AFL
The coinciding of the AFL’s round eight stand against gender-based violence and the NSW Hall of Fame’s plan to bestow ‘Legend’ status on Wayne Carey highlights the yawning gap between platitudes and action.
By Martin McKenzie-Murray.So-called legends and the AFL’s box-ticking response to gender-based violence
On a bright afternoon at the MCG last weekend, the players of Richmond and Fremantle formed a circle in the centre of the ground before the coin toss. An announcer, with a voice more suited to selling bathroom tiles on commercial radio than requesting a large crowd to reflect upon murder, declared a moment’s silence for the women who have been killed so far this year by men.
This ritual was observed before every round eight AFL game, an initiative announced by the league’s chief executive thus: “This weekend we will unite and remember all the women who have been killed as a result of gender-based violence and stand in solidarity in committing to do more to stop this community-wide problem.
“We also understand our industry still has work to do, but we are committed to continuing to educate, to take action and even more conscious of that we must work harder than ever. All men are responsible for doing better.”
The above quote comprises 74 words, and each one conspires to form a resonant inanity. The statement was longer, but the overall effect remains the same: sanctimonious corporatese. “All men are responsible for doing better”? How? Why? Should a line so heavy with implication be offered so casually? That “all men” are responsible for those murders is a very large and theoretical proposition, and that it be offered so glibly – that “better” is under enormous strain – suggests to me a cynical absorption of prevailing rhetoric.
On Monday’s episode of Fox Footy’s AFL 360, after the completion of the round, two coaches appeared on the show. One was St Kilda’s Ross Lyon, who, when asked about the round’s initiative, was obliged to spew some platitudes. “It’s a significant moment in the history of the AFL taking a stand,” he said. “Really brought a severe spotlight to what often occurs behind closed doors and in darkness until something tragic happens, so I think it was a step forwards, but we don’t have a lot of muscle, those with the muscle need to get it done… You’ve got to walk the talk, but it comes with challenges as we go forward.”
Lyon was echoing the foundational inanity of the AFL’s statement. Are women made any safer by this gibberish? Is society improved? Is policy? Or policing? This is no criticism of Lyon, by the way, who has a job to do, and that job’s not philosophising about the root causes of murder on live television.
I suppose all of this is better than nothing, but by how much?
The AFL’s “stand” last week was complicated by some terrible timing and worse communication. The NSW AFL Hall of Fame opened the same weekend with a grand ceremony, and while Wayne Carey’s induction as one of its inaugural members had been announced some months ago, nobody bothered to tell the AFL that he’d been chosen for the loftiest status of “Legend”.
The athletic brilliance of Wayne Carey is obvious. I’ll spare you a summary of his achievements – it’s enough to say he’s one of the very best to have played the game. He’s also a strange and repellent figure, the lost son of an abusive father and a man whose arrogance and violent instability has left a swathe of harm.
The man convicted of indecently assaulting a stranger in the 1990s, who destroyed his club by sleeping with his teammate’s wife, who glassed his girlfriend and then assaulted a female police officer in Miami, and who was, just months later, visited by police back home in Melbourne after a domestic disturbance and had to be subdued with pepper-spray… this was the man the NSW Hall of Fame were about to raise a champagne flute to on the first night of the silent tributes to murdered women.
AFL boss Andrew Dillon was not pleased. He intervened, the NSW group rescinded Carey’s Legend honour and Carey returned to Melbourne with an unworn tuxedo. Dillon said he had personally called Carey to tell him of his decision, and that Carey was understanding. We’ll have to take his word for it.
Wayne Carey was accepted into the AFL Hall of Fame in 2010, the same year former West Coast and Richmond player Ben Cousins retired. Cousins, a Brownlow medallist and six-time All-Australian, was brilliant. Were the guardians of the Hall of Fame required to judge applicants purely on ability, Cousins would have passed their gates years ago.
Much like Carey, however, Cousins befriended gangsters, enjoyed their products too much and became convinced of his own invulnerability. Severe addiction followed, then several periods in jail for stalking his ex-partner and breaching violence restraining orders.
And so it was last week that the AFL’s period of recognising past players converged awkwardly with its round of recognising murdered women. Carey was denied his place as a Legend in the new, and separate, NSW Hall of Fame, while Cousins was again overlooked for induction into the national hall.
This seems okay to me. The criteria for induction into the AFL Hall of Fame is rather vague, perhaps understandably so, as such vagueness offers defence against scrutiny. Just as the AFL’s Brownlow Medal is awarded to the best and fairest, so is canonisation dependent upon both skills and character. “The committee considers candidates on the basis of record, ability, integrity, sportsmanship and character.”
In a game that enjoys a roughly even split between men and women in the stands each week, and which launched a professional women’s league almost a decade ago, the celebration of two men who have been convicted of criminally tormenting women would seem perverse.
Both men paid some consequences – the loss of jobs, dignity and, in Cousins’s case, liberty. It’s hard to believe, though, that a non-footy star might become a newspaper columnist after glassing their girlfriend, or another a TV sports newsreader after being jailed for sustained and aggravated stalking.
Each man may now have to accept there’s a tax on their privilege – that with the money and fame came an enlarged cultural status, and that one consequence of their behaviour is forfeiting certain honours.
Fair enough. Let them be denied this final privilege. Let them hang suspended between the acknowledgement of history books and the pointed absence of Hall of Fame status. Let them be suspended in popular culture between their athletic genius and their harmful unravelling. This may upset their egos and their most ardent fans but otherwise seems a trivial and justifiable cost. Against any objections, the Hall of Fame committee may tap the sign, the one that says “Character”.
By all means, prevent the ascension of Cousins and Carey. Let’s not pretend, though, that this isn’t most immediately an issue about specific and practical interventions and making things easier for a woman to escape a dangerous or destructive relationship.
If the prevalence of domestic violence was once considered Australia’s “dirty little secret”, at least it can no longer be said there’s media or institutional reticence. It’s just sorrowful it has taken an obscene death toll to put it in the spotlight.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 11, 2024 as "Silence isn’t golden".
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