Winmar’s removal from the Hall of Fame was the right call, however painful

Some decisions the AFL Commission makes are easy to critique. This one is not. When the Commission announced last week that Nicky Winmar had been removed from the Australian Football Hall of Fame following his June conviction on three assault charges involving a woman, there was no clean outcome on the table — only a choice between two forms of institutional pain.

They chose the one that upholds the policy. I think they were right to do so. But the cost deserves to be acknowledged plainly, and I don’t think the AFL’s statement quite did that.

What the AFL Commission actually said

The Commission’s formal statement ran to a few sentences and centred on a single line: that violence against women has no place in the game. As a declarative statement of values, fine. As an explanation of process, it was thin. The Hall of Fame has a code of conduct provision that allows for removal when a member is found guilty of a serious criminal offence, and that provision was applied here. The AFL could have walked through that process publicly and in some detail. Instead, the communication read more like a press release designed to close a news cycle than an institution showing its working.

That is a mild criticism of the execution, not the decision itself.

The weight of what Winmar meant to the game

I watched Nicky Winmar play. I was at Princes Park a couple of times in the early nineties when he was doing things with the football that genuinely looked impossible — turns of pace, changes of direction, marks taken in traffic that simply shouldn’t have come off. He was one of a relative handful of players from that era who would walk into any modern team without adjustment.

But the reason most Australians know his name is a moment from April 1993 at Victoria Park. After St Kilda beat Collingwood, Winmar lifted his guernsey and pointed to his skin in response to racial abuse from the crowd. It became one of the most reproduced images in Australian sports history, and rightly so. It was an act of quiet, defiant dignity at a time when the game — and the country — needed to be confronted on its treatment of Aboriginal people. The AFL was extraordinarily slow to honour it formally; Winmar didn’t receive Hall of Fame induction until 2022, a full seventeen years after he became eligible in 2005. That delay was its own kind of institutional failure, and it shouldn’t be forgotten now.

None of that history disappears because of this decision. The 1993 photograph still happened. The act still mattered. What changes is the formal institutional honour attached to his name, and that is an important distinction to hold onto.

On the conviction itself

The West Australian Magistrates Court found Winmar guilty of three assault charges in June. I’ll leave it at that, because the legal process has run its course through the courts. The AFL Commission was responding to a finding of guilt, not an allegation — and that is the appropriate threshold for a decision of this magnitude. The Hall of Fame code of conduct is not a presumption-of-innocence mechanism; it is a post-conviction standard, which is how it should work.

Some commentators have argued the AFL acted too quickly, or should have waited to see whether an appeal changes the outcome. That’s a defensible position, actually. If Winmar were to succeed on appeal, the Commission would presumably have to revisit this. But given the conviction stands as of now, I don’t see how you leave him in and claim the policy means anything.

The consistency question

Here is where I will push back on the AFL’s self-congratulatory framing, gently but firmly. The Commission deserves credit for acting. It does not deserve credit for having a spotless record on protecting women in and around the game. There have been too many instances over too many years where the AFL’s public stance on violence against women has run well ahead of its institutional behaviour — in how it has handled complaints, in how quickly it has acted, in how transparently it has communicated outcomes.

Removing Winmar from the Hall of Fame is the right call. It should also prompt a harder internal conversation about whether the structures around player welfare and complaint processes are actually as strong as the Commission’s media statements suggest. I don’t think they are, and I reckon plenty of people inside the competition would say the same thing quietly over a coffee on Brunton Avenue.

What this does to the historical record

This is the genuinely difficult philosophical territory. The Hall of Fame exists to honour contribution to the game, and Winmar’s contribution was real and lasting. Removing him doesn’t erase the 1993 photograph; it doesn’t undo the symbolic power of that moment for Aboriginal footballers and fans who found in it something the game had never quite offered before. But a Hall of Fame is also a living institution, not a sealed archive. It makes ongoing judgements about who it wants to formally associate with. It is entitled — arguably obliged — to remove that association when a member is convicted of serious offences involving violence.

The AFL has made similar judgements before in other contexts, and will again. The discomfort of this particular case comes from the fact that Winmar’s induction was itself a corrective act, a belated righting of a wrong. Removing him so soon after a long-overdue recognition has an especially sharp quality to it. That sharpness is real and should be named. But it doesn’t alter the logic of the decision.

Where the AFL goes from here

The 1993 photograph and its meaning to Australian football and to the broader story of Indigenous rights in this country will need to be maintained in a way that is decoupled from the Hall of Fame. The AFL’s own museum, state football bodies, the clubs — St Kilda in particular — all have a role here. That moment in footy history belongs to more than one institution, and its preservation shouldn’t depend on whether Nicky Winmar holds a specific honour.

The Commission made the hard call. Now the harder work is making sure the occasion prompts genuine introspection rather than just a news cycle managed and moved on from. The AFL has a habit of the latter. I’d like to see evidence of the former — in policy, in process, and in the way the game actually treats the women who work within it and connect to it.

That would mean something. A press release, however well-worded, doesn’t.

— Peter Calloway, Senior Columnist