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.
Ten years ago, Ray Dennis found himself out of work. Each day he made more home-brew and started killing himself drinking it. Then he remembered the talent of the young men he'd trained from Palm Island, the Aboriginal ex-mission community north of Townsville. He decided to move there with the aim of training an Olympic gold medallist. In the beginning he put a boxing ring in a paddock and started teaching the sons and nephews of his old protégés. More kids came, and now Uncle Ray never turns a child away.
In the ring Ray's boxer, the angel-faced Steen Walsh, is representing Queensland in the burgundy-and-white uniform of that state. Steen is small for his age but as muscular as a gymnast. For years he had been watching the other kids train, with Ray promising he could join them when he turned ten, the legal age for boxers in Queensland. Ray's challenge is getting kids young and encouraging them to keep off booze and dope. (On Palm Island, he says, he has potential world champions now too stoned to compete.) So far, Steen has won his only three fights. His style is freakishly adult: tough, fast, brutal. But it's been drilled into him that if he loses he has to congratulate the other boy: anyone who cries or throws a tantrum won't be allowed on other excursions. And without these trips to boxing competitions, funded by piecemeal donations and Ray's pension, many of the young boxers wouldn't have the chance to leave the island. Tonight the team are just a ferry ride from Palm. In a way they're on home turf, but this is the Deep North, and in Townsville a taxi driver will turn to the white visitor and spit that blackfellas are vermin.