All Ceremony, No Country
Thoughts on a Sir Doug Nicholls Round with fewer Indigenous players than ever.
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West Coast’s 2026 Sir Doug Nicholls Round guernsey (the club was renamed Waalitj Marawar for the duration of the round), designed by Ngadju Mirning artist Andrew Beck, tells the story of Mandooboornup, a place central to the Waalitj Dreaming story. In the story, a mother eagle carried two boys who’d been stealing eggs from the Mandooboornup peak and dropped them into the ocean, where they turned into islands. The front of the guernsey features a large circle representing the club, surrounded by figures that honour the first three Indigenous players to represent the club: Wally Matera, Phil Narkle, and Chris Lewis. Flowing from that central circle are dots, shields and boomerangs, symbolising the warlike nature of Australian rules football.
At the centre of the design sits a golden eagle – the Waalitj – an important and respected symbol across many Aboriginal nations, including Noongar Country. “The eagle is really significant within Aboriginal culture,” Beck told the West Coast club website. “We talk to our young people about what the eagle does when it’s being annoyed or frustrated. Instead of reacting, it rises above. It goes to an altitude where nothing can bother it anymore, so it’s really important symbolism as well.”
Adelaide’s (Kuwarna’s) guernsey tells a story of a different kind. Designed by Wayne Milera, the guernsey is about the Crows half-back, his footy journey, and his ancestry. On the top-right of the guernsey is a small circle, interlaced with dots and figures, representing his mother’s Gunditjmara and Wotjobaluk heritage. The circle on the bottom-left represents the Nharangga of the Yorke Peninsula – his father’s side. Small white dots around the large central circle represent Milera’s ancestors, including his nan, who are no longer with him in body but still are in spirit. The U-shaped figures in the bottom-right of the guernsey represent the Ingle Farm Football Club (shout-out to the northeastern suburbs of Adelaide; God’s country), where Milera played until he was 16, and Central Districts, where he completed his footy apprenticeship.
On the top of the guernsey, sandwiched slightly awkwardly between the large AFL and Toyota logos, are two sets of animal tracks – an emu chasing a crow. This is a nod to a Wotjobaluk Dreaming story, which tells of a fierce, giant emu spirit named Tchingal chasing Waa the Crow across the land. Their violent struggle physically shaped the geography. It’s fitting. After all, Milera is a Crow who is often chased. The four sets of handprints right in the centre of the guernsey represent Milera’s family: his wife Nina, their two boys Carter and Stanley, and him.
Melbourne’s (Narrm’s) guernsey celebrates the club’s connection to Nyirripi, a small town 440 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs. Sitting on the land of the Warlpiri People, it’s a community whose heart beats red and blue. The local club is the Nyirripi Demons. This year’s guernsey was designed by Vanetta Nampijinpa Hudson, a Nyirripi artist whose works tell the stories passed down by her father and his father before him for millennia. She paints stories of Warlukurlangu Jukurrpa (Fire Dreaming), which relate directly to her land, its features, and the life that dances and teems on its surface. The video on Melbourne’s website, which features Kysaiah and Latrelle Pickett, Shane McAdam, and Ricky Mentha Jr., depicts children laughing, kicking the footy, and admiring the heroes who’ve come from the big smoke. But the spiritual richness cannot hide the material poverty.
The 18 guernseys reveal the astonishing breadth of Australian Indigenous culture – its age, its span, its reach. They encode not one story, but thousands. The AFL Players’ Association Indigenous Map, which traces the origins of every Indigenous AFL and AFLW player, evokes a similar feeling. Every corner of this vast red, brown, and green land is represented. Ngarrandjerri. Whadjuk. Kamilaroi. Larrakia. The map reveals an important truth. There is not one Indigenous culture. Instead, there are dozens – hundreds – which have independently found an avenue of creative and physical expression in this game we all share.
Indigenous Australians were playing various forms of kicking games on this continent before white settlement. Whether those games, often banded together under the collective name Marn Grook, was a direct influence on the sport today known as Australian rules, is not the subject of this essay. What is not in dispute is that the AFL has been hugely ennobled by the contributions of Indigenous players, coaches, fans, and administrators. Sir Doug Nicholls Round acknowledges those contributions and celebrates a deep connection to the game.
The AFL and its clubs have gotten very good at honouring Indigenous culture. The guernseys, the smoking ceremonies, the Welcome to Country, the matches played on sacred ground – the way the league observes Sir Doug Nicholls Round has grown richer and more considered with each passing year. The unfortunate irony is that, over the same time span, the league has become less good at ensuring there are actually Indigenous players on the field.
According to the AFL, there are 62 Indigenous players on clubs’ lists in 2026. (I actually couldn’t reach that total myself, I could only get to 59 or 60 – but I’ll trust the league to get such an important number right.) Regardless of the exact number, the trend is clear. There were 87 Indigenous players in 2020. Since then, the number of Indigenous players in the AFL has declined year-on-year.
Just a single Indigenous player featured in Dreamtime at the ‘G, the showpiece game of Sir Doug Nicholls Round. Yes, that was an unfortunate coincidence created by Richmond’s extensive injury list. It still felt symbolic. Observance and representation are different things, and the gap between them has been widening for half a decade. The ceremony has expanded at the same time as the numbers have contracted.
Many people believe this is a problem. The AFL believes it is – at least in the prosaic sense that it’s a bad look for an already crisis-stricken administration. But this is by no means a unanimous view. Opposition to the claim that declining Indigenous representation is a problem comes in two main forms. The first is that Indigenous culture and contributions to footy aren’t worth celebrating. That view exists and is probably more widespread than many people believe. But it’s one I fundamentally disagree with. The second form of scepticism is more consistent with the principles of footy libertarianism I articulated in a piece from a couple of months ago – namely, that clubs and coaches should be allowed to build their lists and approach the game however they like, and that attempts to do that ought to be resisted. A footy libertarian might respond to the fact of declining Indigenous player numbers with questions such as: what’s the “right” number? Will the AFL impose a quota clubs must comply with? Where does it end? There’s a difference between the concern the AFL has expressed about Indigenous player numbers (which one doesn’t tend to hear much about outside of Sir Doug Nicholls Round) and full interventionist tyranny, but if the league believes there’s a problem, and seeks to address it, then most proposed remedies will impact clubs.
The AFL is doing something – or is at least talking a reasonably good game about doing something. In a media conference launching this year’s Sir Doug Nicholls Round, CEO Andrew Dillon announced that the league would launch a First Nations Impact Fund, an initiative which “aims to grow First Nations representation across the industry, creating culturally safe environments and calling out racism ‘wherever it exists’.” That sounds encouraging, although given that the fund is believed to be worth about $300,000 – less than the median player’s salary – we should temper our optimism about what it can achieve. The AFL has also convened a sub-committee of AFL and club figures, which met for the first time on the eve of Sir Doug Nicholls Round to discuss ways to boost the number of Indigenous players. No sooner had the committee been publicised, it was criticised by several Indigenous AFL greats, including Shaun Burgoyne, Michael Walters, and Michael O’Loughlin, for not being sufficiently consultative or representative. The omission of national AFL talent diversity manager Paul Vandenbergh, the most senior Indigenous staffer at AFL head office, from the panel, came in for particular criticism. There’s a real dispute here: the AFL and Indigenous advocates like Hill might well define “success” differently. The current AFL administration is, first and foremost, looking to arrest the decline of Indigenous player numbers. Indigenous players might see it differently: they could be just as interested in important questions of cultural safety, career longevity, and how the league will support Indigenous players after they leave the system.
The AFL is also reportedly considering giving clubs an extra list spot specifically for First Nations players. It’s worth exploring the potential implications of this. When I asked “Alex”, an AFL list boss, what list management rules he’d remove, he quickly identified the rookie list. “A lot of clubs use it as a list management tool,” Alex told me. “It’s within the rules, but I just think you can extend your primary list, make it a full list, and remove the admin, remove the stress of players getting delisted and re-listed.” Clubs have converged on a use of the rookie list that’s quite different from its original purpose of player development. It’s a small example that illustrates a broader point: clubs are increasingly clever at maximising utility. Given this, what are the likely outcomes of a bespoke Indigenous rookie list spot?
The first is the one the AFL would most like: clubs use it as a chance to recruit a player they know is talented but would otherwise have required more patience than is typically afforded. Isaiah Dudley comes to mind here as a potential proof of concept: a player with all the technical tools who has thrived in an AFL environment. That’s a quick and effective way to go from 62 Indigenous AFL-listed players to 80. The second outcome, which one suspects the AFL would tolerate but probably not love, is that clubs treat the spot as a box-ticking exercise by adding an Indigenous rookie player that’s unlikely to ever make it, and investing minimally in their development. That would probably count as vaguely malicious compliance: recognising that the value of getting the league off their backs is greater than the cost of the list spot. Certainly not an ideal way to increase Indigenous representation in the AFL, but one way for the line to go up.
The worst-case scenario is that the Indigenous rookie spot isn’t actually additive at all, and instead results in fewer Indigenous players being taken in the National Draft. I suspect that’s more likely than the AFL would like to admit: creating a list spot that can only be used for Indigenous players will effectively increase the opportunity cost of adding Indigenous players to a senior list. If the choice was previously between using a third-round pick on an Indigenous player and a non-Indigenous player, more clubs, knowing the buffer exists, will pick the non-Indigenous player. In this view, an extra list spot without accompanying obligations – minimum development hours, cultural safety reporting, etc. – becomes window dressing at best, and cynical compliance at worst. Clubs are rational and self-interested, and smart people employed by them spend lots of time thinking about how to engineer marginal gains.
The proposal to add an Indigenous rookie list spot might be misguided, but it gestures at something real: fewer Indigenous players are being drafted, and more are being delisted. In a sense, this is trivially true. Indigenous player numbers are declining, so clearly more are exiting the system than entering it. But the collapse in the number of Indigenous draftees is still alarming. The sole Indigenous player taken in the 2024 National Draft, Cody Anderson, was selected with Pick 64.
There are several hypotheses for why fewer Indigenous players are being drafted. The first is that nothing has actually changed and the decline is just attributable to bad luck. That’s possible; we’re ultimately dealing with small sample sizes. But I’m not sure it squares with the reality, and the AFL’s response. Most other explanations posit that something structural has happened. Perhaps clubs believe that Indigenous prospects aren’t well-suited to the evolving physical and tactical demands of modern footy (players are getting taller and are expected to run harder for longer). Or perhaps they believe that Indigenous prospects, especially those which haven’t come through elite developmental pathways, are riskier prospects than “good kids” who won scholarships to fancy private schools. Either way, if you believe there’s a structural reason for declining Indigenous player numbers, then you’re implicitly agreeing there is a crack somewhere in the developmental pipeline – we’re just quibbling about where it is.
Saying that the AFL is bad at considering second-order consequences is a little like saying that water is wet. But the problem isn’t really that the AFL’s proposed interventions are inadequate. It’s that the league is hopelessly stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the AFL is one of the few mainstream institutions in Australian public life where young Indigenous men are actively celebrated instead of being passively tolerated (or treated with something between suspicion and hostility). On the footy field, Aboriginality is admirable. Seeing Kysaiah Pickett, or Shai Bolton, or Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera strut their stuff matters a hell of a lot for Indigenous kids in Broome or Nyirripi. It is also, frankly, one of the main ways Australians learn about Indigenous customs. The AFL is a prominent stage for positive depictions of Indigenous culture. It knows this. It understands the immense commercial and political value of this reputation – and the costs of relinquishing it.
But I also suspect that sharper minds at AFL House know that, ultimately, they have few levers at their disposal to meaningfully increase the number of Indigenous players coming into the system at the level required. The most obvious problem is that clubs have adopted a more fine-grained approach to drafting, which often manifests as a greater aversion to downside risk, and therefore – indirectly – in fewer Indigenous players entering the system. I’m going to quote from the piece I wrote about the Indigenous player decline two years ago, because the problems I identified then are still just as apparent today.
Once you start looking for this [risk aversion], you can see its influence everywhere. Funnelling more money to elite underage programs, such as the AFL Academy, at the apparent expense of Indigenous development. Increasingly stringent testing requirements on prospective draftees. The increasing predominance of a small group of prestigious private schools, who burnish their own credentials by offering promising players lucrative scholarships. Clubs, terrified of whiffing on high draft picks, have instead participated in a joint effort to turn drafting and talent identification into a hard science.
But, for several reasons, that effort has worked to the disadvantage of many Indigenous players. According to [Professor John] Evans, his experience in elite sports has revealed a clear pattern: recruiting Indigenous players “is often perceived as more challenging than selecting their non-Indigenous peers.” That reluctance is partly attributable to lingering stereotypes. For example, kids who were raised in tough circumstances are labelled “difficult” when logistical hurdles mean they miss the occasional training session. Nonchalant body language is perceived as not caring. Shyness? Arrogance. The bias, Evans writes, also extends to the metrics clubs use to evaluate prospective players today. Those tests, he argues, prioritise physical traits instead of football skills, and thus often fail to capture the true potential of young Indigenous footballers. If you’ve spent your adolescence kicking the footy on red earth, then it’s easy to see how beep tests might seem a little alien.
That bias doesn’t stay in the recruiting department. It shapes how Indigenous players are discussed and perceived well after they’re drafted. Too often, commentators reach for words like “mercurial” and “X-factor” – words that are meant as praise but presuppose supernatural talent and implicitly discount hard work and football intelligence – in ways we rarely do for white players. It’s a form of exoticisation that, however well-intentioned, keeps Indigenous players at arm’s length from the game’s mainstream. We’ll know something has genuinely shifted when those adjectives are retired in favour of “smart” and “selfless”.
Clubs covet data. And Indigenous players that come through non-standard development pathways – that don’t play Talent League, that don’t play in the Under-18 National Championships, that don’t submit themselves to a battery of physical and psychological testing – generate less data. Players who aren’t on the radar at 16 are often regarded as permanently lost to the system. From the perspective of clubs that pursue their own interests, it’s rational to avoid risk, and sensible to treat the broader problem as not theirs to solve. That’s part of why Melbourne drafting Latrelle Pickett in the first round of last year’s draft, felt so bold. He spent a decent chunk of his draft year in the SANFL Reserves.
Ghosts of present and past loom over all this. Australia is doing a poor job of Closing the Gap. If anything, the gap is widening. The costs of poor physical and economic outcomes are felt far beyond footy. But if the median 16 year-old Indigenous kid is, because of nutritional deficits beyond their control, smaller than their White Australian counterpart (at a time when height and running power are more important at the top level than ever), it’s yet another way the deck is stacked against them. The longer we go without meaningfully closing the gap, the bigger the gap between the environments where many Indigenous kids hone their footy skills and the gilded private schools where so many white kids are drafted from becomes – and the bigger the risks of drafting the former become for AFL clubs. Even the most competent footy admin in history can’t close the gap. It’s just that the AFL, by virtue of its prominence, is one of the places where the gaps have widened.
As the AFL and AFLW Indigenous Player map shows, Indigenous footy talent comes from every corner of Australia. It’s incredibly hard – not to mention expensive – to build a system capable of finding it everywhere. A player being drafted is the culmination of a years-long process. Talent identification is just the beginning. But even that first step filters out so many potential Indigenous AFL players, because so many of them are trying to get by in places like Nyirripi. The Indigenous talent development model often involves identifying future elite prospects when they’re around 15 or 16 and then pulling them into the system, which, for those who’ve grown up in rural and remote areas, means a move to the big smoke and one of those prestigious private schools. That’s a highly resource-intensive process, not to mention one which carries a whiff of an episode of Australian history that’s best forgotten (and which has contributed to lingering intergenerational trauma among Indigenous communities).
There’s another contributor to the decline in Indigenous player numbers I’ve not mentioned: deep cuts to clubs’ “soft caps” because of Covid that have still yet to be restored. I haven’t seen that connection made very often. But a quick glance at the trend in Indigenous player numbers suggests it should be. When budgets tightened, clubs cut what they couldn’t easily justify on football ROI terms. Indigenous Player Liaison Officers – the staff members best placed to make newly-drafted Indigenous players feel culturally safe – were precisely the kind of role that didn’t necessarily generate the short-term value that contributed to wins.
Following the Hawthorn racism saga, where Indigenous players described being pressured to cut ties with family members, the AFL mandated that every club must have an Indigenous Player Liaison Officer present for at least three days a week. According to comments made by Caroline Wilson on the most recent episode of the Real Footy podcast, Richmond’s Indigenous player liaison officer currently attends the club just one day a week. Whether that’s an outlier or representative of a broader pattern of non-compliance, I’m not sure. But perhaps that at least offers a genuine starting point. Increasing Indigenous player numbers in the AFL is partly about recruiting more Indigenous players – but it’s also about retaining the Indigenous players already in the system.
Perhaps the First Nations Impact Fund includes an increase to the funding available to clubs for Indigenous Player Liaison Officers. I hope it does, but I don’t know. I’m not sure the AFL knows. But one thing is certain: the problem won’t be solved by talking or by forcing clubs to act against their interests. If the AFL is serious about increasing Indigenous player numbers, and serious about doing it the right way – by improving the breadth of talent identification, the depth of talent development, and making the AFL a more culturally safe environment – it’ll need to pony up. You can’t do something like this on the cheap. More Indigenous player liaison officers and a dedicated rookie list spot are a start. But the AFL should reconsider how it handles Indigenous talent development.
The Northern Academies provide a clue. They work because they provide those clubs with strong incentives to invest in footy in their own backyard. They get to direct junior development and then draft them at a discount. It’s a hell of a deal. And it’s a demonstration that when the AFL gets the incentives right, clubs respond. The question is whether similar logic can be applied at scale to Indigenous talent development. Here is one tentative answer, offered in the spirit of creative blue-sky thinking rather than a model that’s guaranteed to work. The West Australian clubs have been petitioning the AFL for expanded academies, based on the northern states’ model, to make better use of the abundant talent in the state. The AFL should accede to the request – with caveats. Make them Next Generation Academies, specifically dedicated to the incubation of Indigenous and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse talent. Ensure that the Academies are tied to demonstrable community investment obligations, minimum development hours, and mandatory cultural safety reporting. Find a compromise between the products of those new academies being in the open pool (which would deter the WA clubs from investing) and giving them exclusive access (which would be unfair to other clubs). The WA clubs will bear the brunt of the cost of running the academies, but every club has an interest in seeing them succeed.
Beyond WA, the harder problem is the Northern Territory, where the distances are just as great and the communities even more remote. I suspect something more radical is needed here: a permanent AFL-funded institution. Base it in Darwin and give it a satellite presence in Alice Springs. Appoint coaches and welfare staff who are based in the community year-round, a pathway from community football to a Territory academy that doesn’t require a 15 year-old to leave home, and cultural support that travels with players when they do eventually relocate. The pastoral care piece – the part the soft cap cuts gutted – gets built into the institution’s DNA. Fund it so it operates entirely independently of clubs. The AFL takes responsibility for everything before draft night. Clubs still draft the kids and mould them into AFL players. But at least they’re picking kids that aren’t beginning 20 metres behind the start line. Framed correctly, this isn’t the AFL taking power away from clubs. It’s the AFL finally taking responsibility for the parts of the system no one else has. Something like this will cost real money and an appetite for leadership and ambition I’m not sure the incumbent administration has shown. There’s no guarantee it’ll work. The complex, multilayered challenges of geography, history, and trauma that have shaped Indigenous Australians’ relationships with institutions like the AFL won’t melt away because they can suddenly attend a whizz-bang academy in Darwin. In truth, there’s scant evidence that, outside of the ritual admission that “there is work to do” you hear around Sir Doug Nicholls Round, that the AFL considers declining Indigenous representation to be a big enough problem to intervene in the talent development model. And it’s not at all clear what success would look like. Is it a particular number, or share, of Indigenous players in the AFL? Is it about improving cultural safety and retention of Indigenous players in the league? Improved articulation of development pathways? I’m not qualified to answer these questions, but they’d probably be good ones for the sub-committee of AFL and club figures convened by the league to consider.
But the alternatives that the AFL has so far presented – a $300,000 fund, a sub-committee, and a list spot that smart clubs will find ways to game – don’t adequately honour the contributions that Indigenous Australians make to the game. So much about how Indigenous people in the system are treated – the way players are spoken about, the way Indigenous club staff are often the first to be cut – suggests that they are still regarded as an ornament. They are not. They are a central part of the game’s past, present, and future. On the back of the Waalitj Marawar Indigenous guernsey is a small circle. Inside it are human footprints and stylised versions of the tracks made by the eagle, the kangaroo, and the emu. These three animals are incapable of walking backwards. According to Andrew Beck, the artist who designed the guernsey, the symbolism is deliberate. “The club shouldn’t walk backwards. The nation shouldn’t walk backwards.” Those words are worth heeding.
Straight from the chart
To begin, one final chart which illustrates the dwindling presence of Indigenous players in the game. The total number of AFL-listed players across this sample size ranged from 806 in 2019 to 777 in 2023. NB: these are manual counts, they might be slightly off in places. But the story it tells is fundamentally true.
Despite being very similar on the scoreboard, the opening two games of Round 11 couldn’t really have been more different structurally. The Hawthorn-Kuwarna game was typical of contests between good sides (well, at least in Hawthorn’s case) in Tasmania – high-pressure and high-turnover. The two sides combined for 151 intercept possessions. The Dreamtime at the ‘G game was rather different: just 118 intercept possessions were recorded.
The other especially noteworthy thing was how few possession chains were recorded in the North Melbourne-Gold Coast game. Both sides were accurate, so there were only 18 kick-ins. Remarkably, there were only three more intercept possessions (88 in total) recorded than clearance wins (85). Neither team could stop the other when they had the ball.
Turning our attention now to how successfully sides converted possession chains into scores, Kuwarna and Richmond both feasted on clearance wins (the former simply didn’t win enough of them), Waalitj Marawar capitalised on the turnovers they did force against Collingwood (but only recorded 52 intercept possessions), and Carlton utterly dominated Yartapuulti in close.
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Footnotes
Some good stats from the ESPN Footy Podcast: across the two games Josh Fraser has coached Carlton, the Blues have been:
1st for uncontested marks (13th this season under Michael Voss)
18th for share of kicks taken long (9th under Voss)
3rd for 45-degree kicks (15th under Voss)
2nd for D50 to F50 transition success rate (13th under Voss)
2nd for inside-50 kick retention percentage (6th under Voss)
Courtesy of Ben Cameron: North Melbourne’s stirring after-the-siren victory against Gold Coast at Marvel on Saturday was the club’s biggest half-time comeback since Round 18, 2005. That day, they were 40 points down at half-time against Port Adelaide. On Saturday it was a measly 38 points.
Speaking of that game, it was the ninth this year where both sides have scored 100+ points – the most in a season since 2016. There are still 119 games left to play. (H/T Sirswampthing)
Unsurprisingly (given it was the highest-scoring third quarter in V/AFL history), GWS’s third term against Brisbane was also the highest-scoring quarter ever recorded against a reigning Premier. The previous best was the 80 points Richmond put up in the last quarter of its Round 2 game against Melbourne. Don’t remember that game? I’m not surprised – it was played in 1942. (H/T Sirswampthing)
Some utterly bonkers stats about the third quarter of the GWS-Brisbane game, courtesy of friend of the newsletter, Emlyn Breese: The Giants were +53 for post-clearance disposals, +41 for uncontested possessions, +14 for tackles, and +9 for forward-50 tackles.
Courtesy of Fox Footy’s Max Laughton: this is the first time Essendon has been outright bottom of the V/AFL ladder at the conclusion of a round since Rounds 18-22 of 2016. Before then, it was bottom from Rounds 7-16 of 2006. Before that? Round 4, 1992. Before that??? You have to go back to 1933.
Recommended reading
Cody Atkinson and Sean Lawson on that third quarter by the Giants on Sunday, and what it might mean for them and the Lions.
Jonathan Horn on James Hird, the ghost at the Essendon banquet.
Tommy Wolfe on the responsibility of commentators and creators to ensure the footy media ecosystem is safe and inclusive to all.
In case you missed it: Cody and Jonathan and I have started a podcast. It’s called 110 Percenters. Find it wherever you get your podcasts, or here’s a direct link to our second episode.
Nick Rynne wraps up another big week in WA footy over at Jumper Punches.
While not the main point of the piece, I appreciated you highlighting some of the language used by commentators. It's something that's bugged me for a while that would influence so much of the footy public perception without most even realising, just like the commentators were influenced by those that came before them.