Mundine's story in black and white

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ANTHONY Mundine was just about to bask in his greatest triumph but he wanted the spotlight to fall instead on the chubby little man with glasses and halting gait who had inspired him and generations of Aboriginal athletes.

Lionel Rose, the first indigenous Australian of the Year, almost half a century before Adam Goodes, was lending support in Mundine's dressingroom just moments before The Man's victory over Danny Green in 2006.

Mundine's fight with unheralded Kiwi Gunnar Jackson at the Entertainment Centre tonight has not generated the same sort of anticipation as that bout at Aussie Stadium but Mundine's athletic prowess and dedication continue to inspire Aboriginal Australians everywhere.

He has called Rose one of the greatest fighters ever and in 1968 the American magazine Sports Illustrated said there was elation throughout Australia's population of 12 million when Rose won the world bantamweight title in Japan against the ominous Fighting Harada.

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"Among the nation's 130,000 Aborigines, Lionel Rose was now Superman,'' the magazine said. "In the slums of Redfern black men danced in the street, in the dry bed of the Todd River outside Alice Springs they fired rifles into the air.''

On outback stations black Australians hollered so loud their voices carried almost to the Gippsland forest where Rose had grown up in a hut with as many as a dozen children sleeping on chaff bags atop a dirt floor.

Mundine's respect, admiration, even affection for Rose on the night of the Green fight were obvious.

It reminded me of an old photograph buried deep within The Courier-Mail archives showing Rose as a beaming 10-year-old boy congratulating his hero George Bracken after the Aboriginal boxer from north Queensland scored a memorable win in Melbourne in 1958.

Lionel had been taught boxing by his father Roy in a ring made from fencing wire stretched between trees. He sparred with rags on his hands.

10 yr old Lionel Rose with Aboriginal boxer George Bracken, in Melbourne. Source: News Limited

In 1958 the Save The Children Fund charity brought Lionel and three other indigenous youngsters to Melbourne for a rare treat and Lionel was overawed by the tall buildings, the lifts and escalators, the trams and all the people. He had never seen a light switch before.

He acquired a taste for the city and a couple of weeks later he and his grandmother, who was almost 70, hitchhiked from their humpy to Melbourne 100km away to see George Bracken beat Max Carlos at the West Melbourne Stadium. Lionel was wearing a suit jacket, shorts and tie that a charity had given him.

When Bracken's hand was raised in victory, Lionel was hoisted into the ring to celebrate this magical moment in both their lives.

"George Bracken was my idol,'' Lionel told me decades later. "If not for Georgie Bracken I probably would never have started boxing seriously. He was devastating.''

Lionel wanted to be a champion like Bracken in the same way that Bracken had wanted to be a champion like Cloncurry's Jack Hassen, a success in a the white world.

Dave Smith v Jerry Jerome, at the old Sydney Stadium, April 1913. Image: National Library of Australia Source: Supplied

Likewise Hassen, a great fighter of the 1940s, had been raised on the stories of Dalby's Jerry Jerome, a black stockman like him.

Jerome became the first indigenous national boxing champion at Brisbane's Olympic Stadium in 1912 when "fighting like a wild cat'' as one report said, he dropped Charlie Godfrey from Bundaberg in round three and then knocked all the wind out of him with a right to the stomach in round four.

Twenty years later, Ipswich produced an Aboriginal worldbeater in Ron Richards, who drew massive crowds around the country and battered New York's future world champ Gus Lesnevich at the Sydney Sports Ground in 1938.

In the 1940s, Kempsey's Dave Sands, a regular star in Brisbane, and his five boxing brothers, dominated the sporting headlines alongside Hassen and a decade later Elley Bennett, a product of Pialba near Hervey Bay, became the world's No.1 bantamweight contender.

Elley Bennett, featherweight boxer. Source: News Limited

Despite their success, almost all of those great Aboriginal fighters experienced exploitation and poverty. Still, they provided the impetus for the careers of more recent indigenous fighters including Hector Thompson, Baby Cassius Austin, Steve Dennis, Wally Carr, Pat Leglise, the world champions Robbie Peden and Daniel Geale and the London Olympians Damien Hooper and Cameron Hammond.

Times change and Australia has woken up in its treatment of our first people but, as Goodes says, there is still much to do in the way of reconciliation.

Mundine still draws strength from the tales of Aboriginal hardship passed down by his father, Tony, and from all the other great black fighters who came before him.

When Lionel Rose was a little boy George Bracken told him something that became the mantra for all of Australia's great indigenous champions.

"Boxing is one of the few places where an Aborigine can be treated as an equal,'' Bracken said, "because with our people we all started life behind the eight-ball.''

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