Tide of goodwill certain to ebb

By PETER CALDER

The victory of Cathy Freeman in the 400m final has driven Australia into a frenzy of self-congratulation, not just about what their athletes can do but about who they are.

I watched the race in the Bondi Hotel, a saloon full of young men who bellowed: "Go, Cathy!" at the big screen. It occurred to me that it might have been the first time they'd spoken to an Aborigine.

Out at the track, it's little wonder that she was fourth out of the blocks; she was carrying 19 million people on her back.

She bore them up well, and her achievement was graced by an incidental serendipity: in the 100th year of women's participation in the Games, she took Australia's 100th Olympic medal.

But her blackness - or rather its convenient invisibility - was the theme of the evening. A well-fed blond chap, buttonholed by the TV crews, described the win as "the most fantastic thing for the Aboriginal people", although there was no evidence of how he might know this.

"It's the kind of thing," he went on, warming to the theme, "that can reconcile a whole nation when we are all behind one woman."

This instant cultural historian might have been surprised if he'd advanced that theory in Redfern on Tuesday. Close to the city - Redfern Street is intersected by the southern ends of Pitt and George - it's where I lived for a year in the 1980s when parts were little more than an Aboriginal ghetto.

It's more swept up now than it was - there are cafes as well as bottle shops, hairdressers as well as barbers. But the signs of urban blight are plain to see. A hoarding announces the plan, complete with fancy landscape architect's drawings, to create a small, green space on a patch of pavement "in 1996". The only sign of work is a small pile of rubble, neatly fenced off with a rusting yellow movable barrier. The telephone exchange is boarded up, the Catholic Church padlocked.

Under big trees in the leafy park, four Aborigines and a red-nosed old, white man are drinking with the steady singlemindedness of hardened soaks. One is Emmett Bell, who chaired the Aboriginal land rights committee back in 1974.

He professes pride and delight at Freeman's achievement, but is sceptical of the tide of sudden white goodwill towards Aborigines it has unleashed.

"It'll all fade away in a couple of months," he says, staring into the future - and the past - with rheumy eyes. "There's a lot of division in society still and a running race doesn't change that."

Back down Redfern St, Glen Duncan, the assistant manager of the Aboriginal Employment Office, is equally unimpressed.

"Why wasn't John Howard at the stadium?" he demanded hotly, referring to a Prime Minister who has steadfastly refused to offer an official apology for the wrongs and who has attended most of the high-profile Australian victories since the Games began. "He was off at the basketball. If he was serious about reconciliation he would have been there."

Freeman may have led - and will certainly now lead - a charmed life far removed from the depressed urban hell of Redfern. But her maternal grandmother, Alice (Mero) Sibley, was part of the stolen generation, removed as an eight-year-old from her home near Townsville because she was adjudged too blond. The athlete has spoken of her anger "that they were denying they had done anything wrong."

All that is, for the moment, forgotten as Australia basks in Freeman's achievement. That celebration is no bad thing. It fired the imagination of Aboriginal teenager Lailani Burra, who concluded excitedly "that symbolises a new era in Australia for black and white."

A symbol, yes. More than that, no.

If white Australia doesn't get its head around that, it may have been better if Freeman had fallen over on the back straight.