African appearance
Whitten Oval teemed with Sudanese and Vietnamese locals. A tall, strikingly dark Sudanese woman who might yet give birth to the AFL’s first eight-footer, enveloped a football in long, inquisitive fingers as though she’d just unearthed a wondrous yellow egg, and then smiled joyously.
– Inside Sport article, How The West Was Won, May 2010
That very year, a significant birth did occur: the advent of African participation in the AFL. Across town from the Western Bulldogs, Majak Daw, who’d been in Australia a mere six years, had been recruited as a rookie by the North Melbourne football club. It was an enchanted moment for many Sudanese Australians. Though the community had already produced accomplished professionals in many fields, success at sport for them, as for anyone, has some kind of instantaneous magic in it. Philosophies, mores, meanings and morals are summoned up in a single sporting act of valour, honour, might and skill by their new hero. The amount of work he’s put in to become that person is immediately apparent to all.
Though he didn’t make his senior debut until 2013, and in 2018 attained only his 50th game, Daw’s progress has been remarkable considering his levels of football fitness, experience and injury. He’d played only 70 games of Australian rules in his life before his selection. That means to date he’s played a mere 120-odd games, junior and senior. Anyone who’d ever cemented his place in an AFL team on a resume that slim would be feted by their supporters as a prodigy to rival Mozart and Michelangelo. But Majak was fuelled by necessities foreign to the average footballer. Today, this pioneering Sudanese-Australian sportsman has been joined at the elite level by true talents like NBA basketballer Thon Maker, Sydney Swans’ Aliir Aliir and AFLW player Akec Makur Chuot. Each one of them is as important to their community as a big idea.
Last year, Daw and Aliir had their best seasons. When North Melbourne played the Swans, they manned up on each other, and what followed was the sort of pulsing, striving symbiosis that only the best of friends or the worst of enemies could normally produce. In a contest of Trojan fluctuations, Aliir would entangle Majak like Laocoon in his long limbs and bring him down one minute, and the next, Majak would stride forward like Hector at the Skiaian Gate and unleash mayhem. Then, the roles would reverse as they were swung as one down the other end, and stayed in one-another’s orbit. It was a wondrous starburst, the man-on-man
