Phil Dotti:
Former NRL player Phil Dotti says he ‘spoke for the Aboriginal people’ when he walked on stage at a public discussion hosted by MP Jenny Ware in Sydney
www.theguardian.com
----
He says he went on the stage to speak his mind because “people needed to see someone with strength and character” – qualities his mother and grandfather instilled in him when growing up on the Burnt Bridge mission in Kempsey, New South Wales.
Dotti is a former NRL player and the first Aboriginal person to play for the Cronulla Sharks.
He says he moved to
Sydney in the 1980s as a young man with $20 in his wallet and a “pocketful of influences” who taught him that community comes first. He was playing rugby league for a local club and working odd jobs when Jack Gibson, “probably the greatest coach of all”, signed him to the Sharks in 1985.
Dotti says he spoke at the voice forum for his family and Aboriginal people – ‘but I did it my way’. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian
“I knew, even back in those days, football was going to get me out of disadvantage and being underprivileged and poor,” he says.
Dotti played for the Sharks before moving to the Wests Tigers in 1987. Injury ended his football career but not his determination to succeed.
“A lot of people have success and then they fail. I passed failure on the way to success,” he says. “My failure was simply this: I wasn’t given the right opportunities as a kid.
“We were living on rations. I remember waking up in the early hours of the morning at the age of six or seven years old with a just a pair of shorts on, jumping in the back of a white man’s truck and going out to his farm and picking peas and beans and getting five cents or something.
An archival photo of Dotti playing rugby league. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian
“That’s how it was. We lived in tin shacks. We didn’t have lights or the luxuries of a microwave and fridge. My mother and father were very, very poor. So were other Aboriginal people around us.”
He remembers his mother telling him to stand in a dish of water to get clean for when the welfare came. “If you’re dirty, they’re gonna take you,” he says. “I remember mum saying to me: Listen! The police are coming, run down and hide at the back of the creek down there. But watch out for brown snakes.”
He remembers walking with his mum to school at the age of five so she could vote in the 1967 referendum. He says his mum was a strong community person.
“Mum was a fighter,” he says. “Aboriginal people had to help Aboriginal people. We’ve had the ball and chain, all our lives, around our ankles. That’s got to change.