Far-left indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe and her activist uncle have claimed that White settlers stole the game of Australian rules football from aboriginal people.
The pair made the comments in a video shared ahead of Saturday’s AFL Grand Final and titled Yarn With Lidia & Uncle Robbie, in which Robbie Thorpe went on to claim that the Melbourne Cricket Ground was originally an aboriginal football ground.
In the video they also complained about public holidays for the Grand Final and the King’s Birthday, and said there should be a day off to celebrate aboriginal culture instead.
Far-left indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe and her uncle claim White people “stole” Aussie rules football from aboriginals.
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Ms Thorpe, who was originally elected as a member of the Greens, has a long history of anti-Australian activism despite being less than 50% aboriginal, as does Robbie Thorpe, one of the activists behind “Camp Sovereignty”, an illegal squatter encampment set up in parkland in Melbourne’s CBD.
“We’re celebrating football on Friday, we’ve got a day off because of the Aussie rules, and we get a day off because of some coloniser King on the other side of the world, oh wait, and we get a day off because of a horse race … but where’s our day off?” Ms Thorpe asked.
“Well let me start with what they call Aussie rules, that’s something else that they stole off aboriginal people,” her uncle responded.
“Off our mob,” the senator said.
“They stole the game, convicts weren’t playing sport, and weren’t into playing sport, they stole that from our people, and they also stole our ground. That MCG is an original football ground of our people, and we were doing those sorts of things, convicts weren’t, they didn’t invent that,” Mr Thorpe continued.
The pair then claimed convicts were too busy chasing sheep and cattle and “killing blackfellas” to invent the game.
In 2019 the Australian Football League’s general manager of social policy and inclusion stated while apologising for racism that an aboriginal football game “undoubtedly influenced what we now understand as the modern AFL football code”.
But that statement contradicted the findings of historian Gillian Hibbins, who said after being commissioned by the AFL in 2008 to write about the game’s origins for its 150th anniversary that the idea that Aussie rules originated from games played by aboriginals was “a seductive myth”.
Two other historians, Roy Hay and Dr Greg de Moore both told the ABC after the racism statement that there was “no evidence” that Australian football was influenced by aboriginal games.
“I wish it were true, I really wish it were true, but I can’t find any evidence that supports that,” Mr Hay said.
Header image: Left, Lidia and Robbie Thorpe in the video. Right, the MCG (Instagram).
