Ashleigh Barty was almost off Centre Court, the Venus Rosewater Dish balanced on one arm as she strode toward the tunnel, an aisle of ball boys and girls standing sentry and the heartened crowd giving their final ovation to a Wimbledon winner who had captured their consciousness.
To observe small details in such a big setting, on such a big occasion, is not easy, but several rows back, tucked behind a throng of photographers, was a woman wearing a T-shirt bearing the design of the Aboriginal flag.
Barty pointed toward that woman, Mel Jones, cochair of Cricket Australia’s first nations advisory committee and a former cricketer, and smiled. It was an eye for the detail that matters most to her, to her Ngarigo ancestry, and to the 500 different Aboriginal peoples who make up Australia.
Photo: EPA-EFE
They include Evonne Goolagong Cawley, a Wiradjuri woman who, exactly 50 years ago, won Wimbledon for the first time and was also the last Australian woman to triumph there in 1980, as well as Cathy Freeman, the Kuku Yalanji woman who in 2000 became the first Aboriginal person to win an individual Olympic gold medal.
Both have publicly expressed their pride in an athlete who, much like themselves, has gone some way to remedying the racial inequality that still exists in this country.
In the US, Australia’s Olympic flag-bearer Patty Mills welled up talking about it after the basketball team’s warm-up win over Argentina.
“Just incredible, amazing,” Mills said. “Forty-one years since the last Australian woman to win Wimbledon, and that was Evonne Goolagong Cawley, and 50 years since her first Wimbledon title, then Ash does it in a dress that’s inspired by her idol in Evonne, during NAIDOC [National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee] Week.”
“These are all things that give you goosebumps when you’re talking about an amazing inspiration for everyone in Australia, especially Indigenous Australians. I even choke up a little bit thinking about it,” she said.
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