Those sitting in the Victoria Park press box were oblivious to Nicky Winmar’s gesture until later. Photo: WAYNE LUDBEY
Time lends some incidents a significance which wasn’t immediately apparent. It can happen even in something supposedly as much about the moment as AFL football.
That’s something I’ve been pondering again the last couple of days as, approaching Round 4 of the season, another important football anniversary looms.
It was the equivalent round in 1993, when St Kilda’s indigenous star Nicky Winmar defiantly raised his jumper, pointed to his skin and yelled to the jeering Collingwood hordes at Victoria Park: “I’m black, and I’m proud to be black”.
It’s a moment etched in time, courtesy of photographer Wayne Ludbey’s famous snap of Winmar taking his stance. But it’s also a moment which, incredible as it seems now, didn’t necessarily instantly resonate with the power it should have.
In fact, some of us who were there that afternoon didn’t even know for some time what had happened.
I was at Victoria Park that day covering the game for ‘The Sunday Age’, along with my colleague Richard Hinds. Ludbey was taking the pics for the same paper. It was an eventful afternoon, and not just because of Winmar.
St Kilda, which had beaten Collingwood in a final the previous September, hadn’t won at Victoria Park since 1976, a good 17 years previously. The Saints were without suspended superstar spearhead Tony Lockett, and trailed the Pies at half-time.
But an inspired third-quarter burst of 7.7 from St Kilda sent Collingwood reeling, the Saints going on to win by 22 points.
The stars were Winmar and his indigenous teammate Gilbert McAdam, who booted five goals. It would emerge later that, during the reserves curtain-raiser, the pair, standing in the St Kilda players’ race, had been subjected to withering barrages of racist abuse, thus fueling their determination to perform.
But that, and Winmar’s defiant post-match gesture, were moments of which the dozen or so of us assembled scribes squeezed into a tiny little press box on the outer wing at Victoria Park were oblivious for a good hour or so after the final siren.
How, you ask? Well, it’s important to remember at this point that 1993 was pre-internet and for nearly all of us, pre-mobile phone. And that St Kilda’s massive drought-breaking win against the odds was a big enough story in its own right.
The tiny visitors’ rooms at Collingwood’s home ground were so packed with jubilant St Kilda supporters that we were unable to find enough room to conduct the obligatory post-game press conference with victorious coach Ken Sheldon. The only solution was to head back outside into the players’ race.
That would prove a significant tactical error, as a score of pissed-off Collingwood fans, still hanging about the place seething at their team’s defeat and Winmar having put them in their place, proceeded to hang over the top of the old cyclone wire race, heckling and in some cases spitting on us all, as Sheldon elaborated on his team’s great win.
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As we walked back to the press box from there, we knew we had a pretty good yarn, those of us who’d attended the president’s lunch earlier and were thus “suited up” also pondering the drycleaning costs.
But it was at least an hour later when our landline phone in the box rang. I’d already spoken to sports editor Ken Merrigan about what Richard and I had to work with. But now another colleague, Nick Place, who’d been in the office collating various news from around the traps and the three AFL games played that day, had a question.
“Did you guys see this Nicky Winmar thing?” he asked. “What are you talking about? His goal?” I responded. “No, he lifted up his jumper and pointed to his skin,” Place said. “Nope. News to us.”
Fortunately, Ludbey’s dramatic photo and the words he had heard Winmar utter were enough to form the basis of the subsequent news story for the front page of the paper Place wrote, while Hinds and I continued on with our stories about the Saints’ victory.
Place’s story on Winmar lifting his jumper was by no means a “splash”, though. On a broadsheet page, it was at the bottom, playing second or third fiddle to stories about the US trial of policemen accused of beating Rodney King, Australian sex tourism, and a Queensland by-election. Ludbey’s iconic photograph ran only as a small single column image.
Across town at the “Sunday Herald-Sun”, meanwhile, another angle of Winmar captured by photographer John Feder also ran, but with no reference to racism or skin colour. “We did it with guts” were the words the paper attributed to Winmar.
And even after its publication and accompanying quote, the famous image of Winmar didn’t cause a seismic shift in the landscape.
In fact, just six weeks later, in May 1993, I returned to Victoria Park to cover Collingwood’s game against North Melbourne and witnessed another indigenous player enjoying a purple patch of form, North’s Adrian McAdam, tear the Pies apart with a spectacular nine-goal haul.
Interviewing McAdam after the game, I had to ask what now seemed an obvious question about whether he’d been subjected to racist abuse.
“There was plenty of it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Black c—, go and sniff on your petrol, you know, heaps of words. I kicked nine goals, and that’s the only way to shut them up, so I came out best and they came out second best.”
The most significant difference this time, however, was that the resultant story carrying McAdam’s words was featured far more prominently on the front page.
When it came to the thorny issue of racism in Australia, yes, it was depressingly limited progress. But at least this time we didn’t nearly miss the story altogether.
This article first appeared at ESPN.
