Red dirt. No grass. Big, wide, blue sky. Crooked, white-metal goal posts, paint peeling off. A shaggy-haired kid with bare feet and a smiling face holding a scuffed red ball.
That is the image of Indigenous football in Australia. It is the quintessential look. Red dirt. Blue sky. Smiling face.
But it is only one look. It's become cliched and for many Indigenous players no more relevant to them than it is to a white kid from Mount Waverley.
It feeds assumptions that Indigenous players come ostensibly from somewhere near Uluru or have a loose family connection to the Longs and Riolis.
The AFLPA map illustrates just how misleading the image can be. There is no one Indigenous culture, there is no one image that encapsulates Aboriginal Australia.
Former player Tony Armstrong is the Indigenous and multicultural programs manager at the players association and says the map they have crafted listing all 81 male and 11 female players and what communities they are from illustrates the breadth of cultural diversity. Some players, such as Paddy Ryder, are listed on the map twice, recognising parents or ancestors from different regions.
"From red-dirt Central Australia to WA and the Tiwi Islands, there are players from the Top End, Arnhem Land and the Pilbara. They are all very different from blokes from Victoria and Tasmania. They're culturally very different.
"There can be a stereotype that every black fella is the same and two Indigenous players at one club would have stuff in common and they will have a connection but they could be from very different cultural backgrounds.
"In footy, you will have guys from a desert culture come down and play with other Indigenous guys from a water culture and they are completely different but the map is about celebrating that diversity."
What is apparent in the map is that Victorian representation remains relatively low. That is partly a product of population spread but the take up of the game in Indigenous communities in Victoria has been an issue for several years.
Armstrong rather considers the map, like a census, a snapshot of a given point in time and that, with drafting and list decisions, the numbers and percentages become fluid.
"I think the map is a representation of where they are from at any given moment. At the moment we have a lot of guys from WA, NT and SA.
"It can be very cyclical as players, you can draft three guys and all of a sudden you can have five or six Indigenous players on your list and, by the same token, you have a couple of guys delisted one year and suddenly you are down.
"I don't tend to read much into where they are from as much as how many players but the map is good for showing how far and wide the reach is."
The PA has delivered a document to clubs advising on how to deal with the disparity of cultural backgrounds and clubs are getting better at their understanding.
"The map is used to shine a light on the fact that, whilst under Australian parameters we come from many different regions and cultural groups, we are a single nation.
"When you see the Indigenous language groups within our borders, it goes to show the extra layers these guys confront. Guys are coming down and English is a second or third language. And simple things can be difficult for some guys who have not been brought up in a city, things like tolls and public transport. It's quite foreign."
For some the Indigenous round has become a vexed issue in football because, for all the beauty and good it celebrates, it has also drawn out - most obviously with the Adam Goodes issue of two years ago - the ugliness of attitudes of the stubbornly unreconstructed types in the game or the crowds at the game.
Armstrong understands the misgiving but believes the ledger tilts in favour of more good than bad coming from exposure and understanding. He also believes that each ugly incident is the step back for the two steps forward taken each time by the strong public response to any issue.
"It pains me that sometimes guys have to cop it," Armstrong said. "How frustrating it is as an Indigenous guy sometimes. Say you say something racist to me in a public forum, if I bite back, I suddenly just become an angry black guy so you have to be on the higher ground all the time.
"But this year [with the Eddie Betts crowd incident] you see the AFL industry immediately react - black and white as a collective - to condemn it and I thought that was good."
The map reveals the scope and depth of the game among Indigenous players but a similar map of Indigenous coaches would be a sparsely populated one. Presently there are three Indigenous coaches in the AFL, Xavier Clarke at Richmond, Andrew Lovell at Gold Coast and Roger Hayden at Fremantle. That number is small but better than it has been in the past.
As Armstrong said: "It is the next frontier but we are making inroads."
