A place to call home

An unexpected act of kindness led Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti to find the love of a mother, a whole new family and an iconic AFL career.

- SUE SMETHURST

Of all places, Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti was on the footy field when he realised he’d found the mum and the family he’d been craving for years. It was a simple gesture, a fleeting and innocuous moment of kindness on the sidelines of a footy match in Darwin, that struck the then 15-year-old promising footballer with lightning-bolt force. It gave him a feeling of love he’d never known and the sense that, at last, he wasn’t alone.

“My coach sent me off because I’d forgotten to bring socks. He was pretty angry with me. He told me I was a grown man and should be taking responsibility for myself,” Anthony explains.

His chaperones, Jane McDonald and her daughter Nikki, house parents at Tiwi College on nearby Melville Island where Anthony went to school, watched the exchange from the sidelines. Without hesitation, Jane asked Nikki to peel off her socks and give them to Anthony so he could play.

“In that moment, I knew Mum [Jane] really cared for me, she was there for me. No one had ever done anything like that for me. We’d built a really strong connection [at Tiwi College] but I knew then that I could trust her, that she was looking after me.”

Those few seconds of treasured kindness tell us so much about the heartbreaking and at times harrowing story of how Anthony McDonaldTipungwuti beat the odds and became one of the AFL’s most loved players. And how he came to call Jane McDonald, the woman who got him there, ‘Mum’.

“She welcomed me into the family and treated me like I was one of her kids. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her,” he says. “I struggled not having a mother [before] she came into my life – it’s the best thing that has happened to me.