Round #11 - A weight carried forward
Sir Doug Nicholls
My drawing of former Fitzroy and Victorian State player Sir Doug Nicholls, for whom this round honours. Carrying the weight forward.
“Your words tell others what you think. Your actions tell them what you believe.”
TD Jakes
—
I am old enough to remember when our game sounded different.
It sounded different on the field.
It sounded different in the stands.
I remember this because it was only every so often, such that it stood out.
I remember the player.
It was Carlton’s Syd Jackson, an Indigenous player from Western Australia, and he was masterful.
He stood out.
In just about every game he played in Victoria, he was the only Indigenous player on the ground.
For all of his beautiful talent and joy that he brought to the game, you could feel the weight that he carried that others didn’t.
A weight he carried forward.
—
Sir Doug Nicholls understood this weight decades before Syd took the field. "How can we soar like eagles, when you feed us like chooks?" he asked.
The Indigenous footballers of Syd’s generation were expected to give the answers to questions other people wanted, just to play the game they loved, only to learn that both question and answer bore little resemblance to the world they understood and believed in.
But they went about redefining both the question and the answer, creating a different dialogue, if only to take the conversation forward, driving a wedge between the old and new way, and those caught in between.
Discomfort marks the place where the old way meets the new way. The need to push through. It is a place of vulnerability and courage. These players followed their own voices, seeking to answer the questions that lived inside them, no longer constructing answers to other people’s questions.
Sir Doug lifted the weight just enough, and Syd a little more. Then there were generations of Farmers, Krakouers, Kicketts, Riolis, and Hills, and Franklins, O’Loughlins, Betts and Goodes, and so many more, all prepared to carry the weight, whilst lifting it for the next generation who were expected to do likewise.
They changed and redefined the game and its culture, not just having to overcome the many obstacles in a system built for someone different, but also the hurt and exasperation with the ‘old way’ hatred pointed their way for no reason other than who they were.
Each generation built a platform, a new point of departure, for the next cohort of courageous individuals to continue the conversation they started, the forging of a new way.
And the game sounded different.
—
The courageous conversation is the one we don’t want to have.
We should listen, before we talk, seek to understand.
Do something.
Then, all of us get to carry the weight forward.
And the game will sound different.
Play on!
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