Daniel Gordon freely admits that he had never heard of Australian Rules football star Adam Goodes before he started work on his new feature documentary The Australian Dream, recently nominated for a British Independent Film Award.
“I was completely ignorant of the story. I didn’t know who Adam was. I know Aussie Rules but my knowledge of it goes back to being a kid and seeing it on Channel 4,” the British director remembers. He has made many sports themed documentaries ranging from 9.79* (about the doping scandal surrounding the Olympic 1988 100 metres Olympic final) to Hillsborough (made to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster in which 96 football supporters lost their lives).
Gordon and his regular producer, Oscar-winner John Battsek, were considering new projects and Battsek had been approached by another producer, Sarah Thomson, about potentially making a film on Goodes.
Goodes’ mother is an indigenous Australian and the Aussie Rules star has long been an anti-racism campaigner. He was one of the most popular sportsmen in the country but became enmeshed in scandal in 2013 when he called out a spectator who had racially abused him. The spectator was a teenage girl. Although the girl subsequently apologised, Goode was picked on by right wing commentators and fans. They accused him of bullying the girl. He was booed during matches. For many observers, Goodes’ treatment was a sign of the racism that still existed not far beneath the surface in Australian society.
Gordon had heard the rousing 2015 speech by leading Australian journalist Stan Grant, a Wiradjuri man, about how racism is destroying the Australian dream. After the 2013 incident, Grant had stood up for Goodes. Gordon realised that combining Grant’s insights with the Goodes case would make for a powerful story.
In 2017, he talked both to Goodes and Grant by phone but he could tell that the sports star was still very deeply affected by way he had been scapegoated. While Goodes was keen to give his account on camera Gordon was worried that doing so might “re-traumatise him…it was clear this was an awful period of his life.”
“Although he (Goodes) was putting a bit of a brave face [on it], a bit of a media face which years of training as an elite sportsman gives you, it was quite clear that he would have to be gently coaxed through this process.”
When Gordon first met Goodes, he was struck by the sportsman’s humility. Their first encounter was over breakfast. Gordon was in Australia on holiday with his wife and children. “He’s a big lad, six foot six! We all met. He is just the most gentle person. He sat down and we had a very social chat. I just felt he was really genuine and that is something that has stayed with me all the way through. He is now a close friend. My two daughters know him really well. They call him ‘uncle.’”
The director found it hard to understand why sections of the Australian public had turned against such a decent, courageous man. That’s the question the film asks. Depressingly, the answer given by one of the interviewees is that it was all because he was black. He may have been a sporting legend named “Australian of the year” in 2014, but that didn’t mean the white establishment accepted him.
In the film, Gordon gives a platform to the right-wing commentators who accused Goodes of “picking on” the girl. “I consulted with both Adam and Stan Grant about this. We all felt it would be disingenuous not to have them in. They were all part of the conversation at the time. Just because I don’t agree with their viewpoint, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in the film. Let the audience decide.”
Conservative journalist Andrew Bolt continued to blame Goodes for singling out the teenage girl – and still won’t acknowledge that Goodes went out of his way to treat the girl kindly.
“I found it quite sad that he had entrenched himself and hadn’t taken the time to really look deeper at the issues,” the director says.
Another film (The Final Quarter) was made about Goodes at around the same time as The Australian Dream. The two documentaries have shifted attitudes, at least a little.
The Australian Dream is now used as an educational tool in schools and both media and fans have looked hard at their own behaviour. However, the racism that the film exposes is very deeply ingrained. The national celebration, Australia Day, is still held every year with the same fanfare as ever. It is considered by many to be a commemoration not of a glorious moment in Aussie history but of invasion and exploitation of the indigenous people.
“I can’t see how you can allow that day to continue when you know the deeper meaning [behind it],” Gordon says. “People say change the date but even then, until the country has reconciled itself with its past and taken strides to redress the balance that still exists for people who’ve descended from that brutal past, it is very difficult really to celebrate…this is a day of humiliation and sorrow in the Aboriginal community.”
At the same time he was making The Australian Dream, Gordon was beginning to prepare his ambitious new documentary The Trials of Oscar Pistorius, about the South African Paralympic athlete charged with murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
When the film surfaced on the BBC this year, Gordon found himself in the firing line. Some media commentators accused him, largely on the basis of an early trailer, of not paying enough attention to Steenkamp. The director is still smarting at criticisms he considers to have been unfair and badly informed.
“I’ve never had a reaction like that to any of my films, and I’ve made 20 now,” Gordon points out. “I worked on that for four years. I interviewed on camera 120 people. We spent two and half years on the edit, the film is six hours long…and then a trailer comes out on the BBC that didn’t mention Reeva by name.”
The controversy grew from there. “A lot of the initial reaction was BBC bashing,” the director suggests. “It was a very easy, lazy excuse.” He was dismayed that some of his harshest critics hadn’t actually watched the film. Friends tried to console him with the sentiment that ‘there’s is no such thing as bad publicity’ and that the series turned into a media phenomenon. The director, though, is adamant that the film is balanced and nuanced and can’t hide his dismay at the response to the documentary.
“That, to me, is the equivalent of tomorrow’s fish and chip paper,” Gordon says of the inaccurate reporting around the documentary. One prediction can safely be made: the director’s films like The Australian Dream and The Trials Of Oscar Pistorius will remain in circulation long after the baying from ill-informed media commentators is long forgotten.
Winners of the BIFAs will be announced in Feb 2021.
