INTERVIEW: Adam Goodes Tells Press Gang More About The ‘Welcome To Our Country’ Books

What inspired you to create the ‘Welcome to our Country’ books?

It was actually during Covid that I was talking to my co-author Ellie Lang, about indigenous books for students to help them educate them about aboriginal people and culture. And we couldn’t really find a lot in the market and we thought, well, why don’t we try and produce some?

So that’s where the idea came from – to create a series of books that help us use language and culture and beautiful pictures and stories to help educate each other and to relate those stories to our own upbringing and where we all come from and the special ceremonies that we have and sometimes the languages that we speak at home, which was really important for me to showcase.

And most importantly, the reason why I decided to do the children’s books is because I have a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a six-month-old, and I wanted my kids to be able to read books that have pictures of them inside them.

Have you ever considered writing books similar to the ‘Welcome to Our Country’ series for older children?

That’s a really good question. Would you believe that even though these books are targeted at zero to six years old, we also have teachers in year nine and 10 using these books as resource to educate, especially Somebody’s Land, my first book. It helps to educate students around the meaning of ‘terra nullius’ and how that was as a type of law that affected indigenous people and how the land was taken.

So even though these books are designed for a zero to six year olds, these books can be read by anyone. And I think that’s really important about any book that you pick up, that there’s no real reason why you can’t read a certain book if you can read, we all love to read books with beautiful pictures and stories in them, but the older you get, I think the more adventure and the more story that you want to experience, I think the better. I think that these books are for everyone.

Which career do you prefer? Author or AFL player?

I don’t think I would be an author if I didn’t have the AFL career. And my English teacher had her 70th birthday on the weekend, she just happens to be one of my best friend’s mothers. And when I show her and send her my books, she cries when she reads them because I wasn’t really great with words at school. She put a lot of time and effort in with me and to see how confident I’ve gotten and to also be an author of four books with one more to come, it makes her very proud that she played a small part in that.

So I like being known as both an AFL player and an author. I really love the work that I’m able to do now in writing books for young people like you.

All of all the welcome to our country books you’ve written, which is your favorite and why?

My favorite is ‘Ceremony’. I’ve been on a journey learning my language, and I think in Ceremony we share a lot of Adnyamathanha words and help people learn those Adnyamathanha words.

And if you haven’t realised, in the Ceremony book or any of the Welcome to our Country series books, if you scan the QR code at the front of the book, it’ll actually be me or Ellie reading the book to you. So especially for ceremony when there’s lots of Adnyamathanha words, you can hear me say those words and then you can practice those words as well.

So Ceremony was a really great book for me to write because it was all about my Adnyamathanha culture and ceremonies that we participate in.

Yeah, it happened very, very quickly actually, because I’d already started writing my autobiography from my football career and halfway through Covid I thought, you know what, I actually don’t want to do that book anymore. So I had to call the publisher and say, even though we’re 80% through doing this book, I don’t want to publish it anymore.

And they said to me, well, if you ever have any other projects that you might want to do, please call us back. And we would love to entertain that. And I called them back a year later and said, look, I want to write a children’s book, but I don’t want to write one, I want to write a series. And they that’s fantastic, we want to support you and help you do that.

And it happened so fast. And I think once I knew that I wanted to write for children, for young people, it became very easy. And I’d never written a book before. But what I do love to do is tell stories and create opportunities for us to learn, listen, and ask questions.