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Inside The Remarkable Resurgence of the Redfern All Blacks

Sydney's inner-city Indigenous rugby league team are on the cusp of park footballing immortality but will gentrification get them first?
The Redfern All Blacks. All images: Bryce Noakes (www.brycenoakes.com)

It's a long way from the 40 000 seat stadiums former-National Rugby League (NRL) star Dean Widders once played in, but the nerves are clearly still there.

The 37-year-old former Sydney Roosters, Parramatta Eels and South Sydney Rabbitohs star cuts a solemn figure in the sheds of Erskineville Oval as his team, the Redfern All Blacks, prepare to do battle with arch-rivals, the Coogee Wombats.

"Today's all gonna be about work rate. How hungry are ya to stop that try?" he says.

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There is no bigger test in park football than the Wombats. The famously Bra Boy-affiliated team from Sydney's south-east have won more premierships than any team in the history of Souths Juniors, a park football competition which has fair claim to being the toughest in the country.

For the past two years they have made the grand final only to be beaten both times by a resurgent Redfern All Blacks outfit many are calling the best in the club's history.

"This is by far statistically and on record the best All Blacks team ever," says Shane Phillips, the All Blacks assistant coach and life member of 40 years.

Former NRL star, Dean Widders, aged 37, is captain of the Redfern All Blacks. Image: Bryce Noakes

Along with back-to-back South Sydney premierships, the All Blacks have also claimed back-to-back Koori Knockout state titles as well as taking out the play off between the top Indigenous NSW and Queensland teams.

With a historic double three-peat in the offing, they are on the precipice of park footballing immortality. A remarkable feat considering many of their players were responsible for plunging the community into disarray a few short years ago.

"We were all the fellas who brought the place down," says Shane. "We used to be the same people who were the ones who caused all the problems, and used to be part of the drug dealing and the drug using, the violence and the drunks," he says.

The success of the All Blacks mirrors that of Redfern and the inner-city generally where there are signs of peace and prosperity following nearly three decades of crime and dysfunction.

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Once a proud working-class area, topped with a fervent activist streak (the iconic Freedom Rides were spawned here in 1965 and led by local Aboriginal university student, Charlie Perkins), Redfern deteriorated radically throughout the 1980s, 90s and into the early 2000s as drugs, crime and violence engulfed the area.

The tensions reached a peak in 2004 following the tragic death of 17-year-old Indigenous teenager, TJ Hickey, who was impaled through the chest by a fence paling after being thrown from his bicycle during a police pursuit (the police were cleared).

He died shortly after triggering rioting in the suburb that resulted in more than 40 injured police and the Redfern train station set alight. With relations between Sydney's Indigenous population and law enforcement at an all-time low, local elders including Shane Phillips extended an olive branch to police in a bid to calm the streets. Over the coming years, police and the Indigenous community would work together on a number of mentoring programs, including Clean Slate Without Prejudice and Never Going Back, aimed at breaking the cycle of crime and dysfunction.

"We used to think in deficits. We would react to everything that was wrong before because everyone used to tell us what was wrong," says Shane.

"So we said, we're gonna move the lens. We're gonna teach them routine and we'll partner with the police so the police can learn about these kids and while that's happening we're gonna show 'em everything that's right about their people, why they should be proud, and then they'll represent their people. And that's what happened. It's all off the back of that," he says, adding, "It's growing from a community program to a movement."

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Shane Phillips (right) and son. Image: Bryce Noakes

In a sign of how far the goodwill between police and the Redfern community extends, two of the players in the All Blacks squad are prisoners from Long Bay jail who have been let out to play as part of a day-release program. The man running the water bottles, meanwhile, is Luke Freudenstein, the local area commander for the police.

All Blacks centre, Eli Roberts, is one of the success stories from the Clean Slate Without Prejudice program. Eli grew up between a number of housing commission flats in Glebe, Redfern and Waterloo - and spent much of his teenage years in and out of juvenile detention centres. With the help of mentors and the Redfern All Blacks, he has turned his life around.

"I went from this kid in and out of juvenile justice centres to playing semi-professional football," says Eli, who just completed pre-season with the Wests Tigers NRL club and hopes to follow in the footsteps of All Blacks teammate, Josh Ado-Carr, who made his NRL debut for the Tigers in 2016 before taking up a spot on the wing for NRL heavyweights, the Melbourne Storm.

"(The program) just made me look at things better. It got me in the routine and made me a better person and it just made me get to know the police better. Before I used to have a problem with them, you know, I used to think they were out to get me," he says.

Eli says the mentoring programs along with the success of the All Blacks are also having an affect on the next generation.

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"The younger boys, there weren't much of them around playing football but now they're all playing football and doing good for their community," he says.

"Playing for your community, playing for your family, it's an amazing feeling."

Eli Roberts is one of the All Blacks most exciting young talents. Photo: Bryce Noakes

How long Redfern will continue to produce players of Eli and Josh Ado-Carr's ability is looking uncertain. From a peak of around 40,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders living in the area in the 1970s, only a few hundred remain. The Block, a famous Indigenous housing project, has long been demolished and sits as a vacant lot in the centre of the city as the Aboriginal Housing Corporation, the organisation charted with rebuilding it, struggles to find the funds they were given for construction.

"We have a grave situation in relation to housing in our community. Our population in Redfern has gone from 40,000 when I came here as a young woman in the 70s to less than 300 now. It's all deliberately designed to push the black community out, that's what gentrification is about," local elder, Auntie Jenny Munro, told the Guardian.

Elsewhere in the suburb, the State government is in the process of carrying out one of the world's most aggressive gentrification programs in the world right now, where they will aim to relocate up to 4000 poor, elderly, indigenous and disabled residents from the nearby social housing towers under a dubious plan to privately develop the area and invite a portion of the original residents back over the coming ten to 20 years.

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A head clash with his teammate (and cousin) gives the day-release prisoner a souvenir to take back to his cell.

Those in between are forced to compete with cashed-up young professionals, property investors (both foreign and domestic) and sky-rocketing rents to keep their foothold in the community. Many cannot and find themselves banished to margins of society where housing is cheaper and work is scarce.

"It's really sad," says Paul Brambles, the All Blacks chaplain. "Some of those families have been here for generations and they have to go out there and make new friends and there's not much to look forward to in those places. The corridors are harder to work, it's harder to find a network," he says.

Brambles knows what it's like to live on the fringes without support. He was born and raised in the inner-city though was given up for adoption after his single parent couldn't afford to keep him. He spent next three decades in and out of foster homes, crime, drug addiction and prison. He sees a cruel irony in the growing prosperity and gentrification of Redfern.

"Some of these people are part of this positive change and then all of a sudden they're being pushed out and they feel like, Is this my reward for helping change the suburb? That I've gotta go to another place that I'm not familiar with and start all over? Where's the justice, where's the fairness?" he says, adding:

"We all need a network, we all need to belong somewhere. It's almost being dispossessed of the land again and told where to go and not having the choice."

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Redfern All Blacks Chaplin, Paul Brambles. Image: Bryce Noakes

Back at Erskineville Oval, the game is opening up and it's playing straight into the hands of the All Blacks. Since their inception in 1944, they have forged a reputation as the entertainers of park football with an expansive, free-flowing game hallmarked by plenty of offloads, unpredictable ball movement, and exhilarating broken-field running. The team song 'Keep The Ball In Motion' is a testament to the club's DNA and no one is more wrapped up in it than Shane Phillips.

"(The team) is keeping me alive for sure. It's giving me drive," he says.

For 40 years, he has either played, coached, mentored, driven buses, run water or strapped players. Prior to that he recalls watching his father and uncles play for the All Blacks during the "bad days" of racism, "when you just had to wear it."

"Somehow everyone just kept managing to play football," he says.

Today both his boys play A-Grade while his daughter Lovina, aged 33, is arguably the greatest women's rugby league player Redfern has ever produced.

"They're the same people here but they turned it around. They're actually focused on what they can do to build the community and this isn't just about football anymore, it's about who you represent as your family and your community," he says.

With the game poised on a knife edge, it falls to the captain - Widders, a.k.a. 'the Magic Pudding' - to steady the ship. It's a more portly Widders to the portly Widders you'd remember, but he's all class when the time comes. Spotting a pair of young Wombats defenders on the short side, he calls for the ball, gets the legs pumping, and easily bowls the youngsters out of the way to score the match winner.

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In the sheds after the game, the softly spoken Widders finds voice, owning up to his failures, harshly criticising another elder in the squad - and praising the efforts of the teenage fullback who curbed his disciplinary problems to turn on a blinder against the Wombats.

"Apparently they've already decided the premiership is gonna be decided between them two teams, South Eastern and Moore Park," Widders finally says.

"Well, we got them two teams in the next two weeks, so let's build on this momentum."

The beating of bins and esky's begins as the words of the 'Keep the Ball In Motion' ring out.