Brotherboys: The Story of Jim and Phillip Krakouer
By Sean Gorman
Allen & Unwin, 2005, 269 pages, $29.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/35500
For over a decade, two brothers mesmerised hundreds of thousands of football fans with their skills of hand and foot and their miraculous evasion of hulking brutes intent on physical harm. It seemed that Jim and Phil Krakouer had found, through their extraordinary football abilities, the recognition and respect that had elsewhere been denied them because of the colour of their skin. Alas, writes Sean Gorman in his story of the Aboriginal Krakouer brothers, it was not so, for even their success on the football field was dogged by the cruelties of racism.
Mount Barker, 350 kilometres south of Perth, was home to the extended Krakouer family, descended from the Indigenous Noongar peoples and an English-Polish Jewish convict, Theodore Krakouer. Jim and Phil were born at the latter end of a decade — the 1950s — when coercive state control of Aboriginal lives, in large and small detail, was rife in the south-west of WA.
With the black-only curfews and white-only pubs came sub-standard living conditions. Indigenous child mortality was high (claiming two children in the Krakouer family) and health status was low (Jim did hospital time with rheumatic fever, a disease disproportionately prevalent in remote Indigenous communities). On the Aboriginal reserve where the brothers were brought up, they lived in a shack with no water and no electricity. Financial adversity confined their childhood footballing to 20-cent plastic footballs, but they honed their skills, and their teamwork, as long as daylight permitted.
Jim's reaction to oppressive social conditions was aggression. His method of engaging with people who didn't respect him was to use force. As it did with many Indigenous male youths, jail time claimed Jim — the Mt Lawley Reception Home for Wayward Youth (for fighting), juvenile prison (for rape, although Jim claimed the sex was consensual) and the Pardelup Prison Farm (for dangerous driving resulting in the death of a road worker).
Sport is one of the rare avenues for social mobility for the poor and the black, and football was Jim's ladder up from a potential life of poverty and crime. Football was where he showed he was someone. The trouble-free Phil, too, was attracting attention for his football skills. The Claremont Football Club in Perth recruited the Krakouers in 1978.
As a playing unit, Jim and Phil hauled Claremont out of football despondency. They did so, despite facing physical pressure and racial abuse — "I don't shake hands with black people" is how one East Fremantle opponent greeted Phil's sporting offer of a handshake at the start of one game.
Jim, protective of his younger brother, reacted in typical Jim fashion to the racial abuse both he and Phil received. Never the instigator of violence, Jim was, however, often in trouble for retaliating with his fists. Footballers on his own team also learned how seriously Jim took racist taunts — there were no funny jokes about Aboriginal people, as one team-mate found to his painful cost.
Off the field, as well, racism continued as a negative reminder to the brothers of their Aboriginality. When Western Australia defeated South Australia in a state-of-origin match in 1981, the brothers shared the "Best on Ground" medal, but that evening as the WA team hit the nightspots to celebrate, the Krakouers were refused entrance to an inner-city nightclub that had a "house policy" not to admit Indigenous people.
In 1982, the Victorian club North Melbourne paid Claremont $750,000 for the brothers. The rarity of Indigenous players in the elite Victorian Football League (the Krakouers' transfer brought the sum total of Indigenous Victorian Football League footballers to only five in nearly a century) plus their spectacular ability made them marked players and the brothers were again the target of racial vilification and physical pressure.
Compromise was never an option for Jim, whose counter-aggression landed him before the tribunal with frequent, and heavily penalised, regularity. Phil bottled up his reactions and only at the end of his career did he open up about the anger he felt at racism in football and in the community — "Black is just a dirty word in this world ... When I was home [in Perth] two years ago they [the police] pulled me up twice in a day. I had borrowed a mechanic's car while he fixed mine for the day, they just made me feel like a criminal." In the eyes of the police, Phil Krakouer was an Aboriginal first and a famous footballer second.
Even the more benign praise of the brothers' teamwork as "black magic" was a race-based stereotype. Jim and Phil kicked and handballed to each other with near-miraculous expertise, but this had nothing to do with black "genetics" and everything to do with a long and intimate footballing apprenticeship from childhood.
The Krakouers' football careers wound down in the early 1990s as age and injury robbed them of their speed and manoeuvrability. While Phil found employment with Australia Post, Jim returned to the clutches of the law. He served eight years for drug trafficking in a maximum security prison for his involvement with Australia's biggest amphetamine dealer, in a desperate attempt to escape the financial difficulties he faced from the gambling debts he accrued once his football income ceased.
Whether it was the quiet endurance of Phil, or the angry retaliation and social vulnerability of Jim, racism left its wounds on both. Indigenous footballers have led the way in gaining more respect and recognition in the game they invented. The Krakouers' story shows how far they have had to come, and the distance still to travel.