AFL: History and Good Sense go Walkabout

It’s that time of year when AFL clubs abandon their traditions and history, temporarily changing names and guernseys to celebrate one special class of Australians because of skin colour. Yes, it’s the AFL’s two-week Indigenous Round(s), when all morally worthy Australians must view Aussie Rules through the woke prism of race.

For Rounds 10 and 11, all 18 AFL clubs have been wearing indigenous-themed jumpers that toss overboard the grand, bold and simply designs of jerseys that readily identify the team to its passionate fans (and to teammates during play), replacing them with an amorphous but indigenously-correct bunch of ‘artistic’ swirls and dots designed by (inevitably ‘proud’) Aboriginal artists.

Six clubs have gone one better and changed their actual names – the Adelaide Crows becomes Kuwarna, Fremantle morphs into Walyalup, Port Adelaide takes on the moniker of Yartapuulti, St Kilda transforms into the unpronounceable Euro-Yroke and the West Coast Eagles are the equally cumbersome Waalitj Marawar.

The Melbourne Demons condescendingly explain their temporary renaming to Narrm as looking to “educate the football and wider Australian audience on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture” (for which there is barely a second or two of media coverage whatsoever in the normal run of things).  Why the “traditional” name for Melbourne has been chosen to be Narrm, by the way, is anyone’s guess given the murky complications of translation into English from purely oral, and now largely dead, Aboriginal languages and the competitive land claims between rival tribes over the much vaunted 65,000 years of Aboriginal occupation. But then, the Aboriginal erasure of colonial language is all about woke form rather than linguistic substance.

But then, the Aboriginal erasure of colonial language is all about woke form rather than linguistic substance.

The umpires are not overlooked in Indigenous Round(s), either – their uniforms are also  Indigenous-chic – whilst even the holy Sherrin gets a makeover with its own indigenous design and the brand on the match ball becoming Koethuka Kakur (which really trips off the tongue), allegedly a Saibai Island dialect translation for ‘ball’.  There is, predictably, an annual Dreamtime at the G match (Richmond v Essendon) and a ‘Marn Grook Game’ at the SCG, even though Tom Wills, the colonial father of the Aussie Rules code, traced the game’s origins to  rugby and village football.

The NRL has also gone in for race branding and other sports can not be far behind. Politically correct punters await the running of the annual Narrm Cup on the first Tuesday of November with great anticipation.

The indigenous ‘cultural appropriation’ of Australian Rules football has joined the saturation calendar coverage of Aboriginal ‘special days’ (and weeks and months) to “celebrate or recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and culture” and to overtly or implicitly stick it to the white, Western civilisation that few Aborigines actually show any signs of rejecting but which their activist caste treat as a punching bag and ready-made excuse for lingering pockets of Aboriginal dysfunction.

So, footy is the ‘circuses’ adjunct to the woke bread of National Apology Day, National Close the Gap Day, Harmony Day, National Sorry Day, 1967 Referendum Day (definitely not that other one – the Voice, resoundingly defeated), National Reconciliation Week, Mabo Day, Coming of the Light (one for the Torres Strait Islanders), NAIDOC Week, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children’s Day, International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Literacy Day and the Anniversary of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

No politician dare miss being seen at the four-day Garma Festival.  So much injustice, so many days to remind us of the need for constant atonement. A virtue-signaller’s work is never done.

The AFL’s tagging along with this busy commemoration schedule is no surprise for a corporate body which employs a top executive (Executive General Manager Inclusion and Social Policy, an indigenous lady of course) tasked solely with “celebrating black excellence” and the “incredible resilience”, “courage, determination and strength” of First Nations peoples.  The naming of the Indigenous Round after Sir Doug Nicholls, who was a Fitzroy cham[pion in the 1930s, of course reflects how he became a “leader for Aboriginal reconciliation in Australia” and thus gets naming rights.  AFL Indigenous Round is all about such special treatment of one class of Australians, and the political elevation of their activist elite, rather than the grateful assimilation of almost all Aborigines into modern Western culture.

AFL Indigenous Round is all about such special treatment of one class of Australians, and the political elevation of their activist elite.

Of course, the celebration jamboree will have to avert its eyes from ‘unworthy’ indigenous players, like those who were on-field thugs or saw the inside of a jail cell, just as veils are similarly drawn over other unpleasant elements of the historical and contemporary Aboriginal life. The woke narrative of a noble people whose pre-colonial life of equality and peace being brutally destroyed by the arrival of the white man must not be questioned. So, it’s a fortnight of tales of colonial and ongoing oppression against which heroic Aborigines have to rebel with many goal-assists from an adoring media.

It’s nothing but woke theatre when all that anyone unafflicted by chronic wokeness wants is an exciting game without all the fanfare of woke box-ticking.  Surely we can recognise the skill of the players, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike, some of whom, as with players of any and every other background, make for much-loved heroes and others moustache-twirling villains. No race of player has a monopoly on the good, bad or indifferent on, or off, the field.  Instead, what we get is busybody woke interventionists obsessing about skin colour when black, white or brown Australians have moved on from all that.

Footy bores are some of the worst bores around, but give me one of those any day of the year over the indigenous-grievance bore and leave our truly Australian game the hell alone.

As a (non-woke) Melbourne Dees supporter (and, dare I say it, a ‘proud’ one), the Dees are the Melbourne Football Club. Always was, always will be.  As for the Demons being the Narrm Football Club, it never was and never will be. Stick that in your pre-game pantomimes and smoking-ceremony it.