“We’ve still got a long way to go all across Australia including this region in terms of Indigenous issues so when I talk about equality, I acknowledge that there’s a lot of disadvantage of Aboriginal people in the local area. We still have a long way to go, however those sensibilities I think leans itself naturally to just wanting other people having the opportunities that we’ve had. I had 2 parents, I had grandparents, I had a loving family, I had a very safe environment, so I started to help Barnados. Barnados help women in crisis, children in crisis, orphan children and homelessness, just any area where I think people are being abused or don’t have the power, they don’t have a voice or leverage. A voice, power and leverage is what sport gives us. I was involved in those things when I was young but the older I got, I became more skilled in being able to use the public platform to mobilise it and amplify it. I worked on a lot of refugee issues.
When we grew up we’d go out to the farm, sit around the TV and watch the cricket, Allan Border would be playing, all my uncles would be there and they held those people in very high regard. Also the flag and what it meant, those 2 generations hadn’t been told the stories that we understand today. They saw a very sanitised version of what Australia actually is. They obviously deeply love the country, as do I, but we have different ways of understanding. I think part of being authentically, wholly Australian is by accepting our positives and negatives. By accepting the truths of our history and understanding the wonderful capabilities that we have and the gifts we’ve been given for being here. Whereas those generations weren’t told the other side. They weren’t told about Monarchy, they weren’t told about Crown sanctioned massacres and all of these things that we know about today.
Because of that 2 things have happened. I went abroad and I would play for Australia and I would see the flag go up and when I first started in my mid 20s it represented what I grew up to understand but overtime I started to realise that the values that I believed in weren’t authentic. It’s a unique situation when you’re standing in Saudi Arabia or the Czech Republic or Chile and you’re representing Australia. There’s the national anthem and the flag and you’ve got all their flags and a full stadium and you really get a sense of what this island is back home. You’re overseas, you’re up against 80,000 people in the stadium, you’re wearing your national shirt and people take it very seriously…. Then after a while what happened for me is, I started to think, well what am I actually representing?
It changed my life. I would have just gone on and done broadcasting for the rest of my life and kind of seen sport through that prism whereas what I did was, start to see sport as an effective vehicle with a deep social responsibility that it wasn’t living up to, and also I came to realise that as someone who is purporting to represent the country, I had a responsibility to talk about what we were doing, and who we are and try in some small way to make an impact for us to actually live the values we always talk about. We talk about egalitarianism, I talk about equality because I believe in equality of all people but I know that’s not real for many people. It’s not real for many cultures in Australia, it’s not real for First Nations people, but many Australians take for granted that these are the things we stand by, when in fact we don’t stand by them very often. So because I felt so strongly about actually representing the country, because of where I come from I think, I felt very strongly then about the fact that I had to fight to try and bring these things to life.
Because Football is a multi cultural game, I would be one of the few Anglo Australians in the country who have spent 40 years inside multi cultural Australia. At the age of 18 I walked from the Institute of Sport into a club called Sydney Croatia and then I played for Marconi in Adelaide City. I remember walking into a dressing room of the under 16 Australian team and then with Sydney Croatia, different language, different food, we had all that amazing food and everyone’s swearing in Croatian. Today I sit on the Australian Multicultural Council with the Federal Government and the reason is I come from sport but they see me as someone who knows all the communities in Australia. Football is the multicultural game, Lebanese, Turkish, African, all of Asia, all of South America and Europe. All of those countries and the diasporas in Australia are deeply committed to Football and they love watching the Socceroos and the national teams. I’m very much a part of all their communities because I listen after 40 years about how they feel they are treated.
Going on this journey means you see not just diversity but disadvantage as well and you see huge amounts of racism and you hear about how the first generation Greeks, Lebanese, Turks and Italians were treated for so many decades. I’ve kind of internalised that to the point of where now, I spend the majority of my time just advocating for a better Australia and for global issues so that means refugees.
I was Refugee Ambassador for Amnesty because of what we were doing to people on Manus Island. That whole journey of racism, I saw that happening while I was playing and later I started to do what ever I could to turn that around and then a kid got in trouble in 2018 in Bangkok. His name was Hakeem. He was a Bahrainian refugee and he was a football player. He had been tortured in Bahrain during the Arab Spring and he had fled. Australia had given him protection. He was only 25 and he was playing in Melbourne. He went to Bangkok on his honeymoon on a protection visa, anyway the government messed up and Bahrain had been monitoring him. They grabbed him in Bangkok from the plane, put him into prison. Because he was in my game of football and because I was refugee Ambassador, everyone came to me to help him. That started a 77 day to get him out. He was tortured in Bahrain because he was in a peaceful pro democracy protest in Bahrain and he was a high profile player and they saw him in the video. There’s a Documentary now on Prime which covers this story. It’s called The Defenders.
The reason I feel so strongly about the refugee issues is because it’s one of the key issues where Australia is going wrong. We are literally torturing a couple of thousand people off shore, so after we got Hakeem out I flew to Port Moresby and went to see the guys at Manus Island. I was working for SBS at the time and they were concerned about me going off because I had to advocate against the Australian Government, Scott Morrison and I was working for the government broadcaster, which was fair enough, but when I said I was going to Port Moresby to see these other guys, this kid plays sport and we were able to save him but these people don’t play sport and so we are torturing them. We had to make a decision I wouldn’t be at SBS anymore so we decided we needed to help these people. We raised money with Amnesty, started a campaign, went over and filmed a lot of the guys. They are all my very close friends now. We ended up getting them all out and many of them came here and were locked up in hotel rooms, no air and so on but we shared that every day. They are all out now though.
There is a film out by my friend, a Painter from Lennox called Angus McDonald. He won the Archibald People’s Prize with a portrait of Behrouz Boochani. The four of us, Angus and 2 of the refugee guys made the film. It’s called Freedom is Beautiful and It won awards. It will be on Stan on February 11. It explores the freedom that they were denied and that we take for granted as Australians. It’s easy for us to take people’s freedom away and throw them on an island because we’ve never had ours denied. We haven’t had Civil war and we’ve had such good fortune and yet these people come out of those horrendous environments and the limited freedom they had which is none because they are fleeing, we take the last tiny bit of that minute freedom and we put them in a cage. It explores what it’s like to be out after being locked up for 8 years.
I finished my Law Degree and I’ve worked a lot in human rights advocacy. One of the really challenging things is seeing what humans are capable of. It can be really horrible. Many of these issues just come out of nowhere. All of a sudden there’s someone in trouble, there’s a refugee in trouble or an Australian abroad who needs help. I just get involved in passion projects so that’s the gift that a sporting career gave me. The other thing about growing up here, seeing the outside world and being really connected to Indigenous Australia and to multicultural Australia is also my sense and developing understanding over many decades of Australia’s beginnings, the massacres and the racism so I’m an anti racism campaigner because of that. I head up the Australian Human Rights Commission – Racism Stops with me campaign.
After my Law Degree I did some units on Indigenous Law and the crossover and the stories from a legal perspective which is where the rubber hits the road in terms of how a country deals with a particular people or minority, and the racism was just staggering in terms of the ways indigenous people have been treated.
When I was a player I was involved in the Republic movement and so now, as of last year I’m the Co-Chair with Nova Peres, who’s a legendary Olympic First Nations athlete and a lovely person, so for the next few years our main focus is for us to move on. All these deep seated issues we are struggling to deal with. The more that we are holding on to ties from 200 years ago, the less we can have conversations between ourselves, so we think that it’s time for Australia to move on and have our own Head of State, and move ourselves away from the British Monarchy. Many people love the monarchy. They were told a concept of the monarchy which wasn’t real. If you look at the first few years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign there was uprising in Kenya where over 90,000 people were put into internment camps. The British Government admitted later that they had been tortured horrifically and then put into slavery and that happened immediately under her watch as the head of state of the country. And then the British Empire and what they did in India with millions of people dead. What’s interesting is the UK is dealing with these things in a far more progressive way than Australia is. The British media want to discuss these things. The Anglican Church for example last year put 100 million pounds aside for the descendants of slavery and the Guardian newspaper made an apology for their involvement. So you see this real movement happening there. Whilst they’re opening up these old woulds and able to salve them and heal, we are still stuck. We are not discussing them. It’s like there’s a wall and Australians go so far and then don’t want to deal with that. So the Republic is about National identity and we should have our own. It’s a conversation we need to have. I don’t mind where people sit on these conversations, I just think we need to have them.”