Silvagni Watson’s aspiration is shared by many, if not most, of the 500-plus kids who play Australian rules football in faraway Maningrida.
“I wish I could play AFL,” said Silvagni, so named in honour of Carlton’s AFL full-back of the century, Stephen Silvagni. “Like Anthony Munkara, from Essendon.”
Silvagni, from the nearby Gurr-Goni people, is one of the more accomplished footballers in Maningrida, one of the Northern Territory’s larger Indigenous communities, in coastal West Arnhem, 500 kilometres east of Darwin.
Now 20, his wish is further away than Melbourne from Maningrida. He’s done well to play in an NTFL premiership for St Mary’s, the famed Darwin club that was home for the Long and Rioli families and other Tiwi Islanders.
“It’s hard to get there,” Silvagni said of the AFL competition. He was not talking about the plane trips.
What was the hard part?, I asked. “Training, the fitness,” he replied.
The kids and young adults playing on the floodlit Maningrida Oval that evening, the day before the opening of Sir Doug Nicholls Round, do not have a senior team in the Darwin-based NTFL. They don’t train in an elite squad.
In addition to Silvagni, I’m told there are multiple boys named Daicos in Maningrida, which has one of the highest participation rates for footy in the nation. Silvagni’s father and uncle umpired the game that evening.
But Maningrida has not yet produced a single AFL player, despite the code’s central role in the community. The same applies to Wadeye, a similar distance to the west of Darwin with a population of 3500 or so.
These are communities – replete with the social ills and obstacles that bedevil Indigenous peoples in the Top End – that do not want for raw football talent. But they are not processed and hot-housed like metropolitan or metro-proximate kids with footy futures.
Northampton, the WA Wheatbelt town that spawned Carlton’s dual Brownlow medallist Patrick Cripps, Coleman medallist Josh Kennedy (West Coast/Carlton), Geelong gun defender Harry Taylor and Fremantle’s Paul Hasleby, has spawned nine recent AFL players from a population of fewer than 1000.
I’ve flown from Darwin, accompanying a local AFLNT cohort (and yes, subsidised by the AFL), to observe the local footy and the game’s progress in Arnhem Land.
The question that emerges from speaking to the locals, to the AFL operatives in the NT and from simply surveying the landscape, is essentially the same as the one I posed to Silvagni Watson: Is it possible for a Maningrida youngster to make it in the AFL?
Maningrida has sufficient interest in the game to spawn multiple AFL and AFLW players. It has 1284 participants (including coaches, umpires, officials). That this has never happened – and remains long odds today – bespeaks a more profound problem confronting the AFL: the continued decline in Indigenous footballers at the elite level.
Essendon, who selected Munkara from Tiwi but didn’t persist with him, will have little Indigenous representation on the field in their headline Dreamtime game against Richmond on Friday night. Jade Gresham has been named on their interchange bench.
Once the beacon for Indigenous football, the Bombers have no high-calibre successor to Michael Long, Gavin Wanganeen or Paddy Ryder in their ranks as yet.
Unlike the Tiwi Islanders, blessed to be across the ditch from Darwin and who have their own team in the NTFL, the Tiwi Bombers, Maningrida has the handicaps of isolation and even scanter economic opportunity than most of the territory.
One promising boy, Kevin Garrawurra from Ramingining, an hour and a half from Maningrida, was in the NT’s elite under-18 squad and played for Wanderers in the NTFL, but choose full-time work for the regional council over playing in the Talent League, according to AFLNT.
Fresh food is expensive, as we discovered in the town’s solitary supermarket. There are several takeaway joints. This is not a community where the kids will be weighing their food, in the manner of Scott Pendlebury. Or lifting weights.
Maningrida is a dry community, in which the barge arrives from Darwin fortnightly. Alcohol is not often accessible and requires permission. AFLNT staffer Warren Campbell notes that the local young adults have taken to drinking Kava, the mildly sedative drink most associated with Pacific Islands.
Campbell, who played for North Melbourne in the mid-90s and South Fremantle in the WAFL, drove AFLNT chairman and noted Darwin lawyer Sean Bowden and myself around the bumpy streets of Maningrida, where “Waz” has spent the past four months as the AFL’s man in the arena.
Bowden, from the noted Richmond football family (he played six games in the Kevin Bartlett era), is an evangelist for the NT gaining the 20th AFL license and improving the AFL pipeline.
Campbell has Pamayu and Gundanji heritage from his father Basil, who played for WA in State of Origin footy. That he lived in Maningrida for a period in his youth has given him a sense of what has and hasn’t changed.
We drive past rows of homes that Campbell says are severely overcrowded, and are visibly overgrown. “Poverty,” he says. Car shells outside have no windscreens or windows. The homes are mostly drab, concrete shacks, except in the streets that house the white teachers and government staff.
A new subdivision is being built to redress the over-crowding.
This part of Arnhem Land has one of the highest rates of rheumatic heart disease globally. One in 20 children were reported affected by RHD or acute rheumatic fever in 2019, leading to a community-led intervention in Maningrida.
Kids wander around as we traverse the streets in Campbell’s ute – there’s no Cineplex shopping hub in which to hang. It has a subdued vibe. As Bowden notes, Maningrida doesn’t have mining royalties like some top-end towns in WA and NT.
The oval, with rarely used rooms in the pocket behind the goals at one end, is clearly an important civic space. The Maningrida arts centre, which has drawn a bus of tourists and is renowned for its bark paintings, is another cultural drawcard.
Garth Doolan was chairman for four years of Maningrida’s football league, which has six teams. Two of them, the Swans and Blues, are playing on this warm Wednesday, when I ask Doolan to explain what has prevented his community, for all its footy-obsession, from sending players to the AFL.
“We live in a two world,” he said. “It’s like, you know, following the footstep of the western world, and also we’re going to have a time of participating in culture activities as well … sometimes we get homesick as well, missing families. Everything is a new journey for them.”
Doolan had pushed for scholarships for Maningrida school kids to improve their prospects. He said the Tiwi had been on the map of AFL clubs, and produced a raft of players.
“For the last couple of years, since I became chairman for the last four years, we’ve been pushing for a scholarship to get young ones to go down and participate and make a name of Maningrida … down south.
“But it’s hard for us to get them from where they are, to a big city.”
Campbell umpires a junior game, which isn’t so different from its equivalent in Melbourne, except for the presence of dogs on the field.
There are no boundary umpires in the seniors, but they don’t really need them this time, since the footy seldom goes near the fence. While there’s minimal tackling, it is a less ballistic pace than I witnessed in the Tiwi Islands finals nearly three years ago.
Ray Hocking, an adopted local from Victoria who has worked for AFLNT and in Cairns football – a cousin of Geelong Football Club brothers (and CEO) Steven and Garry Hocking – has a more optimistic take on Maningrida’s potential.
Hocking felt the greatest impediment to Maningrida footballers making the AFL was in training. Insufficient coaching was another deficit.
“And the family influences … because there is that tighter community.”
Hocking had seen a remote footballer make it from out of the desert when the astonishing Liam Jurrah was drafted by the Demons. It could happen in Maningrida, too.
“Anything’s possible. I was in Yuendumu when Liam Jurrah was about. I was in Lajamanu when Liam Patrick from the Gold Coast Suns [was drafted].
“If you look over the journey, there’s a lot of guys like Liam Jurrah, Liam Patrick, Austin Wonaeamirri from the Tiwi, who came out of the communities, and they didn’t really assimilate down there.” None of that trio played 100 games.
The chasm in preparation, training and coaching wasn’t only evident in Maningrida. On the Saturday, I watched the NT under-18 representative team play the Talent League’s Western Jets.
The Jets youngsters from suburban Melbourne and surrounds had muscular bodies. The AFLNT estimated that their boys were out-weighed by an average of eight kilograms.
Despite the skills showcased by NT prospects such as Sonny Smiler, who is on the radar of AFL clubs, the skinny, less-drilled NT team was smashed by the sturdier, highly organised Melbourne side.
The Jets play every week. The NT team get only four games together, as officials highlighted.
Closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia – a longstanding objective of the federal government – has lately, perhaps belatedly, become a goal for the AFL.
Jake Niall travelled to the Northern Territory with the support of the AFL.
Jake Niall is a Walkley award-winning sports journalist and chief AFL writer for The Age.Connect via X or email.
