional discrimination to claim their sporting rights. Aboriginal women have faced the most and the highest hurdles.
Aboriginal teams have often struggled to find competitions that would accept them, and have sometimes faced expulsion from those they have succeeded in.
Tatz catalogues the long history of poverty, adversity and racism that has dogged Aborigines in sport. Their Third World status is not just a historical episode from the bad old unenlightened days, either.
Cathy Freeman's success and popularity on the track, the 250,000 people who lined the streets of Melbourne in 1968 to cheer Lionel Rose's world bantamweight title, Essendon footballer Gavan Wanganeen's Brownlow Medal — all these individual highs which engender Aboriginal pride, and respect from the rest of society, should not disguise the racism that still exists in sport, even for stars when they are off the field or in retirement.
Tatz examines how a racist society which worships sport handles successful Aboriginal sports persons. The adulation they receive is genuine, but as Charles Perkins (former head of the old Department of Aboriginal Affairs and South Australian representative soccer player) puts it, Aboriginal stars are "accepted as sports heroes but not as people".
Doug Nicholls saw it the same way with his sad but accurate view that respect for Aborigines "comes from their sporting prowess, not from their social organisation, survival skills, music, art, lore, law, culture, their civility and civilisation".
The source of Aborigines' problems in sport, and other civil life, is clear to Tatz. The racist comments, whether from the notoriously racist Collingwood crowd directed against Winmar or from Collingwood players like Damien Monkhurst directed against Long, are hurtful and unacceptable, but the real problem lies at an institutional level.
Educating individuals out of bad attitudes will be ineffective as long as the question remains unaddressed of "how to educate a business corporation, a health or housing commission, a bureaucracy, a police force, the corrective services, the 'tabloid' media". These institutions which have power in capitalist society and have used that power to set people against each other on the grounds of skin colour instead of having them united against these institutions' power and wealth.
When corporate and institutional racism are no more, then people and sport won't be racist, and the future Eddie Gilberts and Doug Nicholls will be treated as equals of non-Aborigines in all spheres of life instead of just when they have their cricket whites or club guernseys on.