PRIME MINISTER
SPEECH BY THlE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P. J. KEATING, MP
NORTHERN TERRITORY FOOTBALL LEAGUE
ABORIGINAL ALL-STARS v COLLINGWOOD BALL
As the football experts are prone to say there's a lot
hanging on this game tomorrow.
But it's not so much on who wins or loses. Both sides,
it seems to me, are already the winners simply for
playing the game.
It also seems to me that they are sides with something
very basic in common: I mean they both know what it is to
do it hard in the world.
Collingwood, the greatest sporting club in Australia,
grew up In a poor working class area of Melbourne. They
were social underdogs who became sporting top dogs.
Collingwood succeeded because it tapped the spirit of
people whose circumstances might easily have drained the
spirit from them.
The Collingwood Football Club gave them a collective
strength. It gave them the means by which they could know
success. The spirit was there it just needed a vehicle
for its expression.
The All Stars have much in common with this story. They
have been drawn from the ranks of those Australians who
have been denied a lot of the good things in Australian
life and subjected to a lot of the worst things.
They too might easily have given in to their
ci rcumstances.
But the All Stars like the teams in the Territory from
which many of their players are drawn are proof of
their willingness to overcome the odds. The team is an
expression of the spirit and the potential of Aboriginal
Australia. Like Collingwood, the spirit is there it only needs the
vehicle for its expression.
I will come back to the football in a moment.
And before you murmur what would this character from
Bankstown and Canberra know about Australian Rules? I
have to remind you that in Miarch last year, aliost alone
among the tipsters, I said that the winner of the 1993
Browniow Medal would be Gavan Wanganeen.
And Kicky Winmar was my second tip.
Nicky Winmar's gesture of defiance at Collingwood is
destined to be legendary. In my view it was a great
gesture. Yet there were other gestures in last year's football
season which were, in a sense, just as significant
because they spoke of success.
There was Gavan Wanganeen with the Brownlow Medal in his
hand. There was Michael Long with the Norm Smith medaland
the Premiership Cup above his head.
And there was the gesture of Allan McAlister coming to
the Territory to meet the Aboriginal community, to talk,
to learn, to come to a new understanding.
Tomorrow's match builds on all those events.
And let me say now there will be other winners to come
out of this weekend's events.
Pre-eminent among them will be the City of Darwin.
Hundreds of thousands of Australians will be watching
this historic match. I am sure it will not fail to enter
the minds of most of them that Darwin was the place which
had the national vis4on and character to make it happen.
Darwin and its people.
Standing here in a dinner suit on a night like this I
realise that among the many attractions of Darwin must be
the climate.
It is a wonderful climate for politics. I mean the sort
of climate in which no politician would dare to make a
long speech.
Most of you will know, I hope, that I am a politician who
is inclined to take a national view. I tend to think of
Australia as one nation.
The details of what I mean by that would take too long to
describe at a ball in tropical heat but in short it
means that whatever the difference in geography and
experience, or colour, or creed whatever the degree of
our attachment to the place in which we live we are all
Australians, and think of ourselves as Australians, and
do better in the world and by each other when we work
with a common national purpose.
That means, among other things, that while the place I
come from is very different to Darwin, Darwin's
experience is part of mine. When Darwin succeeds we all
share in that success. When Darwin's spirit rises so
does the spirit of Australia.
And Darwin's spirit is most definitely rising.
This has always been a frontier town but never more so
than now. It Is in the forefront of the great change
which is taking place in Australia.
It is our gateway to Asia, a place with a vital role to
play in 6ofeonomic development, and in our cultural and
social development. Darwin, after all, has always been
multicultural, it has always had multiracial sport it
has set the example for the rest 6f7AUitrala.
As I said, Australia is undergoing a profound change: in
the way we do things, in the direction of our thinking,
in the way we imagine ourselves and our role in the
world. They say you can't write history until you are far enough
away to see the shape of events. Up close, in the midst
of the fray, it's all a bit of a blur.
But in the last twelve months I reckon we've all felt it.
You could sense the change in the last year or so as if
the tide had imperceptibly turned and was now running
our way.
Just now we are starting to see evidence of it in the
figures. You can see it on the score-board.
it actually is a bit like a football match There is
that moment when you feel the game change.
And I truly believe the game has changed between black
and white Australia.
This game is evidence of it. In that sense the score is
already on the board.
It's hard to say precisely what the turning point was.
I know that Kevin Sheedy and the Essendon Football Club
played a role wffith theifr recruiting caiimpigns and their
regular pre-season games in Darwin and last year's
Premiership was proof that there was wisdom as well as
justice in the policy.
I think they deserve enormous credit for their
initiative.
And of course there is one other person who deserves a
lot of credit NickyWinmar.
Think of what one gesture of defiance triggered a
national debate on racism in sport and a new recognition
of -th& -role Aboriginals play -in Australian sport.
Not to mention a horrible succession of mysterious
Coll1ingwood defeats.
Along the way, things also went wrong for Nicky and St
Kilda; Allan McAlister came to the Northern Territory;
Essendon, with a sizeable crew of Aboriginal players, won
the premiership; Michael Long won the Norm Smith medal;
and my March selection, Gavan Wanganeen, won the
Brownlow. It has all ended up here with this historic match.
And it all happened in the International Year of the
World's Indigenous People and the year of Mabo.
So the game, as I said, has changed.
There is a change in mood and awareness.
And with the Mabo decision there is a change in law and
let me tell you that de-sjpite all the arguments, all the
understandable anxiety, all the negotiation which is
still to take place, the Mabo legislation puts right an
historic wrong and there is no going back on that.
I am very much aware of how far there is to go.
I am also aware that very often the sentiments expressed
by politicians seem out of touch with social and economic
reality out of touch with the complexities of life as
it is really lived in Australia.
It is our duty to get in touch with those realities and
fashion policies accordingly. Ultimately the trick is
always to put the right people and the right money in the
right places.
But it ig also necessary to state the principles: not
because one ever believes that they can be translated
into a perfect reality, but because they are necessary
values and ambitions for a nation to live by.
They are the nation's articles of faith, the code we live
by. In some countries they are write into
constitutions and bills of rights: here they are
unwritten, but they are just as powerful.
eft-
1 am talking about ideas like a fair go for all, support
for the underdog, tolerance of difference, respect for
those who by their own efforts have succeeded against the
odds. Every one of those principles on which we pride ourselves
declares that racism is abhorrent everywhere, Including
football fields or tennis courts, or athletics tracks.
It is abhorrent to our best traditions and the best
traditions of sport.
I was at a function at the Australian War Memorial during
the week the opening of an exhibition of drawings done
by children in a Jewish ghetto in Poland during the war.
All but a handful of 17,000 children in the ghetto were
killed in the Auschwitz extermination camp.
I mention this only as a background to words which a
survivor of the ghetto used in a speech at the war
memorial to summarise, he said what an extraordinary
gift the tolerance and freedom and democracy of Australia
had been for refugees like himself.
He also said that democracy and tolerance were more
deeply embedded in the f-abric -of Aus-tralian life than
anywhere else in the world.
His words were very moving. They were a reminder that
those intangible things like tolerance and fairness are
real, especially to people who have been denied them.
It was a reminder of how vital to our national life and
character these values are how jealously we should
defend them.
I would like to think that tomorrow's contest is part of
that defence.
That's why I said at the beginning that, however close
the contest on the field and whoever wins, the teams are
both winners.
I hope and I think we all hope that in due course it
will be seen that they were both playing on the same
side. in fact I think all Australians can be winners from this
weekend's events. if we all want to be. If we all are
prepared to enter into the spirit of it. If we all see
it as a step along the way a highly symbolic step
towards reconciliation between black and white
Australians. I congratulate Tony Shaw and the NTFL, and Allan
McAlister and the Collingwood Football Club for all they
have done.
6
I also want to pay tribute to Maurice Rioli, coach of the
All-Stars, former great player and for years now in the
Northern Territory and throughout Australia a hero and
role model for Aboriginal people.
And finally, let me wish the players the very best of
luck. DARWIN 11 February 1994