INDIGENOUS Round celebrates the outsized contribution Aborigines have made to Australian football, meanwhile concentrating all minds on what the rest of Australia, through the agency of football, might give back to a still greatly disadvantaged indigenous community. You cannot argue with it, any more than you can argue with motherhood. It might just as well be called Feelgood Round.

But as the production of Indigenous Round grows more extravagant every year and the chorus of self-congratulation rises, you can ask how much of Indigenous Round is about indigenous Australians and how much is about non-indigenous? It is a question the AFL must consider carefully as it plans for next year.

Chris Lewis was a charming Aboriginal footballer with West Coast who got himself into scrapes, most infamously when, after his suspension in 1991 for biting Melbourne's Todd Viney, he was also suspended for spitting at another player and for pushing a boundary umpire. Though a champion, he was inconsistent. Yet he never lost the affection of the Perth football public.

Fellow West Australian Dennis Cometti's theory at the time was that white fans lavished attention on Lewis unconditionally in part because it allowed them to discharge their obligation to Aboriginal Australia without having to go far out of their way, nor having to deal with Aborigines personally. The fence at Subiaco served many purposes.

Cometti was speaking in the year after Nicky Winmar's famous gesture of pride in his black skin at Victoria Park and in the same year as Michael Long's even more famous stand against racism after the Anzac Day match. When Lewis was charged with biting Viney's finger two years previously, Melbourne made great and insensitive play of sending Viney off for an AIDS test.

It is doubtful that any club would be so provocative now. White Australia's attitude to black has evolved since, thankfully. But a patronising disposition — because it is less overt than racism, indeed mostly is unconscious — can run deeper still. Minds can be changed easily, mindsets not.

Former England cricket captain Mike Brearley noted the English public's warmth for Indian-born spinner Monty Panesar last year and wondered if it was not also an instance of being embraced by society at a safe and risk-free remove.

Brearley wondered whether Panesar, like Lewis, was not the acceptable, dark face.

In an essay in the latest edition of The Monthly, Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson asks whether Barack Obama's popularity in the US derives in part from the fact that he is a presentable black man who offers white Americans absolution from their racist past.

It is a question first posed by black conservative Shelby Steele, who opposed such notions as affirmative action. "The great ingenuity of interventions like affirmative action," he wrote, "has not been that they give Americans a way to identify with the struggle of blacks, but that they give them a way to identify with racial virtuousness quite apart from blacks."

I am not saying that the AFL's motivation in staging the round, with all its hype and trappings, is cynical. But I wonder if perspective slowly is being lost. As highlighted frequently in these pages in the past fortnight, the AFL's official history, marking its 150th year, disavows the idea that the founders of Australian football were influenced in part by a football-like game called marn grook, played by Aborigines in some parts of Australia at the time of white settlement.

The AFL made a great fuss a few years ago when Sydney and Essendon began to play annually for the Marn Grook Trophy. Latterly, it has made much less fanfare of the fixture; it is not highlighted in the official fixture, though many other themed matches are.

Martin Flanagan, well-known as a champion of the cause of Aboriginal understanding, suggested on Saturday that if the AFL was so sceptical of the idea of a part-indigenous heritage, its promotion of games such as the Marn Grook Trophy and Dreamtime at the 'G were no more than self-interested marketing exercises.

I think Indigenous Round is worth the effort. It can do no harm to recognise the distinct impact indigenous footballers have had on the game and, if it opens up even a few more minds, its ostensible purpose has been served. But the AFL must make absolutely and scrupulously sure that it is about indigenous football and footballers, not merely the rest of us patting them on the back.