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Sounds like a top bloke. Always hard for players to move inter-state. Has a lot going on in WAMeet Jermaine Miller-Lewis: artist, dancer, and football player in the making.
Date
April 12, 2014
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Emma Quayle
Football writer with The Age
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In a good place: 2014 AFL draft prospect Jermaine Miller-Lewis. Photo: Emma Quayle
When people ask Jermaine Miller-Lewis what he does, he wants to say he plays football. The first problem is he hasn't played it in a while, not since the end of last season, when he found out his leg felt sore and tingly because he had a stress fracture on one of his shins. The second thing is that when he says that, he notices some people almost roll their eyes at him, as if to say "that's all?" "Some people look at you like it's not enough," he said. "If I say, 'I play footy' they say 'what do you mean, I don't want that, that's not good.' It's that stereotype. People think, if you just play sport, it's not important enough."
He doesn't agree. It is, to him. But football hasn't always made the 17-year-old feel as good about himself as it does now, even though he hasn't played it in such a long time. When he's back at South Fremantle in the next few months Miller-Lewis doesn't just want to play well and get drafted. He wants to play really well, to show people he is good at this game, to thank all the coaches that have boosted his confidence and told him they can't wait to see him back.
He also wants to have fun, to use it to move on. Miller-Lewis grew up seeing and hearing things he wishes never happened. He couldn't start telling any of his stories without crying up until a year or so ago, they're still hard to get started on and there are so many of them. They're about his parents, and violence, and guns, and threats. They're about being in the room next door and not knowing what to do, about watching his mother and siblings climb over the back fence and race to his aunty's car, forgetting in their fear to take him with them. They're about watching alcohol change people, and understanding at the age of 11 that there was no way he wanted to let it get into his own life.
Creative process: Jermaine Miller-Lewis making his art. Photo: Supplied
When his parents split up for the last of many times Miller-Lewis felt torn, forced into choosing sides and doing it, because he didn't know how else to handle what was going on around him. "I was a tiny little kid and I had all these thoughts in my head, like I was brainwashed against my mum," he said. "Me and mum are good now, a lot better now, but it's still hard. It's still hard for me to say 'I love you mum' and to give her a hug, even though I do. I could tell so many stories and I had tough times but it's made me a better person I reckon. A tougher person. But I only see it like that now. I used to just go tick, tick, tick, all the time. I couldn't sit down, stand up, talk to anyone. I noticed it myself, how I'd snap at people. It was what I kept thinking about, the only thing I thought about."
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Miller-Lewis dealt with it all, for a very long time, on the football field. It was where he could lash out, be aggressive, hurt people as much as he was hurting. When he played he would remember all the bad things that had happened, rather than feel relieved at having a few moments away from them. He'd give away silly free kicks then wonder, watching the footage back on one of his coach's computers, who that person was. It didn't look or feel like him. "I looked like an immature little kid," he said. "All my emotions and my problems were making me go that way so the thing that's helped a lot is accepting that things have happened and moving on, thinking 'why should I spend so much time in the past?' Football has helped put me in a good place with it."
So have other things. Miller-Lewis can remember his father painting, and his grandmother too. One day, a few years ago, his mother left a blank canvas at home, so he picked up a brush and got started on his first dot painting. It took him five months to finish – he'd do 20 minutes work when he got home from footy training – but when he was done he stood back, looked at it and thought "I made that." He took it to a club function and at the end of the night one of the club's sponsors came up to him and said that not only did he want to buy it, he wanted to put him on contract to paint more.
Talented: Jermaine Miller-Lewis with his Wadumbah dance group. Photo: Supplied
It's not the only thing keeping him busy. Miller-Lewis' other part-time job, since finishing school last year, has been with an Aboriginal dance group, Wadumbah, in Perth. He was invited to do five trials last year and had no idea how he would go. "Some people are like little tulips, they have their heads down and they can't look up. They told me to try and I'd never stood up in front of a crowd before, never performed and there I am, chucked in at the deep end, and doing it, and loving it," he said. "I wasn't nervous, my eyes were up, I was smiling, making eye contact. I just loved it, from the first day."
His art has made him feel even better about himself. Miller-Lewis loves coming up with an idea, figuring out how he can make it come to life. Flicking through the pictures of his paintings that he has saved on his iPad he points out how perfect he wants every dot to be, how his paintings tell stories about family, the earth and the universe, "people stuck down on earth reaching up, reconnecting with the Dreamtime and bringing all of the stories back down." Some of them capture exactly how he was feeling at the time he was working on them, with their mishmashed colours and patterns; when he wanted to change his style and work with new colours, his grandmother showed him how in a dream. He wants to make more and more, maybe even start converting some of them into furniture patterns.
"For me it's exciting because I never know when I'm going to have an idea or how it's going to come to me. It just hits me," said Miller-Lewis. "And when I finish one, I don't know how to explain it; I can't. That feeling of stepping back and looking at something and knowing I made it, and having people say 'there's no way you did that, you're Jermaine, you're this aggressive kid, you wouldn't be able to sit down and do that' – it gives me tingles. It makes me feel very proud."
Pride: Jermaine Miller-Lewis with some of his art work. Photo: Supplied
It means that when people ask him that question, Miller-Lewis has answers. He's an artist, a dancer and a kid learning how to become a professional athlete. He's not depending on football, because he has so many other things to do, but he wants to make as much of it as he can. When he overcomes his injury, when he starts playing again and when he starts reminding everyone what he can do, he wants to play for an AFL team. For positive reasons. "I'm in a happy place right now, a very good place," he said. "I want to prove I'm a good player and be unstoppable and be back out there with good feelings and all of my ability. I can't wait."
