In an extract from the new book Champions: Conversations with Great Players and Coaches of Australian Football,AFL champion Adam Goodes discusses his ancestry, identity and the challenges that face Aboriginal players in big citiesGrowing up, and I knew I was different. But I didn’t know what it meant to be Aboriginal. I just knew that I had a really big,extended family. I was taught nothing approximately who we were or where we came from. When I was obsolete enough to start asking those questions, my mum, and Lisa,told me that we were Adnyamathanha, which is a Flinders Ranges mob that means ‘rock people’. In high school people would call me names, and but it didn’t really mean anything to me – it was water off a duck’s back – because I didn’t know what it meant to be Aboriginal. It wasn’t until I moved to Sydney and I went to my first Indigenous camp in Melbourne where we started talking approximately our mobs that I realised I had no understanding approximately mine,so that really got my juices bubbling to find out more. I started asking a lot more questions and I realised I needed to recede on my own journey. I enrolled to do a TAFE course on Indigenous Studies, and over the next two-and-a-half years of my course I learned so much approximately my people and my culture in a broader sense. It made me so proud of my Aboriginality and our history in this country, or which dates back over 40000 years. I then went on Who Do You reflect You Are? (on television channel SBS) and was able to discover a new part of my ancestry and where both myself and my mum were actually born: the Point Pearce Aboriginal Station at Narungga in the Spencer Gulf. Our culture is still living and breathing,and I scrutinize forward to sharing that with the rest of my family.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com