Sporting chance

Report: Ryan Pedler
Photography: Greg Ford

Dr Barry Judd

A Monash academic believes the role Australian Rules football has played in reconciliation can help combat racism in South Africa.

Dr Barry Judd, who is related to football champion Chris Judd, says sport has a small but important role to play.

In a five-year investigation into the impact of Australian Rules football on the lives of Indigenous Australians, Dr Barry Judd has found football to be a healing force.

His recent thesis, Australian Game, Australian Identity:(Post) Colonial Identity in Football, found football had played a mainly positive role in facilitating reconciliation and shaping the identity of Australian Aborigines and their interactions with non-Indigenous Australians.

The work is being published as a book this year, but Dr Judd is already building on his research base.

He's received an Australian Research Council Indigenous Researchers Fellowship grant to investigate the sport's drive into post-apartheid South Africa.

"The game in South Africa so far has been sold to the South African Government as a clean-skin code with none of the colonial, racist baggage that rugby union and soccer have," Dr Judd said.

"Rugby in South Africa has predominately been associated with white nationalism and soccer has been seen as the game of black resistance."

"The South African Government has provided football with support and actually refers to it as ‘the reconciliation game'. My research will be looking at the sales pitch that the AFL is using in South Africa and subjecting it to some critical analysis by comparing and contrasting that message with the history of the game in Australia in terms of Indigenous participation."

Prominent Indigenous players like Michael Long, Nicky Winmar and Syd Jackson have used their status to push for improvements in living standards. Players are also powerful role models for young Australians both black and white.

Dr Judd will travel across South Africa and Australia, including visits to some remote communities, asking those involved with the AFL's South African drive what role they think football can play in bridging the racial divide of opportunities and attitudes in South Africa and will call on staff at Monash South Africa for local knowledge and support.

He said the hopes of the AFL could well be realised.

"I've found people in the broader community are more willing to engage with Indigenous issues if it's through sport," Dr Judd said.

"I'm trying to use something that most people in society would understand and relate to, to get some information and some dialogue going."

Dr Judd, whose mother is Indigenous, joined Monash's Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies in 2001 as a lecturer and tutor.

He's recently discovered he is distantly related to Carlton Football Club captain Chris Judd. At their first meeting over a Sunday family lunch their conversation did not get to football and race relations, but Dr Judd now plans to have a serious football chat to his third cousin as part of his research project.

Chris visited South Africa with his Carlton team mates earlier this year as part of the AFL push.

"I've been following Carlton 's progress through South Africa and a few of the stories based around Chris's and the other players' visits to orphanages for kids with AIDS," Dr Judd said. "He seems to be a fairly switched-on individual and would bring an interesting perspective."

Dr Judd is philosophical about the ability of sport to overcome racism, but says it is an important complement to some of the more fundamental efforts also underway.

"At the end of the day, sport is not the be-all and end-all. The heavy work of overcoming racism and disadvantage is up to other institutions in education, health and governments, but sport certainly has an ability to change attitudes and encourage others to follow."