INDIGENE - PART SEVEN

INDIGINE - PART SEVEN by Whispering Jack

For the greater part of his life, former Carlton and South Adelaide rover Mark Naley believed he was a descendant of Afghan immigrants who first arrived in Australia during the 1860s.

This first wave of Afghani migration were mainly cameleers who entered Australia with travelling papers obtained while working in British India. Most worked in areas of transportation including exploration, mining and supply but with the introduction of motor vehicles in the early 20th century, the cameleers became redundant. Some returned home while others became small property owners and gained respectable places in society.

Such was the shame of being a person of aboriginal heritage or of mixed blood in the community of the time that many who had dark skins preferred to claim an alternate identity and in the southern parts of Australia where Charles Gordon Naley was born to a white station manager and a woman from the Mirning people, it was safe and convenient to assume such a fiction.

When Mark Naley became curious and researched his family tree, he discovered his indigenous heritage. Charles Naley, his paternal grandfather who he never met, was not the son of Afghan immigrants but rather, he was an Aborigine.

Naley did know that his grandfather was an ANZAC at Gallipoli along with 60,000 Diggers and 18,000 Kiwis. Charles Naley was wounded in action and later fought at Bullecourt, France where he was hit by shrapnel, captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war. He returned to South Australia with the wife he married in England and they raised five children before he died at the young age of 41 from respiratory complications that resulted from being gassed while in France.

Grandson Mark, who was a member of Carlton's 1987 premiership team and won the 1991 Magarey Medal in the SANFL while at South Adelaide, now proudly enters the record books as one of more than two hundred indigenous people to have graced the playing fields among the elite in the competition.

Today, pride has replaced shame.

Read his story in full in Football Legend Mark Naley's Anzac Surprise

TO BE CONTINUED

This series is written in honour of the late Matthew Wonaeamirri, father of current Melbourne player Austin. Our hearts go out to all of the family.