In a bunker-like hall in Townsville a boxing ring is set up under fluorescent strip lights and 200 people - trainers, enthusiasts, pugilists past and present - sit in monsoonal heat, watching two ten-year-old Aboriginal boys punching the stuffing out of each other. The boys are competing for a 2008 Australian Amateur Boxing League national title. One minute they look like gladiators in oversized gloves and helmets, belting hard at the other's head; then, when they fall half-crying with exhaustion into each other's arms, like brothers caught fighting in their bedroom.

By one corner of the ring stands Ray Dennis, 71, coach of the all-Aboriginal Palm Island Boxing Team. Dennis is softly spoken, tall and patrician, with the look of a man who's just been hit. His nose, four times broken, has found a new position on his face; rust-rimmed glasses hang there at an angle. When he was ten he started primary school and got badly bullied. At 15 he bought boxing gloves and started training. Each session left his mouth busted, but he persevered until he could beat grown men; until, in 1956, he was runner-up to represent Australia at the Olympics. Later he worked at a drycleaners, at a meatworks, in construction - and all the time he trained other boxers to win a hundred or so state and national boxing titles.