Adelaide Crows’ chairman and chief executive have apologized to former players Eddie Betts and Josh Jenkins over their experience at the controversial 2018 pre-season training camp.
Key points:
Eddie Betts and Josh Jenkins spoke publicly about what went wrong at the Crows pre-season camp
Crows chairman and chief executive apologize to both players and club members
A SafeWork SA investigation had cleared the field of work safety breaches
Adelaide Football Club chairman John Olsen and chief executive Tim Silvers have penned an open letter to club members and fans after Betts’ released a book last week revealing how confidential information was used to verbally abuse him during the camp.
Former Crows Josh Jenkins and Bryce Gibbs also expressed their disappointment at the camp and how players were sworn to secrecy about what had occurred.
“We apologize to Eddie, Josh and any other player, coach or staff member, who had a negative experience during this time,” Olsen and Silvers wrote.
“It has been confronting to hear Eddie Betts and Josh Jenkins describe their experiences during the 2018 pre-season training camp on the Gold Coast, as well as the subsequent hurt they have carried.
“Equally we are sorry to hear Bryce Gibbs express his disappointment at the way in which the camp and events surrounding it were handled and its impact on the playing group, and we acknowledge there are others who may feel the same way.
“The most important thing we can do now is listen and offer our support.”
Adelaide Crows chief executive Tim Silvers apologized to Eddie Betts last week.(ABC News: Camron Slessor)
Olsen and Silvers said “moving on” as a club would be “difficult”.
“Everyone will do it in their own time and in their own way, and we sincerely hope that, with the passage of time, the healing process can take place,” they wrote.
“We are committed to emerging from this painful and challenging period and getting better.
“While we cannot rewrite history, we remain determined to learn from the past.”
The pair stressed that the club culture had shifted in the past few years, with changes to several leadership positions.
Coach Don Pyke (left) and Crows chairman Rob Chapman (right) have since left the club.(abcnews)
Then-coach Don Pyke, head of football Brett Burton, chairman Rob Chapman and chief executive Andrew Fagan have since left their roles.
The camp was held after Adelaide’s defeat to Richmond in the 2017 Grand Final.
Silvers and AFL boss Gillon McLachlan have apologized to Betts for the hurt caused by the camp amid a potential class action.
Betts’ biography further detailed misappropriate use of Aboriginal rituals while Jenkins claimed details about his upbringing were used against him during the camp, despite him explicitly requested it not be shared.
The AFL and SafeWork SA completed separated investigations and found no breaches to work safety laws.
However, the AFL Players’ Association is contacting all players from the 2018 camp to gain better understanding of the issues that were raised.
When English author Sarah Winman sits down to write, she never has a plot in mind – and yet she’s brought the acclaimed When God Was a Rabbit, Tin Man, and A Year of Marvelous Ways to the world.
Readers everywhere fell in love with her characters in 2021’s Still Life, but Winman says it’s a mysterious process that helps bring them to the page.
“You know what, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t plot. So, you know, characters come to me slowly when I move people around,” she told ABC RN’s Big Weekend of Books.
Writing joy and hope
Still Life takes us to a place of great beauty that’s in great crisis, opening in war-ravaged Italy in 1944 and progressing to flooded Florence in 1966. It landed in the hands of readers who had just endured two years of COVID fatigue and uncertainty.
Still Life struck the hearts and imaginations of readers around the world, making persuasive arguments for the transformative power of beauty.(Supplied)
It was one of those books that arrived at the perfect time, but where did it come from?
Winman says she’d actually been thinking about Brexit, and how it illuminated what she calls a “disdain for otherness.”
“I don’t approach novels with themes,” she says, “But I think once you’ve reached your mid-50s, I always call it that you walk your protest, and you walk your care.”
As Britain closed itself off to Europe, Winman wrote a story about characters whose lives and minds opened up after visiting the continent.
“I write books that … I want people to still believe in the goodness of others, and the freedom that is out there by crossing the Channel,” she says.
Brexit, Winman says, “was all done under the guise of British exceptionalism — you know, that we’re ‘better’. And we’re so not. I love Europe. I love its faults. But I love what it gives us , which is so much more.”
Instead of writing her despair at the anti-European movement, Winman turned to joy, with a book that’s been described as a “love letter to Italy.”
In November 1966, Florence flooded as the Arno burst its banks, killing 101 people and destroying countless cultural artifacts.(Marka/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
“I’m absolutely there, to fight against [Brexit]. But what I realized is, what I was being drawn to were stories that made me laugh or took me on an adventure. I needed something to recharge the batteries, and I needed something that was joyous, and sort of entertaining.
“And that was like, OK, well, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give people a moment to pause, a moment of joyful solidarity, a breath of entertainment … I want to give them a little bit of energy, a little bit of belief, to then go out and face what they have to face, whatever that is in daily life.
“So yes, that is my case for joy – that joy is very necessary. And joy is a very triumphant place to be – it’s often dismissed, but it’s very powerful. And so is empathy, incredibly powerful.”
Unconventional men and families
In Still Life and her other novels, Winman also draws non-traditional families, often made up of men who take on roles as primary carers.
In Still Life, Ulysses Temper and his motley crew of mates and a parrot create their own alternative family unit as they raise someone else’s child. Winman’s male characters are often wise, kind and unconventional.
“I feel what I’m trying to do is to show another way for men,” she told ABC RN’s Big Weekend of Books.
“I’m trying to get away from that patriarchal construct of what a man is to be, and to actually say, ‘Get into the feminine that’s in you’. Because that is the only thing that’s going to really turn this world around.
“If you look at [Still Life characters] Ulysses, Massimo, Cressy and Pete… they’re all imbued with this feminine energy of care, of how they talk to each other, how they talk to women.”
Continuing the subversion of gender roles, Still Life’s mother character, Peg, is disinterested in childrearing.
“It is predominantly the men … bringing up this girl child. And so, I’m flipping that whole idea of what the feminine means, and that it’s not about motherhood, but it is about mothering. And these men can mother, and that’s very important.”
“Because if we do talk about the feminist movement… men will have the chance to do things that they haven’t been able to do.”
Art and beauty in Winman’s novels
Winman makes compelling arguments in Still Life for the importance of art and beauty in everyday life – being able to recognize and celebrate it, and its transformative power.
“I was talking to an art historian who I was very lucky to meet and have a friendship with for a couple of years in the writing of this book,” Winman told the Big Weekend of Books.
“And I asked her, ‘Why is beauty important?’ And she said, which I pretty much have written in the book, ‘Because it does something to us, on a very, very deep level’.
“It does something too in our guts – it repositions our sight judgement, and through beautiful art, beautiful photographs, beautiful music, we start to see the beauty of the world again.
“It’s very, very easy in the everydayness to forget that, and in the drudgery that life can cause, many of us go through that – to just know that that fall of light across a table, or that refraction, or a seascape that we ‘ve seen time and time again, that suddenly we just see it with a different eye.”
In making a case for the beauty in the everyday, Winman takes art out of the gallery and makes it accessible to her characters.
“So if I look at Tin Man and then Still Life, that has been very much about working class and opportunity and art and its transformative power.”
What books does she turn to for inspiration?
When asked which books open up a sense of joy, beauty or empathy for her, Winman is quick to respond.
“Any novels by Toni Morrison, she is the master… Song of Solomon is the one I would choose, mainly because of the way she writes about men… Incredible.”
Winman also singles out African American author, filmmaker and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, particularly her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
EM Forster’s Room with A View was also a big inspiration for her when she started writing Still Life.
As was Sarah Waters, whose novels set in Victorian society feature lesbian lead characters, much like Still Life. “The Night Watch I would say is my favourite,” says Winman.
And finally, Australia’s Tim Winton.
What’s next for Sarah Winman?
Winman’s not entirely sure what she will write next, but she’s always letting words flow onto the page.
“I’m always surprised with how little I start with [when I sit down to write]. And then I just dive in.
“I always think, ‘I’ve got to get more [ideas] before I sit [down to write]’ and actually, it’s not the truth. You’ve just got to dive in with one scene or something – something that’s going to make you fall in love with it at least. That’s what keeps me writing.”
Sarah Winman speaks with Cassie McCullagh on Saturday August 6 at 10am for ABC RN’s Big Weekend of Books. Listen live on your radio or online, or listen back on the ABC listen app.
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Former AFL champion Eddie Betts says his form slumped after he felt disrespected and traumatized at an Adelaide Crows preseason training trip, accusing the camp of cultural insensitivities.
Key points:
Former Crows and Carlton star Eddie Betts has released a biography
The book includes details about a controversial Crows preseason training camp in 2018
The Crows’ chief executive has apologized
Betts’s biography The Boy from Boomerang Crescent, which was released today, includes a chapter on the controversial 2018 Adelaide Crows’ preseason training camp following a devastating defeat to Richmond in the 2017 grand final.
In it, Betts describes the anxiety and anger he felt following the camp and the subsequent fallout.
AFL Players’ Association chief executive Paul Marsh said the association would contact all players who attended the 2018 camp to get a better understanding of issues that might have arisen.
In a statement, he said the association had previously spoken to players about the camp, but based on the experience detailed in Betts’s book, he now believed “players felt pressured into remaining silent.”
“The details outlined by Eddie Betts in his new book about the 2018 Adelaide Crows training camp are extremely concerning and difficult to read,” he said.
“We commend Eddie on the courage he’s shown in telling this story and are troubled by the ongoing hurt caused to Eddie and his family.”
In one example, Betts wrote how personal details he had confidentially shared with a camp counselor were used to verbally abuse him in front of teammates during a physically and emotionally grievous “initiation.”
Among the insults yelled while he “crawled through the dirt” was that the father-of-five would be a “sh** father” as he was “raised by only his mother.”
Betts, who joined the Geelong coaching team following his retirement last year, described the incident as “traumatizing” and had him “broken to tears”.
Eddie Betts returned to Carlton in 2020.(AAP: Dave Hunt)
The 350-game veteran said teammates were recruited to verbally abuse each other during the same exercise.
“I’ll live with this shame for the rest of my life,” he said.
Betts said players at the camp were prevented from showering, had to surrender their phones, and were transported blindfolded on a bus that “reeked of off food” with the Richmond theme song loudly playing on loop.
Betts details how First Nations rituals were misappropriated, which he found “extremely disrespectful”, and references to sacred Aboriginal words “were chucked around in a carefree manner”.
“When I started to talk to people around me about my experience, I started to realize that what we’d been put through was all just a bit f***** up, and I rightly became angry,” he said.
Eddie Betts with his wife Anna and five children in Darwin in November 2021.(Instagram: annascullie)
Betts said he raised his concerns with the club and asked to remove Aboriginal players from further “mind training exercises” with the company behind the camp, which continued to work with the Crows until later that year. The club “mutually agreed to part ways” with the company in June.
“Three weeks after I addressed the team about my concerns, I was told that I hadn’t been re-elected to the leadership group. I was devastated,” he wrote.
Crows chief executive Tim Silvers, who only joined the club last year, said he would investigate Betts’s claims that he had been dropped from the leadership group as a result of raising his concerns.
Silvers said he was “saddened” to read the impact the camp had had on Betts.
“It obviously hurt him in a number of ways,” he said.
Silvers described Betts as a “legend” who “lit up the Adelaide Oval for a long period of time”.
Adelaide Crows chief executive Tim Silvers apologized to Betts for his experience at the camp.(ABC News: Camron Slessor)
Silvers acknowledged the camp “probably wasn’t the right move at that time” and apologized to Betts and “any of our playing group who had a negative experience.”
“To have someone like Eddie, who has now left our club, to have a negative experience, saddens me,” he said.
Silvers said the club had new leadership and was moving “in a positive direction”.
Betts acknowledged in the book that a SafeWork SA inquiry had cleared the club of breaching any workplace safety laws, but he wrote: “My view remains that the activities there were inappropriate, counter-productive and culturally unsafe.”
Eddie Betts’s biography, The Boy from Boomerang Crescent, reveals claims about the Crows’ preseason training camp.(ABC News: Ben Pettit)
In a statement made in 2018, the Crows said SafeWork SA’s investigation “found neither the club nor any other person or organisation, breached any work health and safety laws during or in relation to the camp”.
SafeWork SA provided no more information about the investigation.
Crows player Rory Laird, who also attended the camp, described Betts as one of his “close mates” and a “loved figure” at the club.
“I think each individual had different experiences and I actually wasn’t on that part of the camp I guess, so I can’t really comment on the ins and outs of it,” he said.
“But obviously as a former teammate and a friend, you don’t like hearing about that.”
Betts, who moved to Carlton in 2020, wrote of the continuing toll the camp took, saying his “on-field form slumped” at the start of the following season and describing 2018 as “tough.”
“Personally, I felt like I’d lost the drive to play footy, and to be honest I’m not sure I ever had the same energy I did before that camp,” he wrote.
The ABC has contacted Collective Minds for comment.
Aboriginal sporting history has been brought to life in a new book that details how a group of women from a south-east Queensland mission nearly won a national title in the most popular female sport of the era.
Faced with a future working in heavily controlled conditions in the 1950s, a group of young Aboriginal girls from Cherbourg held their head high and marched.
Marching was the lead sport for Australian women at the time, with participants dressing up in white boots, skirts, sashes and formal hats to perform at agricultural shows, city parades and for visiting dignitaries.
Teams competed against each other on weekends and were judged on their timing, uniforms, synchronization and performance.
On the government-controlled mission at Cherbourg, it was the only sport available to the young women.
Aunty Lesley Williams [second from right] and her team received trophies in Melbourne during 1962.(Supplied)
A sense of pride
Aunty Lesley Williams began marching in Queensland’s only Indigenous troupe in 1957 when she was just 11.
The sense of pride gave her as a young person who had been denied her culture and freedom was something she would never forget.
“We were told you are going to have this career. Stop practicing your culture. You can’t speak your language,” Aunty Lesley said.
“If you look back to this point in time, it was about controlling this group of people.”
Dressed in uniforms created in the community, the Cherbourg Marching Girls went on to become the best in Queensland in the six years they competed, and then went even further to place second at the national championships.
“We had a lot of fun. We were so proud,” Aunty Lesley said.
“We’d travel around on the back of the settlement truck that carted wood, flour and meat down from the slaughter yard to the butcher shop.
“When it was time for us to travel, it was scrubbed down, seats were put on it and we didn’t care because we wanted to travel and be part of what was happening in the wider world.”
A photo of the Cherbourg marching girls in 1958.(Supplied)
why marching mattered
Aunty Lesley, her sister Sandra Morgan and a Cherbourg committee, have worked alongside co-authors Professor Murray Philips and Dr Gary Osmond from the University of Queensland to document the history in a book entitled, Marching With A Mission: Cherbourg’s Marching Girls.
Professor Phillips studied sport history and said she was researching in Cherbourg when the idea was born.
“We had just finished the day and [were] walking to the car when one of the female elders said, ‘When are you going to tell our story?’
“And we swung around and said, ‘What story is that?,’ and they said, ‘The marching girls’, and that’s how it started.
“The key drivers at Cherbourg are some women elders and they were giving us all this information about the men’s sport, Eddie Gilbert, Frank Fisher and all these other high-profile male athletes.”
The book’s storyline follows the history of marching, the opportunities it offered and how the sport shaped their lives.
Aunty Lesley, surrounded by former marching girls, launches the book at the State Library of Queensland.(Supplied)
Professor Phillips said it was an important period for Queensland First Nations women.
“You’ve gone from that era of protection to assimilation, and these girls really rode the crest of that wave,” she said.
“For many of these women, this was the first opportunity to get out of Cherbourg and see the opportunities that lay beyond.”
