The Australian Dream

Synopsis: The story of how indigenous Australian Adam Goodes became a two times Brownlow medal winner and 2014 Australian of the Year and used his high profile to tackle racism head-on.

Don’t worry if, like me, you are not a fan of AFL (or for that matter any football or even any sport). The Australian Dream is a moving exposé of ingrained racism in Australian society, one that deserves to be seen by a wide audience both domestic and international.

British director Daniel Gordon is somewhat of a specialist in sports documentary so I assume he was brought in as a gun for hire and that the real genius behind his film is indigenous Australian journalist Stan Grant who is credited as the film’s writer and who appears not only as a talking head taking us through some of the issues at stake in Goodes’s story but who also becomes part of it in the film’s latter stages when he makes a passionately critical speech in support of Goodes to an upper echelon sports function, a speech which gives the film its title.  Particular credit should also be given to editor Matt Wylie who keeps the film both engagingly multi-faceted and message-focussed but never lets it get didactic.

The film’s structure is quite conventional following the usual format of combining to-camera interviews with an assortment of talking heads with archival material (including some harrowing photos of Aboriginals in chains) to tell the story of Goodes’s politicization, a path which culminated in a 2013 incident in which Goodes had a 13 year old girl ejected from the ground after she called hin an “ape”.  This then permuted when on radio a few days later popular media and football personality Eddie McGuire compared Goodes to King Kong.

What is especially rewarding about The Australian Dream is the way that it allows the various dimensions of racism to manifest themselves organically rather than, Michael Moore-like, stand as illustrations of a prior thesis. Whilst these vary from the overt vilification of social media postings, through to the white-washing opinings of right-wing journalist/social commentator Andrew Bolt in many ways the most telling incident is that of McGuire’s infamous “slip-of-the-tongue” radio incident one which in the Freudian manner reveals the racism ingrained in the collective psyche.

Goodes himself is a winning presence, self-effacing yet strongly caring and thoughtful. That he walked away from the game he loved in 2015 without accepting the usual honours of a retiring player speaks volumes for the toll his activism took on him. Whilst unfortunately such sacrifices are often the price of change, one feels that If, as it seems, that change has come to pass Goodes would regard it as a price well-worth paying.

FYI: Another film about Goodes, Ian Darling’s The Final Quarter which concentrates on the last three years of Goodes’s football career using only television footage shot at the time was also released in 2019.

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