Adam (Adam Goodes)

Adnyamathanha/Narungga man, Adam Goodes (b.1980) was a champion AFL footballer with the Sydney Swans until his retirement in September 2015. Born in Wallaroo South Australia, he won the AFL Rising Star award in 1997, the year he commenced with the Sydney Swans team. Recognised as one of Australia’s great footballers, he is a dual Brownlow medallist, a four-time All-Australian member of the Indigenous Team of the Century, and has represented Australia in the International Rules Series. In 2014, he broke the record for the most AFL games played by an Indigenous footballer.

He has been actively involved with several Indigenous sport and community programs and has spent time working with troubled youth and in youth detention centres. With his cousin and fellow AFL football star Michael O’Loughlin, Goodes established the GO Foundation in 2009 with the aim of providing educational opportunities and mentoring for the next Indigenous generation.

Awarded Australian of the Year in 2014 for his leadership in taking a stand against racism and his work with the GO Foundation, he has continued the legacy of previous Indigenous AFL footballers Nicky Winmar and Michael Long in challenging endemic racism both on and off the field. Admired around the nation, he received support from many other previous Australians of the Year when faced with repeated on-field heckling prior to his retirement in 2015.

Alan Jones completed an advanced diploma of fine arts at the National Art School, Sydney, in 1997. That year he won the inaugural Pat Corrigan Travelling Art Scholarship. In 2000 he completed his bachelor’s degree at NAS. In 2004 he was awarded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship. He won the Kedumba drawing prize in 2010 and the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award in 2011. In between he gained the Janet Holmes à Court Artist’s Grant. Over the course of his painting career, he says, he has done every conceivable day job to augment his income. For some years he held solo shows at Legge Gallery and Watters Gallery; in 2014 he began showing with Olsen Irwin. Jones’s portrait of Pat Corrigan was hung in the Archibald competition of 2013, he won the Kilgour Prize in 2014 and in the middle of 2015 he won the Mosman Art Prize.