Eddie Betts: The Boy From Boomerang Crescent

  It’s a long, hard road from the Nullarbor to the MCG.

  Eddie Betts

  The Boy from Boomerang Crescent

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  For my mob.

  It takes a village and without that village I would never be where I am today.

  Thank you for the sacrifices you made for me.

  FOREWORD

  I first met Eddie Betts in person whilst I was working as the Indigenous Program Manager at AFL Victoria in 2010. Our offices were based at Optus Oval, the home ground and training venue for Carlton Football Club.

  It was a chance introduction. I was walking around the outside of the ground with my father, who is a lifetime-devoted Carlton supporter – he was just thrilled to be at the home of his beloved Blues. As we were walking along, just chatting, we noticed Eddie walking along by himself just outside of the gate where the players enter the venue. When Eddie saw us, other Aboriginal people, he stopped and waited.

  I introduced myself and I also had to introduce my father as I thought that he was going to be too awe struck to speak. My father eventually mentioned that he was a lifelong supporter of the Blues and of Eddie.

  For the next 10 minutes Eddie Betts made my father feel like he was the most important person in the world. The respect that Eddie showed, the genuine interest in who my father was and where he was from, was amazing to witness. I took a few ripping photos of Dad and Eddie together, one of which still holds pride of place in his home today.

  As we were saying our goodbyes and best wishes, Dad and Eddie shook hands like only us Aboriginal community do and they shared a cuddle that meant the world to my Dad (and I suspect to Eddie too).

  As we were walking away, I looked at my father and noticed a smile from ear to ear and a real bounce in his step. His moment of pure joy had just happened. Following this meeting, I always had a special interest in following the career of Eddie Betts because I knew that he was a genuinely respectful young man.

  In February of 2018, I was working as the Indigenous Relationship Manager at the AFL Players Association, and we were gathered at the Bi-Annual AFL Indigenous All-Stars Camp in Adelaide where all Indigenous players come together for a week-long camp of football, Culture and connectedness.

  At this camp I witnessed a moment in time that has changed the landscape of sport in our country forever, with regard to how racism is now dealt with. This is the time that Eddie Betts took the opportunity at our hotel venue to speak to all his Indigenous peers as a group. He stood, and then paced, whilst commanding the attention of all within the room, and he implored all his brothaboys – ‘From today onwards when we hear racism, we all call it out or nothing is going to change.’

  Eddie challenged the room multiple times to better gain an understanding of who was with him and whether he had their full support. In the end, the decision was made unanimously by all attending Indigenous players, along with full support from the AFL Players Association and the AFL. Eddie Betts is the one person responsible for creating positive cultural change by taking the responsibility to bravely challenge his peers to no longer accept racism.

  I truly admire Eddie as a person and a father, for his strong leadership capacity, resilience and desire to make our country better for all.

  Leon Egan

  We used to play spot the eagles as we flew across the Nullarbor in our little two-door Magna. We’d spot them circling over the highway and count them sitting on the dead kangaroos by the side of the road. Mum always had the trip mapped out and planned ahead. Sometimes we’d do the drive non-stop. We’d stock up on music cassettes at the servo – country music mainly, like Alan Jackson, a bit of Creedence, John Fogerty. Then we’d play the cassettes on repeat for two days. Other times we’d pull up and get a motel room in Border Village, home of the Big Roo on the South Australia – Western Australia border. What I remember most is the long, flat drive, the eagles, sometimes a camel out on the plains or some emus, the kangaroos along the road, and the trucks that wouldn’t stop for anything.

  I loved those trips. They’d take a couple of days. We used to pull the seats out of the back of the Magna, put a mattress in the boot and away we’d go. It’d be Mum, me and my two sisters, Sarah and Lucy, shuttling across the Nullarbor between Kalgoorlie and Port Lincoln. We’d always get somebody to come along with us to share the driving with Mum. We were always squeezing people in.

  During the long drive we’d play games to break up the time. Car cricket was popular – I remember red trucks were an ‘out’, and the blue cars were ‘fours’. I’d also take my mind off things by playing with a couple of little teddy bears. I would lay-up on the mattress and pretend they were playing footy, taking ‘screamers’ and ‘hangers’. Before I knew it five hours would have passed. My imagination took me onto an Aussie Rules ground, thinking of my family, being like my Uncles playing in the Blackfulla carnival.

  I’m not the first Eddie Betts. I’m not even the second. I’m also not the first to play football. I might not even be the best footballer to have carried the name. Edward Frederick Betts, my grandfather, was born on South Australia’s west coast and lived there most of his life before he died on the floor of a Port Lincoln prison cell.

  He came into the world at the Koonibba Mission on 10 March 1938 and lived in the children’s home there. Back then, they called it a ‘native home’. It was supposed to develop the next lot of workers for the area. My grandfather and the rest of the kids were westernised, taught to be ‘reliable Christians’. Eventually, his dad – my great-grandfather – moved the family to Cummins, a little wheatbelt town on the Eyre Peninsula. He made money by doing all sorts of different things there, including moving wheat along the railway line.

  They reckon wheat lumping was tough. Once the grain was sewn into jute bags, the lumpers had to throw the bags up on their shoulders – some of them were as heavy as 90 kilos – and get them in and out of the storage terminals. Lumping was so important to the history of the area that there’s a bronze statue of a lumper in Cummins now. Eddie followed in his dad’s footsteps and became a lumper, too, in nearby Ceduna. He also played a bit of footy for the Rovers there, which is how he met his wife, Veda. They married in 1959.

  Whenever you talk to people who can remember my granddad, they all mention how brilliant he was at football. He won the Mail Medal in 1958, given to the ‘fairest and most brilliant’ player in the entire country association. He and Veda had two children while they were living in Ceduna.

  When the North Whyalla Football Club asked Eddie to come and play for them, he packed up the family and headed east on a bus. Unfortunately for North Whyalla, their rivals, the West Whyalla Dragons, got wind of the trip and sent a group of players some 150 kilometres to intercept the bus at Kimba, about halfway between Ceduna to Whyalla – and by the time they reached Whyalla, Eddie was signed to be a Dragon and had the promise of a better job at BHP.

  He played with West Whyalla for a few years, and during that time another one of my Aunties was born. But pretty soon the family was off to Port Lincoln, after Eddie was chased by the Tasman Football Club, where he got to play with his brother George Burgoyne. I only mention that because in most of the teams he played for, Eddie was the only Blackfulla on the team. He only played until 1968, because at the end of that seaso
n he was sent to hospital feeling unwell. He ended up being diagnosed with high blood pressure. He must have been gutted to have to stop playing footy, but he was left with no choice and forced to retire. By then, he was generally seen as one of the best Rovers the Far West Football League had seen.

  Some people ask me why my granddad never went to Adelaide to play with one of the two SANFL clubs there that had tried to get him. The reason that was never going to happen is that he and my grandma knew Port Lincoln was the best place for their family, and by that stage there were six kids knocking around – including my dad, Edward Robert Betts.

  Around the time my granddad retired, the wheat lumping jobs were drying up because Port Lincoln had finally gotten silos. By then, he was drinking heavily. Later on, the coroner, in a report on his death, wondered if he’d been driven to drink by the combination of having no job, not being able to play footy anymore and being ‘dumped’ by the white people who had previously loved and cheered him for his game. I kind of think he ended up drinking just because there was nothing else.

  Eddie had been arrested a few times while he was playing footy: three times for being drunk in public, once for having a ‘ferocious dog at large’. He even got pinged a couple of times just for being an Aboriginal person drinking liquor. Back then, you didn’t even have to be drunk or out in public to get in trouble for it. Towards the end of 1968, he was admitted to the hospital at Port Lincoln suffering from acute alcoholism. Veda reckoned it all went downhill pretty quickly once he knew he couldn’t play footy anymore.

  By the time I arrived, in 1986, at the Port Lincoln hospital, my dad had grown up and moved around a bit and was playing footy, too. My grandfather died in October of the next year, so I don’t remember anything that happened. It was only when I moved to Adelaide to play with the Crows that I started looking into what had gone on.

  Mum was with Dad on the beach when they got a call informing them that my grandfather had died in a police cell. Mum says Dad fell to his knees, howling. They jumped in the car, dropped me off and kept going to Nanna Veda’s house, which turned out to be surrounded by cameras and reporters. It was all a mess.

  Many years later, when I started to ask people what had happened in that hospital and that prison cell, a lot of my cousins on my grandfather’s side started to open up to me about it. I also sat down and read the coroner’s report for the first time with my partner, Anna. I never knew the forensic details of my grandfather’s death until we both read that report. I knew he died in the cells, but I didn’t know about so much that happened in the lead up. It made me wild to think that, while the police and doctors were all cleared of responsibility for his death, his life leading up to that point was scarred by the structural racism that denied him the opportunities that would have allowed him to thrive.

  * * *

  So what happened to the first Eddie Betts in October of 1987?

  The coroner’s report said my grandfather was in an ‘off-the-bottle’ period. Only four of the kids were still living at home. Dad had moved to Western Australia where some other family of ours come from. One weekend, Nanna Veda was busy helping my Uncle move to a new house; no one is quite sure, but we think that’s when my granddad started drinking again. Certainly by the Monday it was noticed that he was shaky and unwell.

  In the early hours of the Tuesday morning, he woke my Aunties and told them to call an ambulance. They dialled triple-zero from the public phone box across the street and he was taken to the Port Lincoln hospital. He told them he’d had too much to drink over the weekend. According to the coroner’s report, however, the doctor’s notes included the lines ‘patient much too well known’, ‘domestic violence (mutual)’, ‘may well be swinging the lead’ and ‘does nothing to help himself’. The notes finished with the phrase, ‘Admission to maintain the peace.’ The coroner’s inquiry and the Royal Commission both cleared the doctor of any negligence, however the coroner confirmed that Eddie was sober.

  Eddie checked himself out around 10.30 am. When he left the hospital, he headed to a meeting place for Aboriginal people in town called the Red Shed, but he called a cab soon after and went home. By lunchtime, he was so unwell that he had to go back to the hospital again, and one of his daughters called the ambulance. When asked by the paramedics, he said that the only drink he’d had since leaving hospital that morning was a soft drink. Later on, when the investigation happened, everyone who’d seen him that morning said they didn’t think he’d been drinking.

  He walked into the hospital unaided. But while he was waiting, and again while he was being seen by staff, he got increasingly agitated. He was complaining of a pain in his stomach. The doctor kept telling him to calm down – which he’d do for a bit, but then he’d start up again, waving his arms around and asking for tablets or injections for the pain.

  Finally, the police were called and my grandfather was removed from the hospital under the Public Intoxication Act 1984. This time around, while the coroner found no causative connection between the doctor’s attitude and my grandfather’s subsequent death, the doctor’s notes included the lines ‘do not believe he has a primary medical problem’, ‘his presentation is an insult’ and ‘this is purposeful and deliberate behaviour’.

  By 2 pm, however, he was dead in the police cell.

  I think I wasn’t ready to deal with that story earlier in my life. But now, the more I think about it, the angrier I get. My grandfather’s blood alcohol reading from his autopsy showed that he wasn’t intoxicated when he passed away – and that he was, in fact, very sick.

  He died of heart failure.

  I could have grown up with him. I could have had another grandfather, but all I was left with were memories and stories told by my cousin-uncle David, who was in the cell next to him. He told us that he listened to my granddad shout in pain as he called for help. Davo said that he also called out asking for someone to come and help, but that no one heard him. There is no suggestion at all in either the coroner’s report or the report of the Royal Commission that Eddie was neglected, but for many years afterwards Davo said he could still hear my grandfather yelling out.

  The fact that nothing came of it – that all the evidence pointed away from any individual being responsible or accountable – hurts, and still causes trauma for our entire family.

  * * *

  People often look to me for answers, wondering what I can do to stop deaths like my grandfather’s from happening – and I feel a sense of pressure to be able to do that. My profile can help to highlight what is going on, but I often don’t have the solutions.

  That’s mainly because there is no easy solution. There are so many issues facing my people and sometimes this burden of needing to make things better is all too much for me. I want to be able to prevent Aboriginal deaths in custody, we all do, but pulling apart a system that isn’t set up for us is incredibly hard. To make positive changes, we need to collaborate and we need to respect Indigenous community leadership on what is best for our People.

  I know that playing footy has given me a platform and if I can use it to educate people about what it’s like growing up in an environment where it’s seen as normal for the police to take people away, then it might help.

  * * *

  I inherited my grandfather’s name, and I was lucky to inherit his sporting skills, too. I was even luckier to be born in a time and place where I was able to make the most of the opportunities that I was given and earned. Poppa Eddie wasn’t so lucky.

  You needed to know about my grandfather’s life – and his death – to understand who I am and who I’ve become. That was his story – and this is mine.

  Each of Mum’s four brothers played footy and even now she says she always wanted to marry a footy player – and that she was only ever going to get the best one. She often tells the story of how she was watching a local game one day, saw that Dad was the best on ground, and decided then and there that he’d be the one.

  My dad was Wirangu and Kokatha, and
came from Port Lincoln. He played in the same footy team as my mum’s brothers. He was good enough to get called up to the Mallee Park A-Grade side, where he played a full season. Then they dropped him for the grand final because he was one of the younger boys. But Mum’s brother, Trevor, as well as Byron Pickett’s dad, Normie, and Daniel Wells’ dad, Leonard, said, ‘If Eddie Betts doesn’t play, we don’t play.’ So, the club had no choice. He got a game and the Mallee Park Peckers went on to win the flag. Once, I asked Mum how Dad went that day and she just said, ‘Deadly. He always played deadly.’

  Mum and Dad got married not long after Poppa Eddie died. There wasn’t really a proposal or anything, but because Nan and Pop were Christian, they did what the church told them to and decided to get married in the local chapel.

  I was born on Dad’s Country in Port Lincoln. Mum had Nanna beside her when I was delivered at 8.20 am on a Wednesday morning. She reckons I was ‘snow-white and bald’. Mum always says I was the perfect kid. You might think otherwise when you hear about some of the things I got up to, running amok with the older boys at school. I think she means I was ‘perfect’ because I didn’t get sick and I’d just get on with things. She also reckons I never complained, so when I finally did get sick, they’d all know I was really ill. Then Nanna and Pop would make their bush medicine for me and, depending on what it was, I’d either drink it down or rub it on my body. It tasted pretty gross, but it seemed to work. We would always use bush medicine when we’d spend time out bush with Pop and the family in Kalgoorlie. One day, I jumped on a tree, it snapped in half and I impaled myself on it. I had a huge hole at the base of my back where my brothers pulled me off the broken bit. The bush medicine fixed that up – though I still have a huge scar on my back.