Indigenous Football in the AFL: History and the Round

Indigenous AFL history is not a supporting chapter of Australian football. It runs from an unnamed Djab Wurrung man playing for Geelong in 1872 to a premiership player being booed out of the competition in 2015, and the game has spent thirty years building rules, rounds and apologies around it. Sir Doug Nicholls Round, held each May, is where all of that becomes visible for two weekends a year: designed guernseys, Welcome to Country, the Long Walk to the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and eighteen clubs saying the same thing at once.

The short answer to what the round is: it is the AFL's annual celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players and cultures, named since 2016 after Pastor Sir Doug Nicholls, the Fitzroy footballer who became Governor of South Australia. It grew out of Dreamtime at the G in 2005 and the league-wide Indigenous Round of 2007. Every club wears artwork commissioned from an Indigenous artist, several play under a name in language, and the centrepiece is Essendon against Richmond under lights at the MCG.

The longer answer involves Victoria Park in 1993, an Anzac Day match in 1995, a walk to Canberra in 2004, three seasons of booing that ended a 372-game career, and a set of participation numbers that are currently going the wrong way. This page covers all of it, and it does not soften the parts that reflect badly on the competition or its crowds. For the wider Australian sport picture, start at the Australia hub or the sports index.

What Sir Doug Nicholls Round actually is

Sir Doug Nicholls Round is a fixture block, not a single match. Since 2019 it has usually spanned two consecutive rounds in May, timed near National Reconciliation Week, which runs from 27 May to 3 June and brackets the anniversaries of the 1967 referendum and the Mabo decision.

Inside those rounds, the standard club presentation is replaced. Ground advertising in the goal squares and on the centre circle gives way to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flag colours and commissioned artwork. Umpires have worn Indigenous-designed uniforms since 2015. Every match opens with a Welcome to Country or an Acknowledgement, and most carry a dance or smoking ceremony performed by the traditional owners of the ground the match is played on.

It is worth being precise about scale. This is not a themed guernsey and a pre-game speech at one game. It is the entire competition, home and away, for two weekends, at every venue from the MCG to Marrara Oval in Darwin.

Who Sir Doug Nicholls was

Douglas Ralph Nicholls was born at Cummeragunja mission on the New South Wales side of the Murray in 1906. He was a sprinter and a footballer, played 53 games for Fitzroy between 1932 and 1937, and twice represented Victoria. He was refused a place in the Carlton dressing room earlier in his career on the grounds that other players objected to him.

What he did after football is why the round carries his name. He became a Churches of Christ pastor in Fitzroy, ran a hostel for Aboriginal people arriving in Melbourne, campaigned through the Aborigines Advancement League, and was central to the campaign for the 1967 referendum. He was appointed MBE in 1957, became the first Aboriginal person to receive a knighthood in 1972, and was appointed Governor of South Australia in 1976.

No other VFL or AFL footballer has held vice-regal office. The AFL adopted his name for the round in 2016, replacing the generic Indigenous Round title used from 2007.

Indigenous AFL history before the VFL

Australian football's origins are argued about, and the argument matters here. One line of research connects the game codified in Melbourne in 1858 to Marngrook, a ball game played by Aboriginal communities in western Victoria involving a possum-skin ball and high leaping. The link usually runs through Tom Wills, who grew up at Lexington station in Djab Wurrung country and spoke a local language as a child.

The evidence is circumstantial. There is no contemporaneous document in which Wills says he took anything from Marngrook, and several historians reject the connection outright. Other historians argue the absence of such a document proves little about a colonial ball game in the 1850s. The honest position is that it is unresolved, and the AFL's own materials tend to present it as a story rather than a finding.

What is documented is that Aboriginal men were playing senior football almost immediately. Albert Austin, known as Pompey, a Djab Wurrung man, played a senior match for Geelong in 1872, more than two decades before the VFL existed.

Joe Johnson and the first VFL players

Fitzroy's Joe Johnson became the first Aboriginal player in the Victorian Football League when he took the field against Carlton in round one of 1904, aged 21. He played 55 games across three seasons and was part of Fitzroy's 1904 and 1905 premiership sides, which makes him the first Aboriginal premiership player at the top level as well as the first player.

After Johnson the trickle was slow and interrupted. Doug Nicholls arrived at Fitzroy in 1932. Norm McDonald played in Essendon's 1940s premierships. The pattern for most of the twentieth century was one or two Aboriginal players at a club at a time, drawn heavily from Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory rather than from Melbourne.

That geography still shapes the competition. Recruiting zones, academies and the long-standing pipelines out of the Kimberley, the Tiwi Islands and the Top End are the reason clubs run development programs thousands of kilometres from their home grounds.

The 1980s and the change in style

The Krakouer brothers, Jim and Phil, arrived at North Melbourne from Western Australia in 1982 and played a style of short, fast, telepathic football that commentators had no vocabulary for. Maurice Rioli won the Norm Smith Medal in Richmond's losing 1982 Grand Final side, the first player from a losing team to do so.

Through the 1980s and 1990s the number of Aboriginal players in the VFL and then the AFL rose steadily. So did the volume of abuse directed at them, from opposition players and from crowds, and there was no rule against it. Michael Long has described racial abuse in that period as simply part of the game, something players were expected to absorb and keep playing through.

That is the context for what happened at Victoria Park in April 1993. It was not an isolated incident that shocked a competition with clean hands. It was one incident that a player refused to absorb.

Nicky Winmar at Victoria Park, 17 April 1993

St Kilda had not won at Victoria Park since 1968. On 17 April 1993 they did, and Nicky Winmar and Gilbert McAdam, both Aboriginal, were among the best players on the ground. Both had been abused by sections of the Collingwood crowd for most of the afternoon.

At the final siren Winmar walked towards the outer, lifted his number seven jumper, pointed at his stomach and said he was black and proud to be black. Wayne Ludbey photographed it. The jumper is now held in the Museums Victoria collection, and a bronze of the moment stands outside Optus Stadium in Perth.

What made it a turning point rather than a photograph was what happened next. Collingwood president Allan McAlister said publicly that Aboriginal players would be respected as long as they conducted themselves like white people on and off the field. The remark forced the question out of the stands and into the newspapers, and it kept it there. In 2023, thirty years on, Collingwood formally apologised to Winmar and McAdam.

Michael Long, Anzac Day 1995, and Rule 30

Two years later Essendon's Michael Long was racially abused by Collingwood ruckman Damian Monkhorst during the Anzac Day match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The AFL convened a mediation. Long walked out of it dissatisfied and, crucially, refused to let the story die when the league would have preferred it did.

On 30 June 1995 the AFL introduced Rule 30, a rule to combat racial and religious vilification. It was the first such code in any Australian sport, and other codes copied it. It was later renumbered Rule 35, broadened in 2013 to cover disability, appearance and sexuality, and on Long's own recommendation renamed after long-serving administrator Tony Peek.

The rule's design is worth understanding. Its first stage is confidential conciliation between the players, not a tribunal hearing. Only if that fails does the matter escalate to a formal charge. The theory is that a private acknowledgement changes behaviour more reliably than a public sanction. The criticism, made regularly since, is that confidentiality also protects the offender. Formal charges arising from crowd or player vilification are heard separately from the ordinary judicial process covered on the AFL Tribunal and Match Review Officer page.

The Long Walk

In late 2004 Michael Long set out on foot from Melbourne towards Canberra. His stated purpose was to get Aboriginal community welfare back onto the Prime Minister's agenda. He walked roughly halfway before John Howard agreed to meet him, and he stopped.

Since 2005 the Long Walk has been re-enacted every year on the afternoon of the Dreamtime match, from Federation Square along the Yarra to the MCG. Thousands walk it. The Long Walk Foundation runs education and community programs off the back of it.

The walk is the reason the round has a public ritual that does not depend on a football result. Supporters who never buy a ticket can join it, and it happens whether Essendon or Richmond is any good that year.

From Dreamtime at the G to a league-wide round

The round assembled itself from separate pieces over about a decade. The Marn Grook match began in 2002, Sydney against Essendon during National Reconciliation Week at what is now Accor Stadium. Dreamtime at the G followed in 2005, Essendon against Richmond at the MCG, pushed by Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy, who had recruited more Aboriginal players than any coach of his era.

In 2007 the AFL made it league-wide, running an Indigenous Round across all matches from 25 to 27 May to mark the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum. In 2016 it was renamed for Sir Doug Nicholls. From 2019 it expanded to two rounds.

Dreamtime remains the anchor fixture. It shifted to a Friday night from 2024; the 2026 match was played on Friday 22 May at the MCG. Its one year away from Melbourne was 2020, when the Victorian lockdown moved it to Marrara Oval in Darwin, in front of a crowd for whom the fixture arguably means more.

• 62First Nations players on AFL lists in 2026
• 87Record listed First Nations players, 2020
• 18Clubs wearing designed guernseys since 2014
• 31Players in the 2025 Indigenous All Stars squad

Counts published by the AFL. The 2026 list figure is a pre-season count and changes with every draft, delisting and mid-season signing.

The guernseys

Richmond commissioned the first Indigenous-designed guernsey for the round in 2011. By 2014 all clubs were doing it, and it is now the most visible part of the round.

The convention is that the design is commissioned from an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander artist, very often a relative of a current or former player at the club, and that the club publishes the artist's own explanation of the work. Essendon's 2026 guernsey, titled A Piece of Me, was designed by Gunditjmara woman Aunty Karen Lovett and draws on her childhood in institutions and on the Elders she has lost. Richmond's 2026 Dreamtime guernsey was designed by former Tiger Michael Mitchell with his daughters Meghan and Sam.

The guernseys are sold, which makes them commercial as well as ceremonial, and clubs are regularly asked whether the artists are properly paid. Most clubs now state the licensing arrangement publicly. It is a fair question to keep asking.

Club names in language

Since 2022 a group of clubs has played the round under a name in the language of the Country their home ground sits on. These are agreed with the relevant traditional owners and used for the round only.

Club	Round name	Language	Sense of the name
Melbourne	Naarm	Woiwurrung	The Melbourne area
Fremantle	Walyalup	Noongar	Place of the woylie
Port Adelaide	Yartapuulti	Kaurna	The place of sleep
Adelaide	Kuwarna	Kaurna	Crows
St Kilda	Euro-Yroke	Boonwurrung	Grinding stone place
West Coast	Waalitj Marawar	Noongar	Eagles of the west

Two things follow from the table. First, the naming is concentrated in South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria, which is where the language work and the traditional owner relationships were furthest advanced. Second, three of the six are clubs whose ordinary emblem translates cleanly into language, which made the conversation easier. Other clubs have chosen not to participate, and the AFL has not made it compulsory.

Adam Goodes, 2013

Adam Goodes played 372 games for Sydney between 1998 and 2015, won the Brownlow Medal in 2003 and 2006, played in the 2005 and 2012 premiership sides, was a four-time All Australian and was named in the Indigenous Team of the Century.

On 24 May 2013, during Indigenous Round, Sydney played Collingwood at the MCG. A 13-year-old Collingwood supporter called Goodes an ape. He pointed her out to security and left the ground visibly distressed. His response afterwards was to ask that the girl not be blamed and that people look at what she had absorbed. Collingwood president Eddie McGuire apologised, then five days later made a joke on radio about using Goodes to promote the King Kong stage musical, and later attributed the remark to painkillers.

In January 2014 Goodes was named Australian of the Year, and he used the platform to talk about racism. The booing started around then and did not stop.

Adam Goodes, 2015, and what the booing was

During the 2015 Indigenous Round match against Carlton, Goodes performed a short dance he had learned from an under-16 Indigenous side, finishing with a mimed spear throw towards the Carlton cheer squad. He described it as an expression of pride. The booing that followed him for the rest of the season was continuous, ground by ground, from the opening bounce.

The defence offered at the time was that supporters boo players they find provocative, and that Goodes staged for free kicks. That defence has to explain why the volume rose after he was named Australian of the Year, why it rose again after the dance, and why no comparable campaign has been mounted against any of the many white players who stage.

Goodes took indefinite leave in August 2015. He came back, played his last match in the September semi-final loss to North Melbourne, and left without a farewell lap. He then declined to take part in his Australian Football Hall of Fame induction.

The 2019 reckoning

Two documentaries were released in 2019. Ian Darling's The Final Quarter used nothing but archival footage of the booing and the commentary around it, which removed any argument about framing. The Australian Dream, written by Stan Grant, set the same events against a longer history.

The AFL screened The Final Quarter for club chief executives and coaches. In 2019 the AFL and all 18 clubs issued a joint statement apologising unreservedly for their failure to stand with Goodes, saying he had been subjected to treatment that drove him from football.

Goodes has said watching the film back was traumatic. He has not taken a role in the game since. The apology is real and it is on the record, and it arrived four years after he stopped playing.

Indigenous AFL player numbers are falling

Here is the uncomfortable current fact. There were 62 First Nations players on AFL lists in 2026, against a record 87 in 2020. That is roughly eight per cent of the playing group and the lowest share in about a decade, after several consecutive seasons of decline.

202087

202471

202563

202662

Published AFL pre-season list counts for the seasons where a figure was available. This is not a continuous annual series and the intervening seasons are not shown.

Show the numbers

First Nations players on AFL lists

Item	Value
2020	87
2024	71
2025	63
2026	62

No single cause explains it. The concentration of the talent pathway in metropolitan academies, the cost and structure of under-18 competitions, the removal of some zone and academy access, and the sheer distance between remote communities and club programs are all cited. So is the Goodes period itself, which several former players have said made families think twice about the AFL as a destination.

What the AFL is doing about it

The most concrete measure announced is a list change. From 2027, subject to AFL Commission approval, a club may carry a third Category B rookie instead of the usual two, provided one of the three is of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander background. It applies to the AFLW as well as the AFL, and it is optional rather than mandatory.

The AFL's general manager of First Nations engagement, Taryn Lee, has framed it as one of a number of measures rather than a fix, and as a partnership with clubs. The other measures are less visible: Next Generation Academy access, remote-area programs, and Indigenous-specific talent camps.

The junior numbers give some ground for the argument that the list decline lags the pipeline rather than reflecting it. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander registrations in Next Generation Academies rose close to 20 per cent between 2023-24 and 2025-26, and First Nations representation in the under-18 programs rose from about four per cent in 2023 to about 11 per cent in 2026 across the boys' and girls' pathways.

27%73%

• 20234
• 202611

Percentages published by the AFL for its boys and girls under-18 programs combined. A share of a pathway program is not a prediction of future list numbers.

Show the numbers

First Nations share of AFL under-18 pathway programs

Item	Value
2023	4
2026	11

The Indigenous AFL All Stars fixture

The Indigenous All Stars concept ran intermittently from the 1980s and lapsed after 2015. It returned on 15 February 2025, when a squad of 31 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players drawn from 16 clubs played Fremantle at Optus Stadium in Perth. The squad included seven All Australians, nine premiership players, six top-ten draft picks and three Mark of the Year winners.

It is a pre-season fixture, not a premiership match, and it has not been scheduled every year. Its value is less about the football than about the week around it: the squad camps together, Elders speak, and players who are the only First Nations player at their club spend a week not being the only one.

Compare it, if you like, with how representative fixtures work in other Australian codes on the rugby index, where the All Stars concept has been an annual fixture for much longer.

AFLW and the Indigenous Round

The AFLW introduced its own Indigenous Round in 2021 and runs it over two weeks each season. It kept the name Indigenous Round rather than adopting Sir Doug Nicholls' name, and it names an honouree each year. Joy Murphy Wandin, Alicia Janz, Pam Pederson, Ebony Abbott-McCormack and Mary Dunn have all been honoured.

Because the AFLW season runs from August into November, the women's round falls in spring rather than in May, which detaches it from National Reconciliation Week. Clubs wear designed guernseys as in the men's competition, often by the same artists.

The AFLW's First Nations participation rate has historically run higher than the men's competition as a proportion of the list, though it is measured against much smaller squads and moves sharply with a handful of retirements.

The Northern Territory question

Per head of population, no part of Australia produces AFL footballers at the rate the Northern Territory does. The Tiwi Islands run a competition whose grand final at Bathurst Island draws a crowd larger than the island's usual population. Central Australian and Top End leagues play through the dry season, which is the opposite half of the calendar from the southern states.

That produces two structural problems the round does not solve. The first is seasonal: a Territory junior playing his best football in July is being scouted by clubs whose talent programs are built around a southern winter. The second is distance. A 16-year-old from a remote community entering a Victorian or South Australian talent pathway is moving several thousand kilometres from family, usually alone, into a boarding arrangement.

Clubs have responded with Territory-based staff, cultural liaison roles and family travel budgets, and several current AFL players credit those programs directly. The retention data is not published in enough detail to say how well they work overall, which is itself part of the criticism.

What the round does not do

Sir Doug Nicholls Round is a celebration. It is not a mechanism, and it does not by itself change anything about vilification, recruitment or retention. Every serious criticism of it starts there.

The recurring complaints are worth stating plainly. That a two-week celebration sits alongside a five-year decline in listed players. That clubs commission artwork and sell guernseys while their First Nations development staffing stays small. That the vilification rule's confidential first stage can end a matter without anyone outside the room knowing it happened. That crowd abuse still occurs, and that the response is usually an ejection and a statement rather than anything structural.

None of that makes the round worthless. It makes it a shopfront, and shopfronts are judged by what is behind them.

Watching the round

The round is broadcast in full on the usual AFL rights holders, and Dreamtime at the G is a Friday night national fixture. If you want to see it properly, the Long Walk is free, starts in the afternoon at Federation Square and finishes at the MCG gates.

For a match in the Northern Territory, Marrara Oval in Darwin and Traeger Park in Alice Springs both host AFL fixtures in the round or near it, and the atmosphere at those games is different from a Melbourne crowd in a way that is hard to convey secondhand. Tickets are cheaper and the grounds are small.

If you are new to the sport entirely, the practical logistics of getting to a match are the same as for any other round, and the general guidance on Australian venues and ticketing on the Australia hub applies. For how the on-field officials work during these matches, see the guides to AFL umpiring and the AFL score review system.

How other Australian codes compare

Australian football is not alone in this and it was not last. The National Rugby League has run an Indigenous All Stars fixture annually for far longer, and has taken it offshore in recent seasons alongside the Maori All Stars. Cricket has the Indigenous teams that toured England in 1868, the first Australian cricket side of any kind to tour overseas, a fact that sat largely unmarked for a century before Cricket Australia began commemorating it. Netball, basketball and athletics all now run rounds or programs of some description.

What distinguishes the AFL's version is scale and continuity. Two full rounds of a national competition, eighteen clubs, every match, every year since 2007, with a named honouree and a documented rule history behind it. Whether that scale converts into anything measurable is the argument covered above, but the comparison is worth making before assuming the AFL is behind. On the cricket side of that history, the Australia cricket hub and the origins of the Australian game give the venue and early-history context.

Where the argument goes next

Three questions are live. Whether the extra list spot from 2027 arrests the decline or is too small to matter. Whether the confidential first stage of the vilification rule survives, given the pressure for transparency after the Goodes period. And whether the round expands further, contracts back to one week, or is restructured around the All Stars fixture instead.

The historical record is reasonably clear about how change has happened in this part of the game. It has not come from the league acting first. It came from Winmar turning around at Victoria Park, from Long refusing to accept a mediation outcome, from Sheedy pushing a fixture nobody had asked for, and from a documentary that simply replayed what everybody had already seen.

That pattern is not flattering to the administration, but it is the pattern. The round exists because individual people forced it into existence, and the parts of it that work are the parts those people built.