That little bit of chemistry

On a recent Friday morning, the sun bakes Fremantle Oval. Inside the ageing and soon-to-be-replaced Dockers’ training facility sits Roger Hayden, who was appointed development coach in 2011 following a 128-game career with the club. He is one of only two Indigenous coaches in the AFL, both in development roles. It is a sore point for the league, which at the senior level has only ever had two Indigenous coaches. (Both were Noongars: Farmer and Cable.)

Roger Hayden: "We can work through whatever's going on."

Hayden grew up in Brookton and through his parents is connected to Noongar football royalty – on his dad’s side, the Bennells, Kicketts, Boltons, Ugles, McGuires, Jettas, Yarrans, Collards and Davises, and on his mum’s, the Haywards, Eades, Coynes and Flugges. Part of his job involves supporting men with similar lineage.

“I’m Noongar, and if they’re Noongar our families are going to know each other.”

“I think that’s the beauty of it – we can work through whatever’s going on. We have that little bit of chemistry.” Of course, it doesn’t always work out. Josh Simpson, a sublimely gifted player drafted to the Dockers in 2012 with pick 17, played two games in two years and was fined twice by the club for failing to meet club requirements. He was then delisted. “It does sting, although he was a young man looking after two kids with an AFL career – not your typical school leaver,” says Hayden. “But he’s back at East Fremantle now having another crack at it in the WAFL, and that’s fantastic. His contact with footy has been positive.” Hayden walks into a function area where dozens of young Aboriginal boys are watching a video. The star-struck kids – half of whom are Noongar – are from the Clontarf Foundation, an educational program that encourages Aboriginal boys to learn by integrating their schooling with a football academy, using training and games as the carrot for study and self-improvement. Clontarf started with 25 boys and two staff at one school, and now has 4210 students and 220 staff working in 68 schools around the country. Since the program was established in 2000, 35 players have also made it onto AFL lists, including more than a dozen Noongars, 2013 All Australian centre-half back Michael Johnson foremost among them.

Michael Johnson: "We talk about footy. It makes us stronger."

Johnson is here today. The key defender’s 2016 season has been ruined by long-term knee and hamstring injuries, but in between a massage appointment and other rehab duties, he stops to talk. Johnson was raised in the suburbs of Perth. Walking around the streets he was never without a football. “I would always find goals, whether it’s two bins or two bushes close together,” he says. “You never lose that feel for the game. Watch Stephen Hill running off the wing for us, or Michael Walters kicking goals. It’s the sport we grow up and play and love. Communities get together and mingle. We talk about footy. It makes us stronger.” The man who runs the Clontarf Foundation is Gerard Neesham, the inaugural coach of the Dockers, and he remembers Johnson well. Good Weekend catches up with Neesham over coffee in Melbourne, where he is meeting potential partners from the private sector.

Gerard Neesham: "The ultimate outcome is an employable boy."

“Michael was just a really lovely quiet kid, a late bloomer, not overly confident, not recruited out of school, not part of the state Under 18s. His dad passed away prematurely, so he’s had his own heartaches. We helped him a bit with his footy and with school.” Neesham is adamant Clontarf is not just about sport. The group who visited the Dockers, for instance, were year 12 students on a leadership trip to Perth as a reward for outstanding behaviour in class. “The ultimate outcome is an employable boy,” he says. “If he happens to be employed by the AFL or Rio Tinto or Woodside, we don’t particularly care, as long as he’s doing something positive with his life.” Plenty have been saved in this way. Neesham points out that Clontarf alumni and current AFL players Chris Yarran and Lewis Jetta were both “somewhat disengaged” with their education. “If you’re not engaged in school then you’re invariably not functional, and to be an AFL player – with all the meetings and game plans and lifestyle requirements – you have to be highly functional,” Neesham says. “We didn’t make them any better at playing footy, but we made them a hell of a lot more functional.” He puts Noongar success down to simple geography. Their territory is proximate to the coast and rich in rainfall, meaning their land was close to every developing farming or industrial town – and the centre of every small town is its footy club.

“Half your footy team was blackfellas, half was whitefellas. That’s the way it was.”

“We didn’t know what we were doing was reconciliation, because we didn’t know there was anything to be reconciled.” The area’s geo-historical connection to footy, he adds, did not occur throughout the rest of the country. It is not even true for the rest of Western Australia. “Take the Kimberley,” Neesham says. “Basketball was the predominant sport in the Kimberley until 20 years ago. Baseball, because of the Americans that docked there, was the sport in Port Hedland.” No star footballers emerged from the Pilbara until the past two decades, because the game wasn’t historically grounded there. Neesham has explained a generational talent. How it bloomed into dominance is another story. If you want to know how the Noongars came to the AFL, Neesham says, look at how they first stormed into the WAFL. “You want to talk about the person who made the biggest impact?” he asks. “Talk to Mal Brown.”



