THERE IS A particular kind of language that follows Aboriginal footballers around.
Silky. Explosive. Magical. Instinctive. Tales of athleticism born of primordial genetic inheritance; of resilience instilled by deep-time connection to Country.
The compliments come fast, and they come affectionate – but that telling forecloses on the strategist, the leader, the future coach or football director. What is too readily labelled as ‘instinct’ is often just unexamined excellence.
As across myriad other fields and professions, Indigenous Excellence in Aussie Rules football is more than the spontaneous or the improvised – the quicksilver of the unpredictable.
Ties to community and identity; respect for peers and elders; giving back to community; cultural fluency; pride in culture and family – yes, Black Excellence gathers up these elements. But it also carries a more daunting proposition: self-discipline, repetition, technique built over time; mental preparation, recovery, adaptation, reinvention by design. Strategic thinking.
Registers long reserved, in the public imagination, for non-Indigenous players.
From 2026, the Sir Doug Nicholls Round will be underpinned by an enduring theme that consistently carries across years: ‘Strengthened by First Nations. Moments. Connections. Stories’. The ongoing theme provides an opportunity for the AFL, clubs and players to showcase defining moments, people, and stories that celebrate the sporting legacy of First Nations people within the game and beyond – underpinned by the key message that the game is stronger when First Nations players are at the heart of it.
Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera, Toby Bedford and Latrelle Pickett bear that out in full.
Whether it’s Wanganeen-Milera’s breakout 2025 season; the physical and psychic grind Bedford applied to remake himself from fringe player to elite high-pressure utility; or Pickett – a teenager from Tumby Bay who told a football club to trust him, and then did the work to prove himself right.
In their moments, connections and stories, strength takes shape. And it carries beyond the boundary line.
Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera
EIGHT SECONDS REMAINING. The scores are level at 90-all. The Demons are at sixes and sevens – and the umpire’s whistle shrieks, signalling a 6-6-6 starting-position infringement before the centre bounce.
The Demons were warned earlier and now the Saints are awarded a free kick at the centre circle. Bedlam across the ground. Hysteria in the stands. Saints’ midfielder Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera is already moving downfield swiftly like a grinning black gazelle.
Only moments prior, he slotted the equaliser after hauling in a hanger roughly thirty metres out from the posts and just off-centre of the goal face. Long-suffering Saints fans roared incredulously. Their perennially combustible team had bridged a VFL/AFL three-quarter-time record deficit of 46 points.
With the cool-headed clarity of a veteran who already knows what’s about to unfold, the 22-year-old Kokatha and Narungga man from South Australia seemingly moves with the flight of the ball that has simultaneously been launched forward by Saints’ ruck Rowan Marshall. Wanganeen-Milera covers 50 metres in under six seconds before leaping full stretch to his right and snatching the yellow Sherrin cleanly from the air.
The final siren bellows under the closed roof of Marvel Stadium. Any score the win, no score the draw.
Wanganeen-Milera springs to his feet, paces back from the mark till he is behind the fifty. Steadies. Tips into an uneven stutter-skip that takes him back inside the arc – and puts his laces through the pigskin.
The kick’s trajectory is long and it is true, and as the sacred Sherrin soars through the sticks the rising star fans now call ‘Nasiah the Messiah’ is piled upon by his jubilant teammates.
Forty-six points. Back from the deck. Two scintillating marks and two miracle goals delivered inside the final minute. The St Kilda club song booms from loudspeakers around the ground. ‘Oh when the Saints! Go marching in!’
‘IT WAS PRETTY crazy how it all played out,’ Wanganeen-Milera says, then shrugs it off, deflecting praise to the ruckman’s zipping kick forward. ‘Rowan’s kick couldn’t have been more perfect.’
Wanganeen-Milera’s teammates and coaches describe him as one of the humblest fellas in the AFL.
Spend a short time in his company and you quickly come to understand that as endearing as that quality is, in its own way it creates a natural blind for a formidable football intellect.
“Footy is more of a mental game than a physical one,” he drops as an aside. “You’ve got to see things and adapt to all the challenges thrown at you. A lot can change in a split second.”
It’s the way Wanganeen-Milera sees the game that caught the attention of Michael Gleeson, senior football writer at The Age and one of the game’s sharpest observers across three decades.
What made the finish so compelling, Gleeson says, was Wanganeen-Milera’s ‘understanding and foresight’. The second goal, in particular, shifted his standing in the league.
“It spoke to a player who understood his place in the game,” Gleeson explains – “the way he took complete control, in a way that made all other players mere supporting actors.
“He was completely clear in what was happening, and what needed to happen next.” Wanganeen-Milera instructed his teammates to get out of his way, directed them to lead their opponents out of the way, clearing space for himself to run into. He told his ruck to kick it to him. And it all fell as he scripted.
“It was the sort of football you spend seasons waiting to see,” Gleeson says. “He is a player you spend years wanting to watch.”
***
THREE WEEKS AFTER the historic comeback victory Wanganeen-Milera signed a two-year extension with St Kilda, worth a reported total of $4 million, making him the first $2 million-a-year player and eclipsing the million-dollar marks of AFL superstars like Lance Franklin and Dustin Martin.
His setting a new benchmark for the highest per-season wage in the history of the VFL/AFL might not surprise some footy pundits. There’s a story that gets told about certain footballers from families where the game has run through the bloodline for generations – their talent arrives pre-loaded, it’s practically inevitable.
Wanganeen-Milera’s uncle is Gavin Wanganeen – Brownlow Medallist, premiership player, widely regarded as one of the greatest footballers the game has ever seen. His stepfather, Terry Milera, was a St Kilda player of genuine skill. Growing up in Adelaide, the now twenty-three-year-old whose signature simply reads ‘Naz’, was immersed in the game’s language early.
In the backyard he was always lacing kicks, taking speccy after speccy, and selling the candy. “When you do that as much as I did as a kid,” he says, “it sort of becomes second nature when you grow up.”
***
WHEN WANGANEEN-MILERA debuted for the Saints, it was club great Nicky Winmar who presented him with his guernsey – the number 7, the same number Winmar had worn. The gesture carried more history than any handshake could.
Winmar’s now-iconic stand against racism at Victoria Park in 1993 looms large for Naz today. “I get chills every time I see that photo at the club,” he says of perhaps the most powerful image in Australian sporting history. “There’s Nicky Winmar and plenty of others who’ve had to cop pretty hard things that we don’t have to deal with in the same ways these days. They done all that for us – and it allows us to play freely now. Almost.”
The quiet weight of that caveat says everything. Wanganeen-Milera is under no illusions that racism has left the game. In 2023, following a match, he was subjected to racial abuse through anonymous social media accounts. The AFL’s integrity unit moved, the club condemned it, and his teammates rallied around. It was ugly, and it was familiar. Part of a pattern that has become depressingly routine. Not so much on the field or within the walls of clubland more recently, but out in public: less visible, just as real, and harder to confront.
Naz’s strategy is classic Naz. Outwardly composed, inwardly resolved. And honest about the cost. “They want to see it affect you. But if you can just keep showing up every day, working hard, going about your business – you win the battle. It’s only going to annoy them that it hasn’t affected you. But call it out. Because the next generation needs to know to stand up and call it out too.”
That unassuming resolve carried him into St Kilda’s leadership group on the back of his breakout 2025 season, and like the famed number 7, Wanganeen-Milera wears the responsibility with characteristic understatement.
“I’ve always been this little shy black kid who hasn’t had much to say and hated public speaking,” he says, with a self-deprecating chuckle. “My type of leadership is probably just setting an example. I’m not really the loudest bloke or the most talkative, so I sort of let the actions do the talking.”
Toby Bedford
THE HONEST VERSION of the story, the one Toby Bedford tells without flinching, is that the Melbourne Demons never quite knew what to do with him. Four seasons at the club, 18 senior games, a premiership year in 2021 in which he didn’t play a single match. By the end of 2022 he had accumulated precisely nine goals and a reputation as a player perpetually on the margin, good enough to keep, never quite certain enough to play.
Bedford asked for a trade.
“Probably was a pretty big risk at the time,” he says now. “I’d never really been to Sydney, besides playing once or twice there.” His biggest relocation up to that point had been from Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley region of Western Australia to Melbourne, as a 12-year-old on an Indigenous scholarship to Melbourne Grammar.
He knew what displacement felt like. But the prospect of uprooting his life again, from a club he knew to a city he barely did, for a team that placed no guarantee on what role they had in mind for him, that was a different beast of a risk.
“I just needed to believe in myself. And for that added game time, I spoke to a few boys there, and they were pretty confident that I could come up and make an impact. So, it was a big step, but it was something I needed to do.”
The wager paid out, but not in the way the small forward who landed at GWS in early 2023 might have predicted. What followed wasn’t the comforting cliché of a player finding his natural home. It was something stranger and more exacting. Bedford engineered himself into a different player altogether. He didn’t lean on the gifts that had drawn recruiters to a lively, teenaged ‘elusive small forward who plays with flair and dare’ from remote Western Australia in the first place. He spent three years quietly dismantling and rebuilding them.
***
TO TAG ELITE midfielders is to study film. It is to know an opponent’s habits more intimately than the opponent knows them himself. It is to anticipate, position, frustrate, absorb. It is the most cerebral and least celebrated job on the ground.
That was the mission of reinvention Bedford faced. He was sent to extinguish Zak Butters, Patrick Cripps, Clayton Oliver, players who had grown up expecting to be the most influential person on the field. He was outweighed at almost every contest. “I’m a lighter frame,” he says. “I’m like 75 kilos, and I was tagging some big boys, Cripper and all that.” He could practise on Tom Green and Finn Callaghan at GWS, and later, after Oliver’s arrival, on the man himself.
The body had to be redesigned to match the brief. Gym hours up. Protein shakes up. Mass added. And then, as a consequence, he felt a familiar attribute leave him. “I lost a little bit of my speed when I was tagging. I hopefully got it back now, because I’m not wrestling with the big boys as much anymore.” He chuckles ruefully. “It was a bit harder for me to run around after I was doing wrestling for every stoppage anyway.”
These were the calculations of a player choosing what to surrender, and what to acquire, in service of a role he had accepted clear-eyed. “It’s not a role that’s a pretty role,” he has said elsewhere. “You’re going to go out there to stop a player who is playing their best footy. It’s not one that people normally like.”
Success is measured by what doesn’t happen, the star neutralised, the handballs that die in traffic, the scorelines that never materialise. The coaches’ award he won in 2024 was the sport’s belated way of saying: we see what you do in the dark. He played all 22 home-and-away games that season and led GWS for tackles with 131. Work that produces no highlight reel. Work that sits on the spreadsheet rather than the primetime broadcast.
Now, heading into 2026, the role is shifting again, this time forward. The frame is being recomposed once more, repurposed for a different kind of contribution. He is a player on his third deliberate iteration. “I feel as if I’m a confident AFL player, week in, week out. Before I was probably on the brink and on the verge of the AFL team. But now I’m established.” He pauses. “I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
The Giants appointed Bedford as an Indigenous Ambassador shortly after he stepped through the doors, and he is quick to credit the club for acknowledging and supporting the importance he places on his heritage and culture. The role asks him to stand in rooms full of young men from elsewhere and explain what Country means, what Invasion Day means, talk about his grandmother who was forcibly taken by the state and is a survivor of those Stolen Generations. Of his grandfather who worked in hard conditions as an Aboriginal labourer on a borderlands cattle station in the remote east Kimberley.
Of what Australia’s history has cost a family, a community, a people, for football to be played on Aboriginal ancestral lands at all.
“Little things, like Invasion Day, the club’s pretty open for me to speak about the effects it has on our community. And I think a lot of boys have learned a few things from that.”
The club has also asked whether Bedford’s father might come to address the playing group during this year’s Sir Doug Nicholls Round, to share his own story, which is a harder and less celebrated story than his son’s.
“He went through a lot of racism and adversity. He ended up leaving, dropping out of university and everything like that, because of it.”
His dad then spent most of his life making sure his kids never missed out on their own opportunity for the same reasons, Bedford explains. “For what he’s overcome, and what he’s been able to do, me and my siblings all got opportunities to go through school and get scholarships, which he enabled for us. He’s a pretty resilient man.”
Bedford stops. “Yeah. Pretty proud to call him my dad. I probably don’t tell him that enough.”
***
THE GIANTS’ INDIGENOUS Round guernsey is usually the best design of the lot, season after season. Bedford says so with only partial apology. “If not number one, we’d be top three, that’s for sure, most years.”
That, he says, is testament to the ‘unbelievable’ work the club’s Indigenous coordinator Malcolm Lynch puts in alongside artists from community. The guernsey is worn for only two matches, sometimes three, before it belongs to history. What that means, for Bedford, is that representing the artist, the person who put their family, their Country, their story into the fabric, becomes part of his game-day mental preparation.
“You want to represent them as much as you can. Because, you know, they put a lot of effort into that as well.”
But the jumper is a vector for something deeper: his family in Fitzroy Crossing, watching from another time zone, a world away. Bedford’s four siblings still up there. The seventeen nieces and nephews. The grandparents. His father, whose sacrifices and determination put a Bedford on a televised national platform.
Latrelle Pickett
IN THE COLDER months on the peninsula, when the days were short and the trophy squid were running thick off the scalloped shoreline, the kid and his big brother would head to the best spots along the sweep of beach outside town. Standing barefoot on the packed sand at the tideline, they’d work their prawn jigs in the low light, watching the vast gulf waters stretch, their depth and distance resolving with night and the stars emerging steadily overhead.
“It was always good to get around the beach,” Latrelle Pickett quietly recalls. “To just take your mind off things.”
They’d hop the lures until after dark, then clean their catch and return to town, headed for the bug-flecked floodlights brimming over the local footy oval – home of the Tumby Bay Blues.
Pickett would towel the beach sand off his feet, lace his boots on, leap over the boundary fence, and glide across the ground to join his teammates. The club had seen a few kids come through boasting as much talent as Pickett – but he was apparently in no great hurry to take himself further afield.
***
PICKETT WAS HAPPY being home, around his parents and big brothers, all his mates, and what felt like hundreds of nieces and nephews. He’d cut short a stint with SANFL club Norwood’s under-18s after just three games. “Went over, gave it a crack, and just couldn’t deal with living away from home,” he says. “Got homesick.”
That was 2023. The Ngarrindjeri youngster had come through Port Adelaide’s Next Generation Academy – the AFL’s development pathway for Indigenous and multicultural players – and his registration with Norwood made him eligible for the national league draft. But pulling the pin and returning home to the Eyre Peninsula meant he was always going to be brushed by all 18 AFL clubs.
Not being drafted didn’t dent his self-confidence though. Pickett knew he needed to mature. His dream tilt at professional footy hadn’t failed. His mind and body just needed time in the country footy league to gestate. “I knew it was going to happen,” he says. “I just had to have the right mindset.”
***
LIFE’S UNPREDICTABLE BOUNCE began to fall favourably again in October 2024. Pickett had just played the Nunga Carnival – an annual Indigenous football tournament where First Nations players showcase their skills to community and professional scouts – in nearby Port Lincoln.
Former St Kilda player Terry Milera was watching and noticed Pickett sparkle. Milera – also the stepfather of Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera – offered to vouch for the kid and get him a start with SANFL power club Glenelg. Pickett soon sat down with the SA club’s head of football for a straight conversation. An honest expression of commitment was required.
“I just told him there and then, this is what I want. This is what I want to do,” Pickett says. “I just said, ‘you just have to trust me’.”
Pickett was told he had three weeks before pre-season started – that was his window. He began to train every day, ensuring his body and his mind were primed.
That earned him a start at the club and his game stats for the 2025 season at Glenelg speak for themselves: 32 goals in 18 games for the reserves, including a grand final win. A late-season promotion into the firsts saw Pickett debut in the top grade with a scintillating four-goals, 16-disposals effort. Three more games in the firsts followed.
Pickett’s status as a first-round draft bolter: confirmed.
The Mebourne Demons landed Pickett via pick 12. It made him the latest in a lineage of Aboriginal footballing champions selected at that number including Brownlow Medallist Gavin Wanganeen, four-time premiership star Shaun Burgoyne, Norm Smith Medallist Cyril Rioli, North Melbourne’s Jy Simpkin, the Kangaroos’ first Indigenous captain and his cousin, 2025 All-Australian Kysaiah Pickett, who had also been drafted to the Dees in 2019.
“I was hoping to get picked around the 60 to 70 mark,” Pickett says. “I just couldn’t get my head around it.”
The Demons quietly organised for Kysaiah to surprise their latest recruit at the draft. Pickett took the stage unaware his cousin was waiting behind a curtain to present him with a guernsey. Kozzy – the 24-year-old excitement machine who had earlier that year committed to a reported seven-year, $12 million extension that made him the longest-contracted player in the AFL – stepped out, and the two reconnected. From then the two Picketts have flourished side by side.
A couple of days passed before it all sank in. Then came training, and I was like, oh shit – this is real, Pickett laughs.
***
THE KID WHO grew up with a Sherrin always in hand, picturing himself as Cyril Rioli and Eddie Betts in the backyard, made his debut at the MCG for the Demons in Round 1 of the new season. Ironically, it came against the Saints.
A crowd of almost fifty thousand delighted footy fans watched the debutant mark a looping kick on the run, 10 in from the boundary and about the same distance outside the opposition’s 50-metre arc. It was what he chose to do next that dazzled aficionados of the game.
“Soon as he got the ball, he’s outside 50, running and you think, yeah, this is it. Something’s gonna happen, AFL great Betts recalls. “He takes a bounce, and then you think, okay, kick it now. But he didn’t kick – he keeps running and five steps later he takes another bounce, and then he swerves in-field and takes another bounce as he’s cutting between three defenders and you’re thinking, why did you take three bounces in the space of twenty metres, as he snaps the ball off the inside of his right boot.”
Pickett just recalls the ball floating in front of the sun, taking forever to get to him. Then it was in his hands and from that point he ceased to be present in any conscious sense. “I just blacked out,” he says. “I’m just running, running, and kicking.”
Betts knows the feeling. “Time slows down for you,” he says. “You’re in the moment. You know where the goals are. Because you’ve been doing this since you were a little kid – running around, kicking through gates, the whole lot.”
The Age’s Gleeson was also watching. “Latrelle arrived in the AFL carrying one of the most famous names in football,” he says. “It took less than one match to prove his name was not a burden to performance but an accurate descriptor of what he might be as a player.
“He could have done many other safe team things and knew he didn’t need to. He knew what he could do in the play, he knew what he had the skill to do, and that he had the maturity to do it. In the space of one game he proved he was not just Kysaiah’s cousin – he was his peer.”
But for Pickett, drawing level with his peers and heroes is not the destination. He intends to become one of the AFL greats, as an Aboriginal player specifically. “Just be one of the best,” he says. “If not the best.”
The 2026 Sir Doug Nicholls Round will be held across Round 10 and Round 11 of the Toyota AFL Premiership Season. The AFL’s ongoing theme of ‘Strengthened by First Nations: Moments. Connections. Stories’ is a platform that positions First Nations people as a source of strength within the game, highlighting enduring impact through shared moments, relationships and lived stories and driving the key message that the AFL acknowledges the game is stronger when we have First Nations players.
The Sir Doug Nicholls Round starts on Thursday May 14 with Brisbane hosting Geelong at the Gabba. Tickets for all games are available via https://www.afl.com.au/sir-doug-nicholls-round/fixture
WORDS: JACK LATIMORE
PHOTOGRAPHY: JOSHUA SCOTT
CREATIVE DIRECTOR: RHYS RIPPER
STYLING: JUANITA PAGE
STYLING ASSISTANTS: MOLLY SMITH & GEORGIA ANDERSON
PRODUCTION DIRECTOR: REBECCA MOORE
GROOMING: BLANKA DUDAS
VIDEO: JORDAN COLES
DESIGN: KRYSTAL HAMADY
HEAD OF BRAND: BEN JHOTY
