The Statue Had to Come Down — And That Hurts to Say

There are moments in this game that transcend the scoreboard, the ladder, the finals race — moments that belong to the whole sport. Nicky Winmar lifting his jumper at Victoria Park in 1993 is one of them, and nothing that happens off the field can erase what that image meant.

But the statue is gone now. And as much as it pains me to say it, that was probably the right call.

Let’s Start With What We All Know

For those who’ve been living under a rock, Nicky Winmar — St Kilda legend, one of the most electrifying footballers of his generation — was found guilty in court of assaulting a woman. That’s not alleged. That’s not a charge still before the Tribunal. That’s a finding handed down by a court of law.

Two days after that verdict, the statue commemorating his famous 1993 gesture at Victoria Park was taken down. The AFL and the relevant authorities moved quickly, and look — whatever you think about the optics, the timing, or the pain of it all, you can’t argue with the basic logic here.

A statue is a public honour. When the person being honoured is convicted of violence against a woman, you have a real problem on your hands. It doesn’t matter how iconic the moment. It doesn’t matter how important the gesture was. You can’t ask a community — particularly women — to walk past a monument to someone the courts have found guilty of harming one of them.

The Moment Itself Still Matters

Now here’s where I want to be really clear, because I’ve seen some blokes online trying to use this situation to muddy the waters on racism in football, and that makes my blood boil.

What Winmar did in 1993 — pointing to his skin after a brutal day of racist abuse from sections of the Collingwood crowd at Victoria Park — was extraordinary. Yes, I barrack for Collingwood. Yes, that day reflects a genuinely ugly chapter in my club’s history, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But what Nicky did in that moment took more courage than most of us will ever need in our entire lives.

He stood there, on a footy ground, in front of thousands of hostile fans, and essentially said: I am Black and I am proud of who I am, and no one in this world is going to take that from me.

That moment belongs to the history of this country, not just this game. And removing a statue because of a conviction does not — should not — rewrite that history. The photograph still exists. The moment still happened. The significance has not changed.

Two Things Can Be True At Once

This is where a lot of the commentary I’ve seen online falls flat. People are treating this like a binary choice: either you defend the statue or you abandon Winmar’s legacy entirely. That’s lazy thinking.

Nicky Winmar the footballer, Nicky Winmar teh icon of the 1993 moment — that legacy stands. The AFL’s long and complicated history with racism, and how that one image helped crack things open — that story doesn’t disappear because a statue came down.

But Nicky Winmar the man has been found guilty of assaulting a woman. That is a serious thing. It demands to be treated seriously. And a public statue — funded publicly, displayed prominently — is not something you can just leave in place when that’s the situation.

It doesn’t mean we erase him from the history books. It doesn’t mean we pretend the 1993 moment didn’t happen. It means we recognise that public honours carry a standard, and that standard matters.

This Is Not a Story About Race

And this is the bit I really, really want to hammer home. Because already I’ve seen people online trying to frame the statue removal as an attack on Indigenous recognition in football. That is wrong. Full stop.

The AFL and others involved in this decision have been clear: this is about the conviction, not about Winmar’s Indigeneity, not about the 1993 moment, not about racism or anti-racism. A man was found guilty of assaulting a woman. The statue came down as a result.

If anything, conflating this with race is actually doing a disservice to the legacy of what that 1993 moment represents. That gesture was about human dignity. Using it as a shield to avoid accountability is the opposite of what Winmar stood for on that day.

Racism in football is real. The AFL’s history with Indigenous players — the abuse they’ve endured, the systemic barriers they’ve faced — is real and documented and nowhere near fully addressed. But this specific situation is not that conversation. Don’t let anyone muddy the waters.

What Happens to the Moment Now?

Here’s what I keep coming back to. The 1993 photograph — Wayne Ludbey’s extraordinary image of Winmar pointing to his skin — is one of the most powerful sports photographs ever taken in this country. It’s in galleries. It’s in textbooks. It’s seared into the memory of everyone who cares about this game and cares about equality.

That image will outlast the statue. It will outlast all of us, definately. It will be shown to schoolkids in fifty years as a turning point in Australian sporting history. The moment has a life of its own, independent of the man who created it.

Other ways to honour the significance of that day — education programs, acknowledgement in the official AFL record, historical exhibitions — those can and should continue. The moment deserves to be remembered. It just needs to be separated, carefully and respectfully, from the ongoing public celebration of the individual behind it.

My Two Bob on All of This

Look, I won’t pretend this doesn’t sting. That 1993 game is a complicated one for Collingwood fans like me. We know what happened in the crowd that day. We know the abuse Winmar and Gilbert McAdam copped. We’ve had to sit with that as part of our club’s history, and we should.

And there was something meaningful about that statue standing where it did — a reminder that the game is bigger than any of that ugliness, that a single moment of defiance and dignity could rewrite the conversation.

But the statue came down because a court found its subject guilty of a serious offence. That’s not a political decision. That’s not anti-Indigenous. That’s the correct application of a reasonable standard for public honours.

We can mourn the loss of the statue and still support the decision to remove it. We can honour the 1993 moment and still acknowledge the 2024 verdict. We can love this game, love its history, and still demand that the people it publicly celebrates are held to account when the courts have spoken.

The image lives on. The history lives on. The fight against racism in football — which is far from finished, by the way — lives on.

The statue is gone. And that’s okay.

Carn the Pies.