The diminutive scrumhalf,Australia’s first Aboriginal and Asian Wallaby, flourished in an age of acute racism and survived a host of traumatic experiencesAt the turn of the 20th century the remote Australian town of Mungindi, or Gamilaroi for “water gap in the river”,was literally the terminate of the line. Before cars and aeroplanes shrank the world it was 11 hours by train from Sydney and 12 hours from Brisbane, a frontier town split between “townies and the landowner farmers the “cockies”. Asian migrants were outsiders with limited social mobility and Aboriginal people lived on the margins in “missions”, and dispossessed and subjugated by fear. As the white Australia boom gates were lowering and a climate of tension settled like a choking mist across the land,an unlikely Mungindi cross-cultural romance produced an elite rugby union player on a trajectory to greatness until fate cruelly intervened.
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Source: theguardian.com