When we meet, Goodes radiates positivity and is philosophical about the past; the documentaries are a metaphorical line in the sand. For Goodes has undergone birth (with the arrival of his first child, Adelaide, eight weeks ago) and rebirth. He is looking to a future where he can help achieve more for Indigenous people than he ever did on the field. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video And, at last, Goodes is prepared to speak his mind on AFL, the game that once brought so much joy and happiness to his life. "I don't watch any AFL these days," he says, matter-of-factly. "There's nothing, today, that excites me, or that makes me think I would like to be back in AFL circles. I have no interest. No interest whatsoever. My love for the game died inside of me in those final years of me playing." These are sad words to digest more than 15 years after I first met Goodes, when he was a young AFL footballer and I a young AFL journalist. In the sporting arena we shared, we were minorities. He, a sky-high-achieving Aboriginal man never afraid to speak his mind (or choose silence, which Goodes also used to great effect). Me, a white woman, navigating a largely white sea of men as a cub reporter; no physical bruises but certainly some unique battles. After a welcome in 2011 to the first camp held for Indigenous AFL players in Redfern, Sydney, Goodes has helped me, on- and off-record, to understand football, Australia and the politics of difference in ways I wouldn't have otherwise.

Tripping the light: Adam Goodes and Jarrad McVeigh hoist the premiership cup. Credit:Pat Scala My first question over breakfast may seem simple but, given the tumult of the past six years, no amount of reflection or research knocks this one from top of the list: how are you? Goodes is instantly animated; his hand, with its broad span, reaches for the phone. "She's eight weeks today," Goodes says, showing off gorgeous photos of his baby, in classic proud father mode. "Right now I'm in a place that is really a love bubble. I took six weeks off work to be in that bubble, to get to know Adelaide and to support [his wife] Natalie through that really tough period; that 'haze', as a lot of new parents say."

Sharing the detail from his new everyday – up before dawn on first feed duty with a bottle of expressed milk – the love bubble bursts all over Goodes' face, softening even the furrow that deepened so noticeably on his brow during his excruciating exit from elite sport. Adam Goodes and wife Natalie Goodes at the world premiere of The Australian Dream in Melbourne. Credit:AAP In 2013, Goodes objected to a racist slur fired at him from a teenage girl sitting in the grandstand of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. She called him an ape, and Goodes pointed in the direction of the insult. He became a hero for change-activists, a villain to rednecks. But thereafter, boos followed Goodes' every move on-field, the jeering growing louder as the personal toll on the champion deepened. Goodes had legions of supporters, but they were offset by caustic commentary, footy chiefs who rubbed salt into wounds and a sport – the AFL – that claimed social role model status but was too vague and slow in response. With his games marred by relentless booings and his nights by sleeplessness, in mid-winter 2015, Goodes arrived home in Sydney from Perth, after a match against the West Coast Eagles, and broke down. He told his future wife: "I'm so sorry, but I just can't be here. It's got nothing to do with anything about us. I've just got to go." "I got him on a plane. I had no idea when he would come back," says Lucy Mills, a long-time manager and friend. "Football was completely irrelevant. Adam had hit rock bottom. I was gravely concerned for his well-being."

Goodes spent five days nestled in the true country of his origins – in the Flinders Ranges, three hours north of Port Augusta, in outback South Australia – far from mobile phone reception. There, elders of his Adnyamathanha heritage led a sacred submersion ceremony to help one of their own. In the ceremony, Goodes' size 13 feet were grounded into the red dirt of a now dry riverbed that water has travelled through for centuries. Adnyamathanha, incidentally, translates to rock people. First-time father Adam Goodes says he is in "a love bubble". Credit:Nic Walker "I was overcome by the situation that I was in. I went from packing my bag getting ready for training to an emotional wreck, thinking about how I was going to keep doing this and that this was how I was going to be remembered after 18 years in the game," Goodes says. "The ceremony is about grounding yourself again through a riverbed that has had so much energy pass over the top of it." Goodes meditated morning and night. He went for long walks, stargazed and slept deeply.

Born with a strong will and blessed with a resilient mind, he says, "I'm pretty good at being able to switch off. I'm pretty good at being able to compartmentalise things. Loading "I knew that going to the Flinders Ranges was the best thing for my mental health. I wasn't thinking of self-harm or anything like that. All I knew was that I needed to get myself out of an environment that was toxic." Clarity emerged on Adnyamathanha country: Goodes couldn't kill the football racket but he could end his life as a footballer. In that instant he became conscious of a new noise: the sound of a magnificent silence. Although it was not to be announced formally for another two months, this was how, when and where Goodes decided to end his AFL career. There were only seven more games with the Swans to see through the 2015 season, which meant there were 14 more hours where Goodes could expect to be racially vilified whenever he touched a football. He was booed until his last match.

"When I retired I was done and it was instant relief. Instant," Goodes says. "I tell you right now, I have no aspirations to go back to the game in any way, shape or form. "The best thing that I did was get myself out of an environment that was toxic to me and to my mental health. That was through retiring from football." Adelaide Vira Goodes arrived 10 days overdue, five days after the The Final Quarter premiered in June. Vira means moon in Adnyamathanha language but Nala – cheeky in that same Indigenous Australian dialect – has quickly become a pet name. "There are really important parts of culture that we're going to be sharing with her from day one," Goodes says. "As a parent I think that's the most profound thing that I can give her."

Later this year, Goodes and Natalie will embark on a pilgrimage to bury Adelaide's placenta in the same Flinders Ranges home country he returned to in 2015. Goodes had come to fully appreciate the significance of this land for him and the Adnyamathanha people he met just a year earlier, and now calls family, when he was featured in SBS's reality genealogy television series Who Do You Think You Are? Adam Goodes on the AFL field. Credit:Dallas Kilponen A few months ago, wanting to shield his heavily pregnant wife from any negativity, Goodes chose to watch The Final Quarter alone, in a private screening. A familiar debilitation – rooted in a helpless sense of sadness – invaded his body, mind and spirit. Goodes wept. For the next three weeks he felt weighed down. "It was really traumatic ... I never want to watch it again," Goodes says. "The same with The Australian Dream [which he watched at home with Natalie and a friend]."

Goodes and his wife walked the red carpet for The Australian Dream premiere that opened Melbourne's International Film Festival earlier this month. There was a standing ovation, but Goodes had long left the building. "There's no way I could watch it in a crowd of family and friends and people," he says. Adam Goodes: "The best thing that I did was get myself out of an environment that was toxic to me." Credit:Nic Walker I just couldn't believe what some people were saying at that time. Adam Goodes Goodes has no commercial interest in either The Final Quarter or The Australian Dream.

"My role is as a participant," he says. "I don't see either of those documentaries being my documentaries." He had given Ian Darling, the director of The Final Quarter, his blessing to make a forensically researched piece that deftly lays out events as they unfolded, using existing footage rather than new interviews. The documentary avoids editorialising, encouraging viewers to draw their own conclusions. Darling's vision for an educational piece driven by philanthropy not profit resonated strongly with Goodes. After its premiere at the Sydney Film Festival in June, The Final Quarter was televised nationally and will be available, free, to all Australian schools from September. "The Final Quarter showed me a lot of footage and media that I'd never seen or heard of," Goodes says. "I just couldn't believe what some people were saying at that time, and how much of a stir I'd actually made with some of them. It was through seeing myself in the film that I remembered how much joy and happiness I had on the football field. It made me so upset given how I actually feel now about the game, about being on a football field, and that disconnect I feel now with the sport. "By the end of my career I just really hated being out there on that field and being subjected to what was happening to me." The Australian Dream, directed by Sundance International Film Festival Grand Jury Prize nominee Daniel Gordon, premiered eight weeks later and offers a contrasting narrative arc. Not least because its writer, multi-awarded journalist, author and activist Stan Grant, secured fresh interviews with Goodes.

"It was a really exhaustive process," says Grant. "Adam is a very honest and forthright guy and he was very trusting of the process. My hope for this film is that it becomes part of a new storytelling in Australia. You don't do that by passing law, you need a story." Goodes is planning to visit international film festivals to support The Australian Dream, which assumes less audience knowledge than the Australian-skewed The Final Quarter. Off-field impact: Adam Goodes accepting his Australian of the Year award in 2014. Credit:Rohan Thomspon "This is a story of Australia that a lot of countries around the world can connect with. Countries that have been colonised and where the first peoples have been marginalised," Goodes says. Both productions gave Goodes a strong sense that his wellbeing, from the film making to the launch, was a genuinely important consideration. Darling said he'd be prepared to pull his doco from the Sydney Film Festival if Goodes wasn't emotionally ready for the airing. Meanwhile, original interviews Goodes participated in for The Australian Dream were replaced, at his request, and reshot.

Earlier this year, the AFL issued a public apology to Goodes for its failure to act more swiftly, empathically and emphatically four years ago to condemn the weekly booing and the vilification that accompanied it. Goodes read and appreciated the acknowledgment, but it hasn't inspired a warm and fuzzy response. It's very clear that we want Adam back in the game and I know that will take time. AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan recently stated that he worried Goodes could be lost to the code, saying: "It's clearly a concern but I do know that time heals a lot of things, so it's very clear that we want Adam back in the game and I know that will take time." But Goodes is adamant he has no plans to return to the code. Brownlow medallists are invited to that annual gala event in perpetuity. But Goodes has been a standing apology since 2013. It's more than a year since he attended an AFL match, and that was to present the Goodes-O'Loughlin medal in the Marn Grook game in the 2018 Sir Doug Nicholls round that highlights Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander contribution. A Swans invitation. It is AFL custom to honour retired champions in an MCG cavalcade on grand final day. Goodes has not taken up that offer.

The contrast couldn't be more pronounced when Goodes discusses his club, Sydney. He remains connected to fellow retired Swans of his era, and to sport, through a local over-35s basketball side, the Vikings. "It brings a lot of joy to me," Goodes says. Goodes says his focus now is less about awareness raising and more about action. He is co-founder, with fellow retired Swans champion Michael O'Loughlin, and a non-executive director of the expanding philanthropic GO-Foundation, which provides educational scholarships and support to Indigenous Australians, from kindergarten to tertiary level. One thing Aboriginal people haven't been able to do is build wealth. Adam Goodes He sits on the board of the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation and is chairman of the Support Through Australian National Disasters (S.T.A.N.D) program, a relief initiative founded by Woolworths and the Salvation Army. He is also an ambassador for Qantas and David Jones.

Goodes is particularly positive about work he's doing to help deepen understanding of the Uluru Statement of the Heart, and with Woolworths' Reconciliation Action Plan committee. And it doesn't stop there. Goodes is working with CareerTrackers, which empowers students to gain corporate internships, and he owns a business – Indigenous Defence & Infrastructure Consortium – with three co-directors that helps about 90 Indigenous businesses to win contracts. He's the majority owner in another Indigenous-run enterprise, Nogard Australia, which he hopes will be "the biggest Indigenous provider of consumables in Australia". Adam Goodes appears in The Australian Dream. Goodes sees his entrepreneurial work "with education at the heart and soul of everything I do" as infinitely more impactful than anything he could, and did, do on the footy field. "One thing Aboriginal people haven't been able to do is build wealth. Wealth in terms of picking the suburb you live in, what sort of roof you put over your head, the types of schools that you send your children to, the type of health cover that you can provide for your family," he says.

"All of those things are the things that affect a lot of disadvantaged Aboriginal communities. They're really affecting the life expectancy of our people. By generating wealth, you flip that completely." Much of the commentary on racism that he's reading these days comes from students and is positive in nature. Hundreds write to him about school projects. The response of the public since the television broadcast of The Final Quarter, Goodes says, has been "Incredible. Incredible." He has been embraced on the street by strangers who want to thank him. "Others are coming up and apologising," he says, "saying that they were one of the people that booed." What does Goodes say back to them? "I say 'Thank you. It means a lot.'"

In a former life, Goodes was exposed to racism every day on social media. He has filtered his incoming streams in response: closing his Twitter profile, quarantining his Facebook to nearest and dearest and setting his Instagram account to private. "I am slowly deleting people who follow me for things they say or do. I don't read my direct messages any more because only two months ago I was sent racist imagery," he says. I am slowly deleting people who follow me for things they say or do. Adam Goodes "When that stuff stops happening, that's when I start to feel like we live in a better place." Goodes' new philosophical outlook is affirmed every time he thinks of his wife and their daughter: he would not have met Natalie if he hadn't been nominated for the 2014 Australian of the Year award, where she was working as a producer. He may not have been a nominee if he hadn't pointed out the racism of a teenager that inflamed reams of venomous commentary.

Loading When Goodes views his life this way, and the fact that he is now a husband and a father, somehow it gives everything – even the worst of it – some sort of sense. "I can't block out what happened to me," Goodes says, "but what I can do is understand." Breakfast is now long gone – Goodes has a day of meetings ahead. Like most new parents, he concedes he is vastly more tired than usual and could be fitter. But his eyes say much more – they are full of life and light. The Australian Dream opens on August 22. The Final Quarter is available on 10 Play.