ABDI Artan's love-hate relationship with Australian football and the impact it has had upon his young fragmented life will prove too long a story to describe when the Somalian-born teenager takes centre-stage at Telstra Dome today at twilight.

Artan's journey to Australia came through civil war, a Kenyan refugee camp and almost eight years in New Zealand but he says that Australian Rules was not only his ultimate calling card to fitting in as a black adolescent in inner-city Melbourne, but also a frightening detour.

"We initially joined our local footy club because we thought it would offer us a way of being Australian," said Artan, who will take pride of place in today's Walk in Harmony from Flemington to Telstra Dome. "If we could be like all the other big guys kicking footies we would be part of things.

"I remember I would ignore the abuse until someone had a go at one of my teammates. The parents were the problem, not the players. You would just do a normal tackle and it was like: 'How dare that black kid touch my son'.

"Then the fights would start. When you're young you're hyperactive and you just want to keep moving, keep playing and that's what all the players would do until the people screaming at you got too much."

The public face of today's Essendon-Port Adelaide Harmony Game, Artan was last night nervously practising the short speech he was to deliver from the middle of the ground before the first bounce — a speech designed to remind the football community of what it can achieve throughout multicultural communities.

Artan, 18, agreed to expand on his story and explain how football provided a cultural link to his new life as an Australian alongside two other young community leaders from Melbourne's inner north — Daniel Haile-Michael, 18, and Solomon Salew, 17, both of whom came to Australia from Ethiopia.

The three young men sat down with The Sunday Age at Windy Hill to tell their stories. About 3000 people are expected to take part in the walk to Telstra Dome this year, an event established by the Bombers last year in conjunction with the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and one that so impressed the AFL it has allowed orange flags and orange-clad goal umpires and almost approved orange footballs for the Port Adelaide clash.

Essendon, currently engulfed by poor form, an injury crisis and a character-defining rebuilding phase, has continued to pursue the multicultural program so expertly sold by Kevin Sheedy and that now includes an 18-week schools program introducing football to migrant communities.

Artan and his family of eight fled Somalia when he was two and had their lives put on hold for two years in the United Nations-run refugee camp in Kenya while his parents waited for a placement and were taught how to assimilate into a Western community.

He came to Melbourne, after eight years in Auckland, when he was 12. Forced to play rugby in New Zealand, Artan never enjoyed it but loved the freedom of the foreign oval-shaped ground and oval ball with its uneven bounce.

When he first fell in love with football it was with the James Hird-led Essendon in a televised night game against the Kangaroos in 2002. He was perplexed by the large number of players on the ground but began to read about Hird who became his first football hero and, upon joining his local football club, found he was able to demonstrate skills not allowed in rugby.

What Essendon did not expect when the club arranged this interview was the unashamed honesty with which the three African-born teenagers told the truth about the dreadful treatment they had experienced in junior football with Flemington-Kensington.

"There's a lot of ignorance in the Australian culture," agreed Haile-Michael, who runs what the teenagers call the North-Melbourne-Flemington community group for young African migrants in the area and has a big sport component. "The parents were the worst and the sledging was terrible. There were a lot of fights.

"We had this Flemington-Kensington team and most of the players were of African descent although there were Asians and white kids as well and our teammates felt so ashamed of what was being said to us. Our coaches said it was always going to happen and we had to deal with it.

"I don't think football is the problem, xenophobia is the problem."

Salew, currently studying VCE, said his first white friends were his junior football coach and his son. "My coach told me to take the abuse as a compliment, I must be doing something right," he said. "Now we are seeing a lot of the white people we met through football at social events. It's like we started from scratch and that was with football."

Salew, who coaches a multicultural soccer team as part of his extensive community work, barracks for Collingwood but, like Abdan, he cites Essendon's Bachar Houli as his inspiration. "I was reading an article about Bachar and it really helps confidence-wise to see all the obstacles he's been through.

"To hear someone else has gone through it and got past it, a lot of it is similar to me, I know how hard it must have been for him but he made it despite all that."

In this AFL age of themed rounds and seemingly endless home-and-away trophies, today's Walk in Hamony might not seem particularly significant. But when 3000 orange T-shirts stride into Telstra Dome as the chilly sun sets upon round-seven, an 18-year-old one-time Somalian refugee will represent another bridge built by the national code.

Abdi Artan, who has completed his VCE and is now studying engineering at RMIT, admitted he was looking forward to his few minutes of AFL fame. "Once in a while we get a chance to help change things," he said, "and for us with football the positives have outweighed the negatives. All credit to the Essendon Football Club for letting us come and do this."