The wonderful world of the late Vincent Copley

Five days before he passed, Vincent Copley sat in his armchair and looked out the window, at the birds and the trees and the sky. He knew his time had come, that the end was imminent. He was at peace with it.

As his eyes stayed fixed on the world outside, he voiced some final thoughts from his 85 years.

"What a wonderful world I've been able to live in," he began.

Copley, who was an Ngadjuri Elder, recalled the people and the places of his life, those that shaped him as he wove his remarkable path through the decades. He expressed gratitude for all of it, and he was touched to have received the same in return.

"A few months ago, I went to 'Currie' (Curramulka, South Australia) to see my old friends," he said. "I wanted to thank everybody for what they'd been to me, and I did.

"We all met up at the footy clubrooms, and after I said what I said, Sandra turned around to me and said, 'No Uncle Vin, we want to thank you'.

"For her to say I made their world happy, too – well, that was really good. That made the day for me."

While the locations and the names shift with the years, the above anecdote represents a recurring theme through a life richly lived. For Vincent Copley – husband, son, father, brother, uncle, cousin, friend, teammate, coach, Elder, Indigenous activist – time was best spent forming relationships with people who shared, or were inspired by, his joie de vivre.  

"Everywhere I went," he said, "I found that if you want to make it a good time where you are, you can.

"You don't have to be angry all the time."

* * *

It was on a Saturday night at The Overlanders Steakhouse in Alice Springs that the original blueprint for Cricket Australia's Indigenous strategy was created.

Trevor Woodhead remembers the butchers paper being spread across the restaurant table. He remembers the ideas being jotted down, big and small, one after another, by inspired Indigenous men afforded a rare chance to legitimise what had once been little more than a pipedream.

Woodhead had first seen Copley in action at a meeting of the country's cricketing powerbrokers in Canberra in 1999. It was the second of three such get-togethers aimed at building out the sporting body's Indigenous strategy and Copley, who would in 2000 become national co-chair of the Australian Cricket Board's (ACB, now Cricket Australia) Indigenous Cricket Programs, was a powerful voice in the room.

"In the afternoon, Vince just got up and said to the Australian Cricket Board: 'Look, if you blokes are serious about engaging with Aboriginal people with cricket, then be serious – don't just muck around, because we've seen this before, in 1988 (when Copley had organised a commemorative Indigenous UK tour to mark 120 years since the Aboriginal tour of the UK in 1868), when you had an opportunity, and didn't take it. So don't waste our time, and don't waste your time'," Woodhead recalls.

"And (then ACB chairman) Denis Rogers got up and said to his staff, 'Well, you've heard what Vince has got to say, I want you people to make this happen'.

"I didn't know Vince then, but I was a bit in awe of that. I thought, Wow, that's a pretty straightforward thing to say: Be real, or don't waste our time.

"Now, he wasn't an abrasive man – Vince was a great diplomat – but he knew when to call a spade a spade. And in that instance, it was the right call."

Image Id: 5416A01EDB4744009AF990991F38C200 Image Caption: (L-R) Trevor Woodhead, Steve Waugh and Vincent Copley // supplied

At the third such meeting the following year in Alice Springs, Copley and Woodhead joined forces on the ACB's game development committee, after they pushed the governing body to allocate two seats for Indigenous cricket.

"From there, a wonderful friendship was born," Woodhead says. "And over that weekend, we wrote the first National Indigenous Cricket strategy.

"We met on the Saturday morning and we worked all day, and then we went to dinner."

Which is where the butchers paper was rolled out, and the ideas spilled forth.

"After dinner, some of the group went off to enjoy the nightlife that Alice Springs has to offer, and a few of us went back to the hotel and kept working on the strategic plan," Woodhead adds.

"I think at about 4am they turned off the red wine supply and started bringing the coffee in.

"We worked until about 5:30 in the morning, and then we had to go and have an hour's kip, a bit of brekky, and back to work at eight o'clock until about lunchtime.

"Then we all hopped on the plane and away we went, but that's how the first draft was made."

It was a sowing of seeds for the next generation, but equally, there were practical elements that required immediate action. Soon after, and for the first time, a 'Welcome to Country' ceremony was performed before a Test match at the Adelaide Oval. Woodhead says the establishment of the tradition is "directly attributable to Vince", and in cricket terms at least, it is a notable part of his legacy. So too is the Imparja Cup, which became not only a driver of Indigenous cricket participation throughout the country, but a high-performance development resource as well.

"Vince was a visionary, there's no doubt about that, and he was also a leader," Woodhead says.

"If you look through the different industries and initiatives that he worked in, you always found him at the pointy end of it, be that in the arts, in Aboriginal Housing, legal aid services, health services, he was always involved at that end, setting those types of organisations up and driving those industries for our people."

* * *

In 2018, some three years before he died, the former Test cricketer Ashley Mallett wrote a book titled, The Boys from St Francis. In it he traces the stories of a band of Aboriginal boys who grew up together in one group home in Port Adelaide, in the care of Anglican priest, Father Percy Smith.

Mallett called it his most significant work, while in the foreword, Copley wrote: "The Boys from St Francis is a story which exposes all the emotions – sadness and joy; achievement and failure; love and hatred; humour and hope; bigotry and strength", before labelling it a book "all Australians should read".

Copley had moved to St Francis with his mother's blessing as a 10-year-old, after coming across a group of boys his age who were back home in Alice Springs on their Christmas break.

Image Id: 22D9C64402874E11887AAC9D8480C15A Image Caption: The boys from St Francis // supplied

There he joined what would become an extraordinary group of Indigenous pioneers, including civil rights activist and footballer Charles Perkins, artist and footballer John Moriarty, and academic and activist Gordon Briscoe.

A highly-regarded Port Adelaide footballer, it was away from the sporting fields that Copley had his greatest impact, making vital contributions to the reclamation and protection of Australian Indigenous cultural heritage, as well as for Native Title Claims for the Narangga and Kaurna people.

The achievements and the selfless deeds rattle on; the lasting footprint stretching the breadth of the nation. But it is closer to home that perhaps the truest sense of Copley's character is felt, and where it will most be missed. At his core, Copley was a family man; a husband to wife Brenda, who passed in May 2020, and a dad – to daughter Kara McEwen, and sons Vincent and Darran.

"He was brilliant," smiles Kara, the eldest of the three siblings. "Just insanely funny, and he had such a wicked sense of humor, really dry.

"Actually, even to the end he was like that. Lea McInerney, the lady who co-authored his (upcoming) book, he said to her, 'I've got another thing to tell you Lea, but I'm not going to tell you yet' … and then he died.

"She was like, 'He never told me!' And I'm like, 'Yeah, he would do that (laughs)'."

Near the end of last month, Kara spoke at her dad's funeral, which was held at St Paul's Church in Port Adelaide, where Vince had been a choir boy.

"There were so many people there," she says. "I mean, there were white people, black people … and these were great friends, you know, 60-year friendships.

"And I can't explain it other than to say, people didn't see colour with him at all. He was just a good mate to so many people, and that was apparent to me at his funeral. There were so many of us sitting there together, and we all knew each other and we were all there because we loved this one guy.

Image Id: 56ABEE35B50C417481019C1994317C64 Image Caption: Copley as a Port Adelaide footballer, and later in life // supplied

"He had this charisma or this aura about him that was just magnetic. And he was attractive in the sense that people wanted to be around him; people liked him instantly.

"Even back when he was playing football, and he went to Curramulka, on his first night there he got three dinner invitations – and these are pastoralists in the 1950s.

"He just had this gift, and I think part of that was self-respect. He exuded confidence and self-worth. I admired that."

Kara recalls cricket and footy in the backyard with her dad and brothers. Making a mess in the kitchen with him on Saturday mornings. She knows too that her optimistic outlook on life is a by-product of her dad's. It is one of his traits for which she is most grateful.

"He didn't let the colour of his skin stop him from dreaming, or from pursuing goals and then achieving them," she says. "He just didn't see it as an obstacle.

"I think that branched off from what his mum told him, which was, 'You're as good as anybody else – don't ever think that you're not'.

"And I'm really lucky that kind of attitude rubbed off on me, because I don't feel oppressed, and I've never let anything like that stop me with my goals in life either."

* * *

In the final months of his life, Copley moved in with his niece Kathryn and her husband Steve in Goolwa, down near the mouth of the Murray River, south of Adelaide. There he was cared for while he spent time with family and friends, visits that were often played out to the soundtrack of the summer's cricket on the television in the background.

Woodhead was one to make the pilgrimage from Brisbane to Adelaide to see his old mate one last time.

"He was a dear, dear friend, and to be able to spend two or three days with him was one of the great blessings I've had in life," he says.

"We were able to sit down and talk, share our experiences, and have a laugh. When he laughed, he was in pain, but he enjoyed that pain, because he enjoyed the laughter.

"And his mind was as sharp as it ever was, but sadly, his body was just tired.

"The day I left him, I gave him a kiss on the head, and a hug, and I told him I loved him – and I did love that old man."

Image Id: CB6ED912F73D4C0DA217F8D0FA25EF5A Image Caption: Copley with son Vincent at Redbanks Conservation Park, Burra, June 2018 // supplied

Kara recalls that period as one of peace and contentment, tinged with sadness but not engulfed by it; the gentle grieving for a patriarch whose influence was felt far beyond familial walls.

"A couple days before he died, Dad said to me, 'I'm done'," she recounts. "And I said, 'OK, well, you go when you're ready'."

In her eulogy, she added: "He wanted to die at home surrounded by family. We were all there. He was relaxed, at peace. It was a beautiful day, and he was just surrounded by love, and by people who loved him.

"We all got to hold his hand and speak to him, and be with him as he left.

"I couldn't have wished for it to be any other way. It was a beautiful moment."

Image Id: 5E7080A2AEF2493AAD9FC741B1F1CF4D Image Caption: Vince during his cricket days at Curramulka // supplied

And so we return to Vincent Copley, sitting in his armchair in Goolwa, staring out the window and sharing a special life's worth of wisdom with any of us smart enough to listen.

"All the other things in my life – like lunch with the Queen, and meeting Muhammad Ali, and Nelson Mandela – that's all fine, but it's not life," he said.

"Life is being able to be with your family and friends, and to sit here and see all the birds and the trees."

Cricket.com.au received permission from Vincent Copley's family to use his image in this story