Evonne Fay Goolagong, Australian of the Year 1971

Evonne Goolagong Cawley, born in 1951, is a tennis legend who became one of the world's leading tennis players in the 1970s and 80s, winning the French Open singles, the Australian Open doubles championships, the women's singles tournament at Wimbledon, then winning Wimbledon as the first mother for 66 years, winning 14 Grand Slam tournament titles, representing Australia in three Fed Cup competitions, and, and, and. In 1971, she was named Australian of the Year, in 1985, Goolagong was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame, just to mention a few of her successes (via).

Winning Wimbledon was fine but certainly did not mean not being discriminated against:

Before I started traveling overseas and I was with a friend and in those days I loved music and I loved disco dancing so she took me out but I wasn’t allowed in. That happened again in Brisbane and I was with two Aboriginal friends and this was just after I won Wimbledon. I said ‘don’t worry we’ll go somewhere else’. I think it hurt my friends more than me.
Evonne Goolagong Cawley

Sydney was to provide no respite from the racism Goolagong Cawley had to face. She especially remembers an incident while playing with Edwards’ daughter against two older ladies. “One of the older ladies didn’t like the idea of two youngsters beating up on them. We won pretty easily. When it was time to shake hands. “And she said; ‘This is the first time I’ve had the pleasure of playing a N***er’ and I’ve never heard that before and I started to get really upset.” As her mentor Edwards did his best to shield her from such prejudice. “He taught me not to believe in what you read, believe in yourself so I never read anything. I realize now he was blocking me from a lot of things. “I always just thought of myself as a tennis player. I was protected from a lot of publicity and politics of life.”
Evonne Goolagong Cawley

Being an Indigenous Australian athlete she was believed to have different skills and qualities and was "patronised by both racist and sexist descriptions by a white male-controlled media" (Stell cited in Bruce & Hallinan, 2001). She was hardly mentioned without the preface "Aboriginal girl" (via)...

I'd much rather people knew me as a good tennis player than as an aboriginal who happens to play good tennis. Of course I'm proud of my race, but I don't want to be thinking about it all the time.
Evonne Goolagong

I don't think of myself as being colored but of being Australian.
Evonne Goolagong

"Australian newspapers gave considerable coverage to the 1971 women's Wimbledon final. Wimbledon was and is the tennis world's premier event, yet the women's final did not receive such coverage in Australia in the previous year, when the event was won, as expected, by Australia's Margaret Court. Court played again in the final in 1971, but this time the result was an upset: a surprise win by a young player whose coach had predicted she would first win the tournament three years later in 1974, a prediction possibly calculated to have exactly this publicity effect. Newspapers across Australia announced the result with sensationalist headlines and hyperbole. The winner was a young Evonne Goolagong (later Cawley), aged nineteen and a newcomer on the tennis world stage. Her potential to win this tournament had been hinted at earlier in the year when she won the French Open at Roland Garros. Was it her youth, her rural Australian background and unexpected success that produced this rush of interest in her and her life? Was it her beauty, in a sport where a woman's media profile was and is heavily influenced by her appearance and sexuality? Or was it that she was of Aboriginal descent, the heroine of a classic rags-to-riches tale of triumph? "
Karen Fox

Today, Goolagong`s foundation is dedicated to encouraging Indigenous boys and girls to play tennis.

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- Bruce, T. & Hallinan, C. (2001). Cathy Freeman: the quest for Australian identity. In David Andrews & Steve Jackson (eds.) Sports Stars. The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity (257-270). London & New York: Routledge.

- photograph via