The first AFL men’s player with a Vietnamese background, Essendon’s Jayden Nguyen, held his own against Sydney star Tom Papley on Saturday. Despite the Bombers’ 14-point defeat, Nguyen’s appearance was an important milestone for a game still struggling to come to terms with its place within multicultural Australia.
The 19-year-old, whose parents arrived in Australia in the 1980s, said he hoped he had made others proud. “I’m pretty wrapped with the support I’ve got over the past few days from the Vietnamese community, and the Asian community in general,” Nguyen said after the match. “I just feel like it helps push me and makes me feel proud about myself.”
Quang Huynh, a Vietnamese-Australian working in Aussie rules, watched Nguyen’s debut with interest. “Jayden’s great for the community, just seeing, hearing his story and his journey,” said Huynh, who works at the Western Bulldogs Community Foundation. “Hopefully this opens up the opportunity for more Vietnamese boys and girls to play.”
The AFL will shortly launch a cultural diversity action plan which, as well as highlighting the game’s geographic regions of priority, has a broad goal to increase participation and engagement within non-traditional football communities.
Despite the potential power of the AFL as an inclusive force, it remains to some a source of hate and division. The AFL issued an apology to Swans champion Adam Goodes in 2019 for failing to support him in a period he was targeted by repeated booing and the behaviour of abusive fans on social media remains a blight on the game.
Last year a University of South Australia and University Technology Sydney survey found 50% of AFL match-goers had witnessed racist “barracking” such as name-calling, compared to 36% of NRL fans and 27% of those at the A-Leagues. Supporters in all sports reported the situation had worsened in recent years.
These experiences highlight the importance of the AFL’s new action plan, due to be launched in coming weeks. In it, chief executive Andrew Dillon writes “while significant progress has been made in making our game more inclusive, we recognise there is still work to do.”
The plan is designed to take the game to new audiences, but Huynh’s work at the Western Bulldogs Community Foundation sees the AFL from the opposite perspective. Their imperative is not to grow participation, it is to leverage the power of Australian rules to bring together people new to the country or those still on its periphery.
As a multicultural community engagement coordinator, Huynh helps run a health program in languages including Vietnamese and Hindi, which has included attending matches with hundreds of AFL novices. “We give our participants a beanie, a scarf, and we catch the train with them there,” Huynh said.
“We get off at Southern Cross station and we walk to gate seven at Marvel, and you can feel the excitement because you have people looking around and you see that everyone’s cheering. For someone who’s newly arrived or been here for a while, that sense of, ‘We have something in common, we support the Bulldogs,’ it’s a really great thing.”
The AFL’s action plan promises to introduce new school and community programs in 21 targeted local government areas around the country, including five in western Sydney. The plan is light, only eight pages, but sets out the guiding principles for the code’s efforts in this space, including co-design, intersectionality and an appreciation that for some communities progress “will be a long journey”.
This week staff responsible for the work met in western Sydney for an education and training workshop, and the first programs – including a multicultural one in Dandenong and another with the Chinese community in Perth – have already begun. “By continuing to listen, learn, and evolve, we can build on the foundations already in place to create an environment where all cultures feel respected and represented,” Dillon said.
The workshop coincides with a historic week for Asian-Australian followers of the game. In addition to the debut of Nguyen last Saturday, Hindi commentary was provided by Fox Footy for the Western Bulldogs v GWS Giants clash last Thursday. Mandarin will be heard on coverage of the Brisbane v Sydney match this Saturday.
Barney Yu Xia, a payroll officer by day, will sit behind the mic alongside Agnes Yao Lu, having been involved in community broadcasting and in-language coverage of football. He moved to Australia from Hefei in China in 2012 to study media, but wasn’t drawn to AFL until he met another Melburnian in a public toilet in Cairns in 2015.
“We were washing our hands, and he said, ‘Where were you from?’ I said ‘I’m from Melbourne’ and he was like ‘Okay … Melbourne. Western Bulldogs? I was like, ‘I have no idea’,” he said. “But I thought that people living in Melbourne should understand Australian rules. That’s how I got into it, and then I started to like it.”
