CONSIDER this time-space exercise. If we convert years to millimetres, European occupation of Australia is significantly less than the length of one football. Aboriginal occupation of Australia is approximately the distance Andrew McLeod can kick that football.

Recently Robert Murphy of the Western Bulldogs wrote an excellent newspaper column about running laps of Whitten Oval. He reflected that he was jogging exactly where Ted Whitten had jogged, and Charlie Sutton, and other Footscray champions before him.

The grounds where our AFL stars play have only latterly become football grounds. For tens of thousands of years they were walked across, run across, danced across by Aboriginal feet.

Beneath the manicured turf, beneath the hulking grandstands, beneath the bitumen roads and the European tree plantings, this was land that hosted scores of generations of indigenous Australians.

It would be half-smart to draw too much of a link between sacred Aboriginal sites and the location of contemporary football grounds, but in some cases there is an interesting congruity.

The general area around the MCG was where clans from the Woiworung language group would traditionally set up camp. There are reports from as late as 1844 of Woiworung people camping around where the MCG is now, and there are scarred trees in the parkland surrounding the stadium.

(Boonwurrung speakers met and camped in the area around the current location of the Botanic Gardens. For both groups these meeting places provided ready access to everything needed to support a larger group of people – water, food, shelter.)

The land where Telstra Dome stands is much newer because it was below the edge of Port Philip Bay until about 6000 years ago. When Europeans arrived it was dubbed the West Melbourne swamp, where waterfowl and fish were abundant. This area was a meeting place for people from the Wathaurong language group who would meet on the rising ground around what is now the Spencer Street end of Lonsdale Street.

“The arrival of visitors or the beginning of a period in which a number of clans are getting together are celebrated with corroborees,” Gary Presland wrote in his book

‘Aboriginal Melbourne: The lost land of the Kulin people’. “They are occasions when the dancers can express their feelings about seeing their visitors, and perhaps tell a story that is part of their mythology.”

These dances were held on prominent places around Woiworung and Boonwurrung territory like Parliament Hill, Emerald Hill, Merri Creek near Pentridge, in Collingwood near Victoria Park, in part of Royal Park.

There is an old river red gum corroboree tree beside the Junction Oval, the home ground of St Kilda, South Melbourne and Fitzroy at different times. Collingwood’s spiritual home, Victoria Park, is located on or near land where Aborigines, probably from the Murray-Goulburn districts, camped in the 1840s. Rare artifacts have been found near St Kilda’s headquarters in Moorabbin. Skilled Stadium is on Wathaurong land, beside the Barwon River where centuries of inhabitants fished with cylindrical traps.

When Gary Presland addressed a Royal Historical Society conference on Koori life he linked key Melbourne recreation areas to traditional places where the original inhabitants undertook activities, “not entirely dissimilar to what people do now. If we liken football to a tribal thing, when I go and see my tribe – the Doggies – play another tribe, there is information passed backwards and forwards, it is a recreational and social thing.

“That is a lot like what happened in pre-European times also, when they were probably kicking a rolled-up possum skin around as well. In both cases, it is making use of the available resources in a social context.”

The other AFL grounds in use this round are in South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland.

AAMI Stadium in Adelaide is on Kaurna land. Uncle Lewis O’Brien, a Kaurna Elder, says, “We, the Kaurna people, were the facilitators and we ran the conferences. I don’t think many know that. Other indigenous groups expected us to address various issues at our assemblies and they’d come here to discuss them.

“In recent times we have rediscovered the word ‘Banba-ban-balyarnendi’ in the Kaurna language, which means to hold a conference. So the Kaurna people even had a word to describe these important seasonal events.” Now there are get-togethers at West Lakes every weekend in the football season.

There is debate about the precise traditional ownership of the country where Subiaco Oval is located, but the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council points out that, like all of Perth, it is Noongar country. The wetlands from Lake Monger to Hyde Park and beyond, including Subiaco, were Noongar camping grounds for at least 20,000 years prior to European arrival. There were still Noongar camps in those areas as recently as the 1940s.

Where the Gabba is now was once swampy country which was a fertile area for crayfish, eels, waterbirds and fish. Auntie Valda Coolwell, president of the Brisbane Council of Aboriginal Elders, says that it is Jagara country. While it is unknown precisely what the area would have been used for traditionally, she thinks that the close proximity to the river would have made it a likely camping place.

Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians view land very differently.

Historian Richard Broome wrote that, “The European arrival created a land and cultural struggle that still continues. We must try to imagine the depth of feeling of this contest between original owners, who saw the land as life, as their cultural essence and identity, and newcomers, who saw it as an arcadia, the reward for their uprooting from distant homes and hearths.”

As indicated previously, making connections between traditional Aboriginal sites and contemporary football venues should not be done glibly.

But if we think of AFL grounds as, among other things,  places where young indigenous men dance, where they weave stories, where they celebrate their heritage and their relationships – then perhaps the gap between now and then might not seem so very large.

Round nine is the AFL’s Indigenous Round, highlighting the relationship between the game and Indigenous Australia. This year’s round features a number of events, culminating in the Long Walk and the annual Dreamtime at the 'G game between Essendon and Richmond on Saturday night. Click here for full coverage.