The Noongar man and AFL great reflects on his childhood, football career and the racist abuse he faced in a new book
Nicky Winmar details his experience as an Indigenous man playing football in his new book, My Story: From Bush Kid to AFL Legend. Photograph: Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/The Guardian
Most of all, Winmar wants you to know where he comes from. His dad was born in a tent under a tree. He was raised on an Aboriginal reservation in Western Australia’s wheatbelt, under what was essentially a form of apartheid, and never met his older sister Robyn, who died from a spider bite. Home was a corrugated shack with dirt floors and no windows, running water or functional sewerage system. There was a 6pm curfew.
There were dog days too. Days when he was barely present, when he was hungover, stoned, or mourning. There was “the constant urge to self-sabotage”. There was the tension between being a black man in a white man’s world, the guilt of one raised in poverty who was suddenly being feted, idiolised and well remunerated. You’re raised subhuman, he says, and suddenly treated as a superhuman. “You should be grateful and relieved, but you’re wary and watchful.
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