There is power in sound. Racist booing inside Australia's sporting crucible, the MCG, carried an ugly energy as it made its way to the ears of the man it was aimed at: Adam Goodes.
It's an experience inflicted upon him at many football grounds around the country during the final two years of his AFL career. There was the uplifting sound also, when his supporters stood and cheered for him as one, like a modern-day King Canute ordering the tide not to rise.
Imagine the heartbeat. Pounding faster, harder. Imagine the rise in temperature. Imagine the oxygen flowing through his veins. Imagine his thoughts and the physical responses they generated.
Through each of those experiences, the AFL was collecting Goodes's biometric data, and that of every other player.
The AFL was capturing performance statistics 10 times a second via a small device on his back connected to a global network of satellites. But surveillance of Indigenous people carries extra meaning in Australia. It has a dark past.
In 2015, at the height of the booing saga, Goodes took a trip back home, cutting off communication with everyone — including his wife — so he could take off his shoes and plant his feet into the land and the waters of his people.
He needed to plug back into the 60,000-year-old energy he was born from, to expunge the poisonous negativity aimed at him.
The sacred wirra
For 500 years, a sacred red river gum tree (wirra) has been a silent witness to the world around it, listening to the words of the Adnyamathanha people, Adam Goodes's people.
The rhythm of their language blows through the tree's leaves as it has done for centuries, carried by the North Wind (Ararru) and the South Wind (Mathari).
It is the rhythm that coursed through Goodes as he ran and leapt and kicked in every game he played.
The wirra's roots reach through the earth, down to the water, the well of life. The branches reach high and wide, to the horizon on either side and the skies above, touching the stars at night and connecting the spaces in between.
The tree witnessed the arrival of white man 140 years ago. It watched on as Adnyamathanha and colonisers came face to face, the sounds of a foreign language swirling around it.
Now, 140 years later, the tree carries a different knowledge — Goodes's playing data, claimed back from the AFL, a computerised history of his performance metrics as the cacophony of racist booing, swirled around him, carried by the Ararru and Mathari.
Four years in the making, the Tracker Data Project is now an exhibition commissioned by Adelaide's Museum of Discovery (MOD).
It invites the public into a space that sits virtually inside the trunk of the wirra.
From there it is possible to listen to the sound created by an algorithm blending a recording of the winds with Goodes's game-day data and his voice speaking in his ancestor's language.
"It did start out with my data set from playing football, but it has so many other elements intertwined.
"For me, it was like I was going into warrior mode when I went onto the football field and the best thing that I could do in going out there and performing was to get out of the way … and in a way be guided by my ancestors with that strength and courage to stand tall, be strong, and to, you know, play my absolute heart out.
"It was the same ancestors and spirit that I needed to connect into when I came back for those last seven games of the 2015 season when I was still being booed and it was rubbish.
"When I retired at the end of 2015, I was extremely happy knowing I didn't have to go back out there again."
Data rich with cultural information
Goodes had two lead partners in the project — technologist from UNSW and founder of Old Ways, New, Professor Angie Abdilla, and contemporary artist Dr Baden Pailthorpe.
"From my perspective, I was really concerned about the cultural protocols and all of the nuance within that data set that Adam was using primarily as a performance-management tool," Professor Abdilla said.
"There's a lot of cultural information that resides within data … it's tracked Adam's body, it's an incredibly rich data set.
"It's also a data set that has captured one of the most-prolific athletes in this particular game, while also capturing one of, I think, the most historically significant moments that Adam had to endure, and what does that say about us as a nation and as a culture?
Athletes succeed or fail on an intuitive understanding and manipulation of time and space. Goodes credits the best of his games to the flow of his ancestors that he tapped into before his matches.
Converting that experience into an artwork took a similarly meditative approach, according to Dr Pailthorpe.
"We were really cautious about not just making something for the sake of making something," he said.
"It was really a different creative process for me as an artist, to kind of relinquish that usual agency that I have and to kind of just let the work emerge.
"There was a part of Adam's data set, which kind of revealed itself to me … and that was part of his data set that measured his body in relation to magnetic north.
"Within Adam's kinship system … he's a North Wind-Ararru man and, so, that measurement is particularly significant.
"That kind of guiding principle in the work plays out on the microscopic kind of dot level … all the way up to the kind of exploded, almost astronomical view of Adam's data.
A 3D scan of the wirra and Adam's data were combined in what's known as a point cloud, resembling stars in the sky.
The two images rotate around each other generated by an animation of the North and South winds.
"There was a kind of poetic and a technical link there that emerged kind of naturally.
"It was really grounded in a bunch of other protocols and ways of being and knowing."
Traditional Indigenous knowledge systems used for centuries are being turned to more often as a way of understanding the country we live in and finding solutions to myriad problems such as dealing with floods and fires, to juvenile justice.
It is this cultural "being and knowing" that Goodes sought sanctuary in nearing the end of his playing career. It is where Goodes discovered the wirra, or maybe, how the wirra found Goodes.
"When I first was connected back to Adnyamathanha people … I plugged my feet into the riverbed there and was told many stories of my ancestors and then shown around where a lot of my ancestors were born underneath these beautiful trees.
"And there's plaques of my ancestors and the families that have been born underneath those trees, which is quite incredible.
"And then one of my family members showed me a picture from over 140 years ago and said that this was the first photo of our people taken, obviously by, you know, the white people [who] were colonising the area and, in the background, you can see this beautiful wirra.
"So there has been a really strong connection for me to this wirra and I was constantly talking to the gang here about this incredible wirra back home on country that they needed to go see."
It is the wirra that Goodes returned to at the height of the booing saga in 2015, a place he went to seek strength.
"When all that crap was happening, and I had that week off, I knew exactly where I needed to be. And that was to be back on country.
"I knew I had the strength to go back to finish the season. I'm not one of those people who can display the white flag and I'm just going to quit, even though for my own mental health that probably wouldn't have been a bad idea.
"So that connection to that place and to my ancestors really gave me that strength and I think a lot of that is a part of this project that we're working on and a lot of it is in this incredible installation.
"It's part of my journey, in learning who I am as an Aboriginal person but, for me, to help others come on the journey.
"I find that us, as Aboriginal people, have to give, we have to give a lot more to the reconciliation movement, to the conversation, to bring people with us, to help educate them, to help guide them, to walk alongside us.
"I see this as another opportunity to share my culture, to share stories and, in a way, my connection to this incredible tree, but more so to my Adnyamathanha ancestry, and — most importantly — my Ararru kinship."
A saga born out of racism and misunderstanding has been re-seen, re-imagined … it has become positive and powerful. It is an invitation to a new way of being and knowing.
