elsleevador
All Australian
- Aug 13, 2014
- 625
- 2,113
- AFL Club
- Fremantle
Great post and so true. Thanks for your insight and keep up the good work.Working in the Indigenous justice sector for the better half of 10 years, I know how much his loss means to that community.
The thing is, he was never even meant to make it to an AFL club. Everyone he committed that awful burglary with several years ago have gone back to jail, and none will be coming out anytime soon. The environment he grew up in was mostly hellish, and Indigenous suicide in his particular geographical area in the south-eastern suburbs is not unusual.
But the kids I worked with worshipped him; people have got it wrong when they think the Cathy Freeman’s, David Wirrapanda’s and Adam Goodes’ are the pure heroes of the Indigenous community. It’s the guys like Yarran who have lived the same life as them, who committed crimes with their cousins and older brothers - and somehow managed to make it out and all the way to the big time. In mid-2016 it was a topic in a group therapy program I was a part of, and a common theme was trying to figure out how someone could come from that far back in life and become an actual goal-kicker in a game of AFL.
It was their personal closeness to a guy like him, from a family like his, that probably made some of them realise for the first time in their entire lives that alternative futures existed.
It didn’t work out, and it had a tragic end - but make no mistake, he achieved something no one in my industry would have expected someone in his immediate family background could ever have got close to.
I hope issues like this demonstrate that the people in our most downtrodden areas are also some of our most talented, and it’s the entire community’s responsibility to give them the ongoing love and mentor ship they need - not when they’re 26-27, and coming out of the jail system, but from the minute they learn how to spell their own name.