In 1993 it was the international year of the world’s Indigenous peoples. The Australian High Court had recently abolished the legal fiction of terra nullius. An Indigenous man had just been named Australian of the Year. A few months earlier, Paul Keating had delivered the Redfern Address. “Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had inspired admiration and patriotism and yet did nothing to diminish prejudice,” he said.

Many insist that Australian rules football reached its zenith in 1993. Up to a dozen teams were in premiership contention. Wayne Carey took the competition by storm. Gary Ablett booted 124 goals from 17 matches. In Adelaide, Tony Modra was permanently perched on defenders’ heads.

Some of the best players of that era were Indigenous. Peter Matera pretty much won the 1992 grand final off his own boot. Michael Long would win the Norm Smith medal the following year on the back of one of the great individual finals series. His team-mate Gavin Wanganeen would win the Brownlow medal.

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But their presence was provisional. A players’ survey found that 36% had racially abused an opponent. Tony Shaw told Caroline Wilson: “I’d make a racist comment every week if I thought it would help win the game.”

Neil Elvis “Nicky” Winmar copped it more than most. Like Matera, he was a Noongar man, the warrior tribe from the south-west corner of Western Australia who now make up a third of all Indigenous AFL players. He grew up in a tin shack, with no running water and a bucket for a toilet. An iridescent talent with a short fuse, he was considered fair game by opponents and fans.

He arrived at a club that was something of a joke. St Kilda was famous for its wild disco, its quagmires and its wooden spoons. But new coach Ken Sheldon straightened the place up. They cultivated an intense rivalry with Collingwood, with a succession of matches going down to the death. In 1992, the Saints won a brutal final by eight points, their first finals win in nearly two decades. Because of the vagaries of the system in those days, the Magpies were bundled out, despite finishing third.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winmar with Saints team-mates Dale Kickett and Gilbert McAdam in 1990. Photograph: Getty Images

But they were undefeated heading into their round four, 17 April clash. St Kilda hadn’t won at Victoria Park since 1976. With Tony Lockett rubbed out for belting Tony Malakellis, they were considered a fluker’s chance at best.

For the people of the Kulin Nation, Victoria Park was a sacred place, the scene of corroborees and ceremonial rituals. For Collingwood supporters, it held similar significance. Its feral nature is sometimes overplayed. Granted, some fans were untroubled by intellectual concerns. But it was hardly The Den in South London. Sure, the facilities were primitive. And it could be intimidating. But most of the suburban grounds were like that. St Kilda’s “Animal Enclosure” could get hairy. And Adelaide and West Coast’s grounds had their fair share of birdbrains too.

But it was a sulphurous crowd that day. They felt like they owed the Saints. And Winmar, who’d been St Kilda’s best player three weeks on the trot, was right in the gun. At half-time in the reserves, he and Gilbert McAdam walked down the race to familiarise themselves with the conditions. From the get-go, they were spat on and abused.

In the centre square, McAdam grabbed hold of his team-mate. “We’re not going to put up with this crap,” he said. “Let’s go out there and run amok. We’ll show this mob.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winmar pictured in action for the Saints during the 1997 grand final at the MCG. Photograph: John Daniels/ALLSPORT

Geelong’s Bob Davis once said that the mark of a champion was the ability to don the white shorts at Victoria Park and come away as best on ground. By that and many other measures, Winmar and McAdam were champions. They wrought havoc that day, collecting five Brownlow votes between them.

Charlie McAdam, down from Alice Springs, didn’t see much of it. He’d been forcefully removed from his mother when he was six. He’d worked as a stockman and a boxer. He was standing in the outer but the abuse directed towards his son quickly proved too much. He left Victoria Park in tears. He listened to the rest of the game on radio back at his hotel. “I just couldn’t stomach it,” he later said.

By three-quarter-time, Gilbert had kicked five goals. A recurring image is of him loping away, tucking the ball under his arm, slicing and skewering the Collingwood midfield.

Winmar was different. He ran in straighter lines. He was more spring heeled. He had long, chicken legs. He moved like a gazelle. Few footballers have been so proficient on both sides of their body.

His sealing goal, a 60-metre running drop punt, perfectly captured his joy, his flair, his rage. Shortly afterwards, the siren sounded and the abuse intensified. Winmar blew kisses and bared his backside to the crowd. He then lifted his jumper and pointed to his stomach.

“I’m black and I’m proud to be black,” he said.

It was “both intimate and public, a pronouncement of pride, in the form of an open challenge,” wrote Matthew Klugman and Gary Osmond in their superb book, Black and Proud. “It remains an arresting statement of race, discrimination, dignity and defiance.”

Lurking nearby was the Sunday Age’s Wayne Ludbey. As an 18-year-old cadet photographer, he’d accidentally set fire to the darkroom. But by the early 90s, he was recognised as one of the premier snappers in the game. He was close enough to hear what Winmar was saying. There were no rapid-fire lens shutters in those days. He knew he had to nail the image. He knew he was sitting on something special.

He raced back to Spencer Street and badgered his editors. They sent him home, saying he was hysterical. Deadline was approaching. They were already running with the verdicts in the Rodney King case, race riots in South Africa and an expose of Australian sex tourists in Thailand. But they telephoned him half an hour later. They were running his image on the front page. Many believe that football – and the country that obsesses over it – irrevocably changed as a result.

Or perhaps not. The Collingwood president quickly weighed in. “As long as they conduct themselves like white people off the field, everyone will admire and respect them,” he said. “As long as they conduct themselves like human beings, they will be all right.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winmar runs onto the field before a match against Brisbane. Photograph: Getty Images

Winmar, meanwhile, spent the night at Molly Meldrum’s house. Both he and McAdam were already receiving death threats. St Kilda barred the pair from talking about the issue. Winmar immediately became embroiled in a pay dispute, which culminated in a bizarre slanging match between agent Peter Jess and Meldrum on the Sunday Footy Show.

St Kilda promptly imploded, losing the next five games. A golden generation of footballers – Lockett, Loewe, Winmar and Harvey – never got the flag they perhaps deserved. By the end of the season, Sheldon had been sacked. A piglet had been released onto the SCG to ridicule Lockett. McAdam was asked to take a pay cut and left for Brisbane. His brother Adrian had meanwhile exploded onto the scene for North Melbourne, kicking 23 goals in his first three games. He too was racially vilified at Victoria Park, a day where he saw off half a dozen opponents and kicked nine goals. He was barely seen again.

Winmar would go on to become the first Indigenous footballer to play 200 games in the AFL. But his career at St Kilda ended horribly. In 1998, he was the subject of a scathing Caroline Wilson profile piece. He was moved on to the Western Bulldogs. When he failed to appear as scheduled on The Footy Show, Sam Newman responded by blackening his face with boot polish.

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For reasons that no one can explain, he’s yet to be inducted into the AFL Hall of Fame. He’s worked in iron ore mines and as a rouseabout in a shearing shed. In 2012, he had a heart attack. In 2013, he returned to Melbourne for the 20-year anniversary of the Victoria Park game. He was at the MCG the night a young girl called Adam Goodes an ape. A few weeks later, Goodes brandished an imaginary spear and Australia embarrassed itself a little bit more.

Ludbey’s image is ubiquitous. It’s been hung in galleries. It’s been spray painted on inner city walls. It’s assumed pride of place at both the Age and AFL headquarters. Indeed, for the keepers of the code, it symbolised a seismic shift, whereby bigots would be unmasked and re-educated. Together with its racial and religious vilification code, the AFL quickly positioned itself as Australian sport’s torch-bearer for reconciliation. The fact that Aboriginal people had lit Olympic flames, captained Australian rugby teams, won world title fights and triumphed in Wimbledon finals was apparently a moot point.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winmar pictured at Adelaide Oval in 2015. Photograph: David Mariuz/Getty Images

Things change. A Noongar man is halfway through a nine-year, $10m contract. These days, Victoria Park is populated by hipsters walking French bulldogs and retired greyhounds. The face of intolerance in footy now isn’t some toothless prole in the outer, it’s a former Geelong Grammarian on The Footy Show.

As Wilson wrote all those years ago, the image always meant more to others than it did to Winmar. But every few years, he returns to Melbourne. He recently attended a pride match with his gay son, Tynan. He’s bedevilled by memory loss and dizziness and is considering joining a concussion class action of former AFL players. He’s a shy man, an evasive man, a man who was chewed up and spat out by the sport, having provided it with its most significant moment in time.