We don't know much of AFL legend Mal Brown in NSW, since that sport is more or less confined to the lower levels of Australia, but we do know where Mr Brown was coming from when he referred to Aboriginal AFL players as cannibals and Abos. At an AFL lunch on Wednesday Mr Brown made a forgettable joke about bad lighting being responsible for a failure to pick Aboriginal players in an AFL Origin team, referring to those players as cannibals, and he exacerbated the difficulties when he warned newspaper reporters as he left not to write "what I said about those Abos"!
We know that Mr Brown was coming straight out of a bygone era when Abos were a shade or two less than white Australians, and hence our national embarrassment. In my column in The Herald today I describe how in my experience in country NSW towns the term Abo was used to describe Aboriginal people who lived in garbage-strewn, fly-saturated camps just beyond the town limits, not Aboriginal people who lived and worked in town. We saw these people of the camps as having lower standards than we did, and they did, and so we thought less of them. We thought even less of the white people with them because these white people did not have the excuse of aboriginality!
Slowly we came to see that we could and should do more to help these people of "the blacks camp" rise from the hopelessness that seemed to crush them, and we have. While Mr Brown's boorish terms discredit him and embarrass us, no harm is done in reminding us of those times.
But how does his "Abos" differ from Andrew Johns's "black c..."? Andrew Johns used the term in urging Blues players to carefully mark the Maroons' Greg Inglis, and on Wednesday night we saw that they should have paid more attention. In the context of its use the term was one of respect, even admiration.
Do you see the difference I see?
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