By Ian Syson, first published in Shoot Farken
In the early 1950s a young Aboriginal footballer called Charlie Perkins started to be noticed in Adelaide. John Maynard in
The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe
points out that “Perkins was a first grade soccer player at the age of
fifteen, playing with Port Thistle.” Over the next five years his stocks
improved to the point where he “was awarded the South Australian player
of the Year.” He claims that “Perkins was known as one of the better
wing-halves in the country.” Peter Read’s biography of Perkins describes
him as “tough, self-confident, stoical and uncompromising. He liked to
talk about the game for days afterwards. He was ambitious to be better
than anyone else. Off the field he remained, according to the Secretary
of the South Australian Soccer Federation, anxious and shy.”
It is perhaps well-known that Charlie Perkins played soccer, very
well, playing at the elite level in Australia. He tried out for First
Division clubs Liverpool and Everton in England before playing a season
with Bishop Auckland, one of England’s great amateur sides. The
experience helped to form his attitude towards the game: “I play the
game hard, the way I was taught with Bishop Auckland in England. After
all soccer is a man’s game. But I play it fair and don’t go in for the
dirty, niggling tactics of some players.” The title of Perkins' autobiography,
A Bastard Like Me gives us a sense of his self-perception in this regard.
But while Perkins was a genuine star of the game he is probably
remembered as a curiosity, without context, an exception that proves the
rule. Perkins’ game of choice might be explained away, if explained at
all, via allusion to his radical political orientation and his
‘difference’ from other Aboriginal sportsmen. The attitude adopted is:
‘Yes. He might have played soccer but he was a maverick.’ Well he may
have been a maverick but he was not the only one.
Two other Aboriginal players of Perkins’ generation also had
remarkable careers, first as footballers and then in Aboriginal culture
and/or politics. John Moriarty was the first Aboriginal to be selected
for Australia and Gordon Briscoe followed in Perkins’ footsteps, playing
for two seasons in England. What makes this story all the more
remarkable is that these three young men knew each other intimately.
Gordon Briscoe’s 2010 memoir,
Racial Folly: a Memoir of a Twentieth Century Family is
a startling revelation of locus of Aboriginal participation in the
world game. It is a locus confirmed by Maynard. The story of Briscoe’s
life from his birth in 1938 to his rise to prominence as an activist and
the struggles, sadnesses and joys involved in that journey, contains a
remarkable diversion into an Aboriginal footballing sub-culture of
mildly staggering proportions – not so much in its breadth as in its
sheer depth of quality. Out of one institution, “Father Smith’s home for
boys of mixed Aboriginal descent,” came a remarkable number of players.
Briscoe explains how the boys became involved.
Charlie, with his brother Ernie, John Moriarty, Jerry
Hill and I, began our soccer careers together and for the same team,
Port Adelaide Thistle, or Port Thistle as it became known. In 1950 Port
Thistle won the second division championship and was elevated to the
first division. To qualify for the promotion the club had to have teams
in the lower or junior division. Port Thistle management approached
Father Smith for permission to rent a large field in the front area of
St Francis House owned by the Church, and he agreed. Thistles had enough
boys in the area to make two teams: a full juniors’ team and a senior
colts’ team. The house boys filled the junior team and Charlie, ‘Truck’
and Harry Russel made the colts. From the beginning Charlie was a
natural, as were many in the junior side, particularly Moriarty (Baggy)
and Hill (Skrulyet).
Significantly, all of the boys also played Australian Rules and some
of them (surprisingly) Rugby League for a Semaphore Colts team. One of
them, Wally McArthur ended up playing Rugby League for Australia. In
fact the boys participated in many physical activities that
strengthened their bonds. When their mentor Father Smith left, Briscoe
was devastated.
What possibly helped me cope with my feeling of loss was
life on Semaphore beach, enjoying activities such as fishing off the
jetty with Wally MacArthur, Vince Copley, Gerry Hill and John Moriarty.
Soccer with Port Thistle junior’s side also helped and would lead to a
closer relationship with Charlie Perkins.
It was Perkins who influenced Briscoe and Moriarty to lean towards soccer:
Charlie had great talent in both codes but I believe that
he chose to excel at soccer as a way of evading the bullies at the
House and as a way of venting his frustrations at Father Smith’s
leaving. He also resented the prejudice he confronted by those who
played and organised Aussie Rules.
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Charlie Perkins. Source: Australian Soccer Weekly via Paul and Colin Tatz
|
In his autobiography,
A Bastard Like Me, Perkins describes how soccer hooked him.
And so, soccer got into my system. That year I played for
the juniors in the Scottish Club (Port Thistle) in Adelaide. I got on
well with the club crowd. They treated me like a human being. That was
where I first felt free, when I began to play soccer. The team would
talk roughly to me and I would know where I stood. Soccer was the only
thing that enabled me to put up with my job. The Soccer Club became my
home and I found a new security in my ability to play well. I found some
friends in soccer. Most of all, I found a place where I could be
somebody. I could play soccer better than most people and was improving
all the time. I played one year junior, then senior at fifteen, and
after that I played first division right through the rest of my
professional soccer career.
Moriarty also speaks of culture of racism from which soccer helped him to extract himself. He told Maynard:
Soccer was a blessing for me, on the social side as well,
being able to achieve my self-esteem, the culture of soccer enabled me
to move out of that system that we were brought up in, you know, that
totally racist system, being a second-class citizen and Aboriginal under
differing laws and we had to live with it. But soccer lifted me out of
that because the soccer fraternity encouraged me to do it.
Briscoe also was confronted with a milder form of racial prejudice as
well as a touch of soccerphobia when he started a new job a Port
Lincoln.
One day soon after my arrival a big bloke named Charlie
Oliver jumped on the engine and said, ‘Can any of you blokes kick a
footy?’ I said nothing at first but Jack Asher, the engine driver, said,
‘Hey Charlie this bloke’s a Blackfella; he must be able to play. Every
Blackfella I know is football mad, and I’ve seen some beauties up at
Peterborough, where I come from!’ When I told Charlie that I wanted to
play soccer, he blurted out, ‘What, that’s a Sheila’s game isn’t it?’ He
jumped down from the engine and shouted at me: ‘Come to training on
Tuesday night! OK?’
So Briscoe played both codes at senior level. Normative, masculinised
cultural pressures tended to push him towards Australian Rules whereas
other factors made soccer an attraction.
When I went to Souths I knew many of the white players
who worked for the railway and got on well with them. I was certainly
more interested in girls and I was particularly interested in the
migrant women who followed soccer. My weekends were busy; I played
cricket or Aussie Rules on Saturdays and soccer on Sundays. Nevertheless
work dominated my life and I often had to struggle to get back for the
weekends.
Eventually he made the decision to focus on soccer. Perkins’ return
from playing in England may have been an influence and perhaps he
sensed that he had a future in the game. The fact that he was paid for
scoring goals probably influenced the decision.
I played my last Aussie Rules game for Exeter in the 1959
grand final and subsequently returned to soccer. John Moriarty and I
signed to play soccer for Beograd in the summer-night football season.
These matches were played under lights at Norwood Oval. Charlie Perkins
had recently returned from England and was instrumental in taking
Croatia to the first Division and enticed me to play the winter season
with them.
“In the winter of 1960” a new influence emerged in Briscoe’s life: “Aboriginal politics and soccer were my passions.”
Briscoe steadily improved as a player. He moved from Croatia to
Polonia before deciding to try his luck in England – perhaps once more
influenced by the example of Perkins’ experience. After playing with
Hemel Hempstead and Preston North End’s lower grades Briscoe suffered
injuries and started to suspect that he did not have what was needed to
make the grade in professional football in England.
As the winter drew on I became more and more fearful that
I would injure myself; my confidence was plummeting. I stuck it out in
Hemel for that winter and moved to Preston in mid-1962. However,
one aspect of Hemel Hempstead that would have a profound effect on my
life was meeting Norma, my wife to be, at a local dance hall. We met
early in 1962 and were married in the autumn of that year.
At this point in the narrative, the game recedes from view and
Briscoe gets a job in factory before returning to Australia with Norma
and his 12-month-old baby Aaron in 1964. Charlie Perkins had moved to
Sydney to attend University and play with Pan Hellenic and was still
there when Briscoe decided to come home. Perkins asked Briscoe to come
to Sydney to participate in a new phase in their lives, Aboriginal
activism.
Curiously, soccer then leaves Briscoe’s life and his subsequent
remembrance of it. The memoir seems to drop the game like a hot potato
as Briscoe’s career in politics ramps up.
Racial Folly offers a
model here of the way the game disappears from view in so many other
stories in Australian history. Briscoe says in his Foreword to Maynard’s
The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe, “soccer could not support a wife
and family so the alternative was work by day and study by night. I was
drawn into Aboriginal politics in the same way as Perkins and Moriarty.”
This necessity does not explain the near-complete cutting of soccer from the narrative of
Racial Folly.
Even if the game were practically absent from Briscoe’s life, it would
have been with his thoughts and a subject of discussion from time to
time, especially when he was so closely connected with Perkins. Football
makes a late comeback in
Racial Folly when it is mentioned in
relation to Briscoe’s grown children who, like their father and Perkins
and Moriarty before them, use sport as important building blocks for
their lives:
John was an outdoors boy. He was always looking to play
rugby on the front lawn with the neighbour’s kids, his elder brother
Aaron or me. They were all keen sportspersons, each doing well in their
respective sports. Aaron was a very good all-rounder, his main passion
was soccer, which he played at an elite level with the Canberra City
colts’ soccer team, and he was also a competent cricket player during
the summer months. Lisa was a one-sport person – hockey. Later she
played in the weekly Canberra competition, as well as being an ACT
representative player for a number of years. John loved his rugby
league. One of my lasting memories is standing on the side-line with
John hurling down the side and the crowd calling out: ‘Go, Johnny B’. He
loved it and he too was a representative player.
The Briscoe children mirror their father’s attitude to sport. They
are also a reminder of the special group of young Aboriginal men in
Semaphore showing a sporting flexibility that enabled them to move
easily and gracefully between football codes, something that enables
them to take up soccer but makes them equally able to leave the game
when the pressures of other sports and politics come to bear. It is an
important message for contemporary Indigenous participation in the game.
Briscoe claims in his Foreword to Maynard’s book that the game has
“forgotten Aboriginal people in its zest for self-development.” He
reminds readers that soccer in Port Adelaide relied on Aboriginal
participation at a certain moment in time.
Individual clubs such as Port Thistle blindly supported
us because, without us it would not have existed. Dominated by cricket
and Australian Rules, migrants had to beg for playing space and were
targeted by Australia’s press. What brought us few players to soccer was
often the fact that our skills were transferred from Aussie Rules when
we were driven away from that code. We chose migrants because they
respected us.
It was a rare moment because a number of factors came into play in
leading Aboriginal players towards soccer: excellent and adaptable
Aboriginal sportsmen; truly remarkable individuals; generous and
welcoming football hosts; and an Australian Rules structure that was
often exclusive and racist towards Aboriginal players. Briscoe says that
when “we look to the future of Aboriginal people in soccer it is easy
to be optimistic, but . . . the time is now ripe for the FFA to provide
the support and the framework in which the passionate advocates and
players of Indigenous soccer can succeed.” It is a warning, gentle and
well-intended, that soccer needs to remember the Port Thistle story.
Because it is one that speaks of dire consequences should it not be
heeded by Australian soccer authorities.
Another message in Maynard’s book relates to the low Aboriginal
participation rate in soccer. Compared with Rugby League and
Australian Rules, the number is low. Yet it is not quite miniscule.
Maynard lists five Aboriginal Socceroos (six if we include Moriarty who
was selected but didn’t play because Australia was expelled from FIFA
after his selection) and eight Matildas. He also points to a number of
contemporary rising stars, both men and women. An argument could be made
that this is more representation than might be expected, given the
external pressures encouraging young Aboriginal men into other football
codes and the near absence of historical knowledge within the game about
Aboriginal precursors.
One of the most telling points of the whole book is when Harry
Williams, perhaps the greatest Aboriginal player of all time (with 44
Socceroo appearances and 18 full caps), insists that what got him into
the game was not the legendary stories of the trinity of “Perkins, Moriarty and Briscoe.” While he eventually came to know of them, as soccer men and political activists, his was the much less heroic but no less splendid story of being “exposed to soccer by a friend across the street at six years of age. For me, it was just a question of circumstances. It just
happened.” Yet there was pressure from another football code. He grew up
in Rugby League territory and the St George great and family friend,
Billy Smith kept pestering him to shift codes. Smith “always said to
stop playing that sissy game and come to play rugby league.” Like the
trinity before him he resisted and found solace in the genuine
acceptance of the migrant communities that welcomed him.
This is a good story but it is one that encodes a failure in
communication between the generations. In the battle for the hearts and
minds of Aboriginal sportsmen, Australian soccer’s silence and failure
to follow through – on what can only be described as a wonderful moment
in Aboriginal participation in and commitment to the game – is nothing
short of criminal irresponsibility to its own wellbeing.
Soccer needs to confront the fact that at one point in
the 1950s there were more Indigenous Australians playing first-grade football
in Adelaide than there were playing first-grade Australian Rules in
Melbourne. And while the numbers were low and volatile they nonetheless
represented a march stolen on the “indigenous” game. It needs to
remember why this was the case and work out how to tell the story.
