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Posted on Jul 30, 2015

Why Australia Is Scared Of Adam Goodes

If you have any kind of connection to Australia through friends or relatives, you would know that right now the whole nation appears to be fixated on an issue that on the surface looks extremely minor but is just one step away from escalating into a complete racial war. This article will help people outside of Australia understand what its really all about.

by Pemulwuy

Community Contributor

Adam Goodes is an Aboriginal Australian Rules Football player who has been playing at the elite level of his sport for over 16 years. He has a squeaky clean image and has has won numerous awards as a player and for his club. Adam Goodes is basically what Lionel Messi is to Argentina or what Usain Bolt is for Jamaica. He is a star.

During his 14th season as a professional footballer in 2013 Adam was thrown from the football spotlight into the national spotlight after a member of the crowd racially abused him by calling him an Ape. This abuse did not get any reaction from the people around the girl who shouted it out, however Adam stopped in his tracks and pointed her out to security and she was later escorted from the ground.

Adam did not set out to vilify the girl who abused him. He did however take the opportunity to open up a national discussion about racism in Australia and the campaign "Racism stops with me" was started. The next year Adam was awarded Australian of the year for his work with the program and many other activities he supports plus his great success as a footballer.

The Australian of the year award is a bit like winning Miss Universe, as the winner will be paraded around the country from place to place and expected to give speech after speech. And so everywhere Adam went he kept the healthy conversation of racial tolerance and equality going. Lets remember now that Adam is a football player, not a politician or an actor and he says things how he sees things and that's where it all started to go wrong for Adam Goodes and for Australia as a whole.

A large majority of Australia's European settlers did not take kindly to the fact that Aboriginal people who have been kept silent for over 200 years were now speaking up and questioning basic things such as the founding of Australia and the date of Australia's national day and how it is disrespectful to Aboriginal people. These settlers were not interested in this conversation at all and soon started to turn on this legend of Australian football.

By the start of 2015, it was widely felt by the European settler population that Adam had disgraced his role as Australian of the year by being outspoken on an issue they were not comfortable with and most definitely were not ready for. The reaction from these outraged settlers was to BOO him every time he touched the ball in every game he played around Australia.

In may, during the Indigenous themed round, Adam performed an Aboriginal war cry in front of the opposition crowd after scoring one of many goals during the game. It is said that he directed his war cry towards people who were booing him and this harmless action caused even greater outrage amongst the settler population of Australia. From this time, the booing of Adam Goodes grew louder and louder week by week. The booing continued without further incident until Adams football team traveled to Western Australia (a region often compared to Apartheid era South Africa) for another round of football.

During this game a number of racist European settlers were removed from the stadium for racially abusing Adam Goodes and the chorus of booing from the crowd was so overwhelming it prompted another Aboriginal player and team mate to perform the same warcry defiantly in front of the racist crowd. This latest incident has sent the media, politicians, sporting organizations into meltdown over this situation that seems impossible to address.

So now we come to the question as to why this issue is impossible to address.

Lets look at some possibilities.

Could Adam Goodes apologize? Apologize for standing up against racism and leading a national discussion on the issue. This would most likely work but it would be pathetic to do so.

Could Adam Goodes retire and the issue will all go away? Adam is 35 and talking about retirement but he is an Inspiration now to many Aboriginal football players and you can be sure that in the current environment that another proud player would step into his position and continue the fight for racial tolerance in Australia.

Could the players stop when the crowd is Booing? This has been talked about but as this issue has divided Australia so strongly its believed doing this would drive people away from attending games. Also Settler Politicians, the settler media and settler players themselves cannot even agree if this issue needs to be addressed at all.

As mentioned earlier in this article, Aboriginal people have been silenced for over 200 years. The world still to this day is unaware of systematic genocide that has taken place and continues to take place. Australia's Aboriginal population is home to the highest Child suicide rates in the world, the highest incarceration rate of a single race in the world and some of the lowest life expectancies in the world. Apart from these facts that we want the world to know, we have the issue of sovereignty and how the European settlers can legally lay claim to Australia.

This whole situation comes down to these simple facts:

1) Australia is 100% Aboriginal land.

2) There was no trade, treaty or purchase of our land.

3) There was no declaration of war (which was the only other legal way of claiming this land back in 1788 when the European settlers first invaded).

And these facts are the reason why European settlers want to silence any Aboriginal person who dares to challenge the establishment of the Illegal settler state known as Australia.