On Wednesday morning last week, shocking revelations about the treatment of young First Nations AFL footballers and their partners were revealed, following a detailed investigation by ABC reporter Russell Jackson.
There were allegations that Hawthorn Football Club senior officials forcibly separated First Nations players from partners and families, and even insisted a couple terminate a pregnancy, all to allow the players to focus on their footy.
While many of us have read the reports with horror and disbelief, it is important that the investigation into the situation be allowed to play out.
However, with the disturbing face of racism in footy once again raising its ugly head, it throws a light on an issue that we cannot turn away from.
This is not the first time.
Think back to the time of champion Doug Nicholls’ days at Carlton when the trainers refused to rub him down.
Nicky Winmar’s defiant response to ongoing racial taunts from the opposition supporters.
The racist and shameful treatment of AFL legend Adam Goodes.
The findings of the Collingwood Football Club “Do Better” report.
And even as recently as last year, when Adelaide captain Taylor Walker felt it was acceptable to make racial slurs about another player.
How could it be that someone in a leadership role could behave that way?
How could it be that within the AFL these well documented instances of racism continue? Or within other organisations, for that matter?
What does this say about us as a nation?
What does it say about how our attitudes have been shaped by our colonial past, and why our continued failure to confront our history — including the past atrocities and racist constitution and policies that are the basis of our nation — has resulted in insidious and pervasive institutional, systemic and structural racism?
As we know, the lie of Terra Nullius, meaning “nobody’s land”, was the basis of settlement of this continent, the claiming of sovereignty by the Crown.
This false assumption and a lack of understanding of the complexity of Aboriginal culture, lore and society, were the foundation on which our country was built.
The violence that characterised the taking of the land was written about in newspapers, reports and colonists’ diaries and letters.
But over time, this has become part of the great Australian silence — a collective amnesia about what really happened.
The many policies that supported the removal of children, kept Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on missions and limited their educational opportunities were all designed to ‘smooth the dying pillow’ (the eventual situation where the First Nation peoples would die out). They no longer exist.
And the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 — one of the first pieces of legislation passed by Australia’s newly-formed Parliament — was, as then Attorney-General Alfred Deakin noted, necessary to secure a ‘white Australia’.
Australia had become a white society and a society that was deeply segregated according to race.
Our governments and institutions, at all levels, reflected this whiteness.
The underpinnings of our nation — the Constitution and the White Australia Policy that followed — were structurally racist. They are an integral part of how our institutions and organisations and our attitudes as a nation, and even individuals, have been shaped.
They have led to unfair treatment and inequalities.
And the systemic racism flowing from this has damaged lives. We only have to read the Bringing Them Home report to have some understanding of the extent of the harm caused.
This lack of understanding of our beginnings, the great forgetting about the Frontier Wars and the ongoing impacts of the policies designed to subjugate the original inhabitants of the continent still permeate our collective and individual knowledge, influence our thinking and continue to provide a fertile breeding ground for conscious and unconscious racist responses at all levels.
In the context of the Hawthorn Football Club allegations, there was a widespread response of shock and disbelief.
“Our wider Australian society — and its institutions — has for centuries demonised loving, decent Indigenous people who are told by the state they are not fit to be parents,” ABC indigenous affairs reporter Bridget Brennan reminds us.
“The past never leaves us as Indigenous people, but it rarely informs the actions of majority-white workplaces and institutions which profess to be culturally safe and inclusive.”
The wider community now knows about the Stolen Generations, but for workplaces to be culturally safe, there needs to be more than knowing.
There needs to be deep reflection and understanding of how history and the racist structures and polices of our governments have influenced our own attitudes. It is starting with ourselves first.
As indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney reflected, “sport holds a mirror up to society. It shows the courageous, wonderful things, but it also shows the ugly side of things, like racism”.
Jonathan Horn also summed it up in The Guardian.
“For anyone who loves this sport, it is a week of uncomfortable truths, and a profound shame,” he wrote.
But perhaps it is also an opportunity for Australians to understand that our racist past is still echoing today and to work individually to reflect on the impact our history has on our own attitudes and thinking.
To find out more about the Frontier Wars, watch the first episode of the new SBS NITV three-part documentary series The Australian Wars at https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/the-australian-wars
To read the Bringing Them Home report, visit https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/pdf/social_justice/bringing_them_home_report.pdf