THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM

“Football, for me, was a place where I got accepted for being a good footballer,” Goodes says in the documentary. “It didn't matter where I came from, it was a safe place that helped me break down barriers.”

Incredibly, McGuire and Andrew Bolt, two of the men who helped to make that safe place uninhabitable for Goodes, also agreed to be interviewed for the documentary. Neither are persuasive in their continued justifications that there was no malice in their haranguing, but it’s important that they both make an appearance in the documentary because of what they embody: the glaring apathy of the corporate side of the AFL towards racism and the dangerous attack dog mentality of the media. These two factors spurred on not only the booing but a frenzy of venomous online attacks on social media and YouTube.

On the subject of venom, the documentary includes footage of Sam Newman, an outspoken critic of Goodes, when he smeared his face with shoe polish to impersonate Indigenous footy star Nicky Winmar on The Footy Show. This was in 1999, during another period when racial vilification was a particularly hot issue in the league. Winmar is often referred to as a pioneer for Indigenous footballers after his iconic 1993 gesture which saw him raise his shirt in front of thousands of jeering spectators saying: “I’m black - and I’m proud to be black!’’ He had refused to appear on The Footy Show, and wearing blackface was Newman’s rebuttal. Newman was forced to make a grudging public apology and Winmar was pressured to shake his tormentor’s hand. Eddie McGuire - in whose wake, to be fair to Newman, he has slavishly spent much of his TV shelf life - defended his friend by saying Newman donned blackface in the spirit of “vaudeville”.

Winmar and Gilbert McAdam talk about the historical prevalence of racist catcalls from footy fans, players and coaches alike.

Linking the various interviews and pieces of footage together is a voiceover from Stan Grant, a Wiradjuri man and journalist, who relates his own personal experiences of the racial vilification he endured during his childhood and as an adult. We get to listen to his iconic IQ2 Racism Debate speech from 2015. In his address Grant was asked to argue for or against the topic "Racism is destroying the Australian Dream", and said racism was at its heart. He opened his speech acknowledging the Goodes' booing saga: "When we heard those boos, we heard a sound that was very familiar to us ... we heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival," Grant said. "We heard the howl of the Australian dream, and it said to us again, you're not welcome."

The film explores Goodes’ engagement with his Indigenous identity, in response to a culture within the Sydney Swans that encouraged self-exploration. In turn, that led to an awareness of the history of dehumanisation of Aboriginal Australians under white settlement.

When he was made Australian of the Year in 2014, Goodes used his platform to address those issues. The documentary places Goodes’ story within the wider context of an examination of Australia's national identity, including the uncomfortable truths that underlie the assertion that “Australians all” are equally free. He had no easy answers, he said repeatedly; he just wanted to start a conversation about the realities of our country’s past and it’s present.

But for many footie fans, Goodes had crossed a line. An Indigenous athlete who was a talented AFL player and fun to watch was fine. An Indigenous athlete demanding to have a voice in the national debate? That made people uncomfortable.

To our collective shame, the film argues, the booing effectively silenced him. The AFL and all of its 18 clubs issued an acknowledgement in June this year of its “failures” during the period, but the conversations raised by ‘The Final Quarter’ and ‘The Australian Dream’ can do more towards rectifying the injustices endured by Goodes than a few hollow apologies ever could.

Watch this documentary. Talk about it. We need to re-evaluate how we acted during this extremely recent period of our history, and forge a better way forward.