The process of bringing an Indigenous guernsey to life is complex and requires input from a range of people including cultural knowledge holders, artists, athletes, family, and designers.

This is why in 2023, Richmond engaged Shane Cook to supervise the process and ensure the Club’s work was culturally appropriate.

Prior to working with Richmond on the guernsey, the talented Indigenous man collaborated with Eddie Hocking and the Adelaide Crows to design the Crows’ Sir Doug Nicholls Round guernsey in 2020.

Shane has also designed a fight fit for Anthony Mundine and a commemorative football for Shane Edwards’ 300^th AFL game.

The proud Wulli Wulli descendant with family connections to Koa and the Kaurna community in Adelaide sat down with Richmond Media to discuss his background and journey with art.

Richmond Media: Thanks for taking the time to chat with us, Shane. Tell us how you got into art?

Shane Cook: I think I have just always drawn and loved art. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t creating, drawing or making something. I have been really influenced by Mum, who has always been a painter and a drawer, so yeah, all my life, I have been around art my whole life.

RM: Have some of the drawing skills been passed down throughout your Indigenous heritage?

SC: My mobs are Wulli Wulli and Guwa, they are both from Queensland. My nana was born in Cherbourg, which is an Aboriginal Mission in Queensland, just a few hours out of Brisbane.

She moved off that community when she was a young girl to go and work as a domestic housemaid and moved around a lot. My mother was born in Western Australia and then me in Adelaide, and I have stayed here (Adelaide).

I have grown up my whole life away from country but have also known my nana was from Queensland… so it has been a journey to stay connected with that community just living so far away. I am very thankful now to connect back with them after a few generations. They have been incredibly welcoming, I'm very proud.

RM: How did you stay connected?

I had an incident where I got burnt when I was 12 years old and had third-degree burns to 30 percent of my body, during that time in hospital (nine months), I would ask questions to my mum about our family history and being an Aboriginal person.

My mum would show me rock art and, cave art, aboriginal dancers, and it really sparked an interest and a passion in me to want to learn about it more… and that was when I started diving into art and culture as a young man.

As I was recovering, my mum also got quite sick, she has recovered well now, but during that time from the age of 12-17, there were quite a few years there where health was the main priority in our life.

Because of that, I did not go to school much, but I became connected to a guy named Jack Buckskin here in Adelaide who at the time was an Aboriginal Educator at my school, he is a cultural educator and helped revitalize language here in Adelaide for the Kaurna people.

Jack also has a dance crew named Kuma Kaaru and I dance for them; we have done heaps of AFL Indigenous rounds here in Adelaide, and I have travelled overseas with them and been fortunate to have learned a lot about their culture throughout my teenage years.

I got taken under their wing, and they gave me a lot of encouragement and a lot of confidence to keep wanting to pursue going back to where I am from. I was a very lost and angry young man when I first met him, and I owe a lot of who I am to the community in Adelaide.

Have you had the chance to go back there yet?

I actually got to do that in the week leading up to Dreamtime at the 'G. I went out to my country for the very first time and stayed out there for four days, and flew from Brisbane to Melbourne in time for the game the next day. It was like going from one extreme to the other. What an incredible week!

Did that lineage through your families’ Indigenous art help you to feel connected to the place before you had actually been?

All my life, I have researched it, and knowing where you are from is quite important and a step in the right direction, but actually seeing it with my own eyes was really empowering and something I was really proud to do in my life.

I will be going back there a lot, and I felt quite at ease being able to go back there. I was the first person in five generations from my family to be able to get back and step on country since we were moved off that land. It was quite incredible.

I think learning about culture here in Adelaide really helped me, and they really adopted me into their family.

There are different mobs and different communities, but I think they have sort of a universal outlook on life and on how important connection to culture and storytelling is.

Having learned about that and being able to help other people tell their stories through art has led me back home, and that is pretty special.

Art has been very healing for myself and my mental health, but this week was also significant as one of my brothers was diagnosed with prostate cancer and lost an old mentor/coach due to mental health complications. I will remember this week for the rest of my life. I think connection to country and to community is so important. Especially for our young people and their families to heal from what has happened in our country.

What was it like seeing the players wearing the design on a stage like Dreamtime?

To see people at the highest level of their sport representing Aboriginal people is really empowering, when I was younger, that was a lot rarer than it is now.

It is a lot more accepted (now) and showcased from when I was a young kid or from my mum's generation, so being able to see them running around in that jumper was unreal.

Being able to help Xavier and his family tell their story through digital art was pretty cool, and I am glad to have been able to be there to see it unfold on the day.

How exactly does someone turn a digital image into the art seen on a finished AFL guernsey?

It can be pretty tricky because Aboriginal artwork is so special, and it is not just paint or art just put on a canvas… the stories come from lived experience and generations and generations of factors that have been passed down.

To think it is just painted on a canvas would be really underselling what it is, so for me being an artist and having that responsibility of trying to figure out how I can take a painting and digitally redraw it, I had to make sure I did it in the right way.

It was important that the artwork was portrayed and put in the right direction that it was first envisioned to be. I wanted it to be like the artist intended it to look like.

It was quite detailed and layered, so I had to physically redraw all the dancers and all the artwork… it took quite a lot of hours, and I made sure I checked in with Xavier, so he could check in with his family each step to ensure they were the way that they looked.

We had to make sure we were on point as we were processing through that and that the dancers were in the right positions.

I placed all the elements all over the Guernsey in a few different ways, and he would say what he liked, and I would go back and redraw it to have it exactly where Xavier wanted his family's artwork placed.

Sounds complex?

Yes, it is significant. I think it is great that Richmond had an Aboriginal artist come in as a creative consultant to ensure, along with the (Clarke) family, that the artwork was being displayed in the right way.

It is a duty of care, I guess, so having an Aboriginal perspective on the graphic design and the placement was quite a significant part of making sure the jumper was as meaningful to Xavier and his family as it could possibly be.

As a mentor to younger Indigenous artists, is it the same importance to detail and history that you talk about to them?

I think with young people, there have been things that come up in the media from different sporting codes, where some artists, some young artists who haven't maybe spent the time refining their own style or really diving into their own identity to ensure their artwork is completely unique to themselves. I think some people think you can put some dots on a page, and they call it Aboriginal art. That's amazing that people are wanting to engage in art that has that meaningful storytelling part of it, but I do encourage young people to really dive into their identity and their family history and different art mediums to create a style for themselves, which is really unique so they don't have that issue of another artist doing something similar.

Is mentoring young Indigenous people a passion you want to keep pursuing and getting them into art?

Yeah. I have worked in education and in youth justice, and I do a lot of work in a lot of Aboriginal leadership programs, facilitating workshops and doing a whole lot of different stuff.

I think a big part of my art practice is arts education and making sure that young people first get the opportunity to explore their identity and showcase their stories and what makes them different and also making sure that they get that proper recognition of themselves. When people are collaborating together, just making sure that it's an enjoyable process for everyone.

Richmond will wear the Guernsey for a second time this week against Port Adelaide, which is fitting for you as a way to mark how your art career is progressing?

One of the first big opportunities that I got as an artist was to be able to paint football boots for the Port Adelaide Football Club, the first year, I painted three or four player's boots, and then the following year, Paulie Van Den Berg, who was working with Port Adelaide at the time (now at the AFL) got me back.

He followed it up the next year by asking me to paint 40 pairs of boots, so I believe that was one of the first times that every single player in the AFL running out on the field had their boots painted, that's what I was told anyway.

You have come a long way since then?

It is good to be able to watch Richmond play against Port in the Guernsey I helped design and create with Xavier. It will be pretty special to look back over all the stuff I have done over the last five or ten years and Richmond and Port Adelaide have played big parts in that.

I think having people at Richmond like (Director of Indigenous Leadership) Angela (Burt), I'd like to mention her as someone who gave me the call-up and said, "Hey look, you know Richmond Football Club want to make sure we are doing as much as we can to celebrate this story and have you in as an Aboriginal artist and a graphic design consultant to make sure the design is drawn in the correct and culturally appropriate way", I thought that was great, and I think Ange is on the right track as far as wanting to get people in to do that and I think I'd like to mention her to say thanks for reaching out to do that.

Under Shane’s expert guidance, Richmond staff gained new insights and together, delivered a guernsey that spotlighted the cultural story of the Marri Amu Marri Tjevin peoples.

The Club encourages other sporting organisations, that are working with cultural elements to consider engaging an Indigenous artist or designer.

To learn more about Shane's art visit www.shanecook.com.au