SOMETHING HAPPENED AT a rugby game not so long ago that shows how much David Pocock has left behind his footballing life. It was a winter’s night in the nation’s capital and Pocock was inside Canberra Stadium watching the ACT Brumbies play when someone from the TV crew approached him.
“Hey, will you come over and have a chat with the commentators at halftime?” the guy asked.
“Sure,” said Pocock.
Later, after lights, camera, action, one of the first questions the broadcaster asked Pocock was, “What are you seeing at the breakdown?”
For the record, that is a perfectly reasonable question to ask David Pocock, who was one of the great loose forwards of the modern era precisely because of what he could do at the breakdown. If you know a little about rugby, you’ll get this. If you don’t, suffice to say that Pocock routinely brought to bear extraordinary amounts of courage, strength and technical skill to control this savage and crucial domain, where his work saved the Wallabies countless times and drove powerhouse opponents like the All Blacks and Springboks to distraction.
So, yes, a fair question. But on this night, Pocock didn’t know what to say.
“I’m there thinking, Gee, I’ve just been watching my mate on the wing,” Pocock tells me. “I’ve just been thinking the whole time, Gee, it’s a different thing to be a winger. Look at these guys! They kind of just stand there, and then they get involved. I hadn’t been following the game at all. I’d just been sitting there, mostly chatting to a mate.”
This anecdote notwithstanding, I put to Pocock a proposition: David Pocock misses playing rugby. He smiles. “No, I don’t,” he says. “It feels like two Davids ago.” Then: “I loved it. I absolutely loved it. It’s what I wanted to do from when I was a boy. But, by the end, I was keen to move on and do other things.”
Those other things turned out to be remarkable. Pocock played the last of his 83 Tests for the Wallabies in October 2019. In May 2022, he was elected to the federal upper house as an independent senator for the ACT and – with his re-election last year – has occupied that position ever since. In that time, he’s successfully negotiated more than 220 amendments to government bills, invariably for the better – but that’s an opinion, of course.
Right now, its feels as though politics is dividing us more sharply than it has in generations. Consequently, there may be nothing one can say about Pocock the politician that will be universally acknowledged. But let’s run this up the flagpole: Pocock is an idealist in a system choked by partisan ambition. To fellow idealists, he is an antidote to what masquerades as leadership in various parts of the world, and Australia is lucky to have him fighting for a fairer society and more robust democracy. “Clearly, there’s a bunch of dumb things we continue to do that we need to change,” he says. “So much energy is wasted on the culture wars when the main game is actually all of us, wherever you sit on the spectrum, against vested interests pulling the strings on so many issues.”
Pocock’s speaking to me on a video call from his parliamentary office. He’s standing (and stays standing for the duration), which is fitting, because that was key to his rugby genius: holding his feet at the breakdown despite the best efforts of fire-breathing rival packs. He looks fit, his muscular shoulders filling out a navy-blue shirt that, he says, is virtually a uniform for him nowadays when he doesn’t need to wear a suit. He rotates through four of these shirts, evoking the sartorial practice of, among others, Barack Obama, who’d repeat the same two or three ensembles ad infinitum to conserve mental energy for weightier matters.
Pocock was a rare beast as a footballer – and not just because of the quality of his play. He would speak out on sundry polarising issues – marriage equality, homophobia, the fossil fuel industry – and was arrested once for chaining himself to a mining excavator. Intermittently, his conduct would put him offside with the Australian Rugby Union and a portion of its corporate sponsors, as well as with some rugby fans and certain vitriolic media commentators, who essentially told him to shut up and play, lest his personal crusades compromise team morale. In response, Pocock was always measured. He’d say he was not a simply a footballer but rather a citizen who played football, and it was his right and responsibility to engage on issues that were bigger than sport. The resultant criticism was, he says now, “a motivator to perform, because if you were willing to talk about things outside footy and didn’t play well, you could bet you’d hear, ‘Well, if there was less chat and more focus on footy and training, there wouldn’t be a problem’.”
Clearly, Pocock had the makings of a conviction politician in some future second act but didn’t see himself joining the polity when he hung up his boots in 2020. “I was frustrated by a system that was too often not working for the people, but when people in Canberra asked me whether I’d run as an independent, my initial reaction was, ‘Absolutely not,” he says. “Yes, I wanted to see better representation of the community I love, but [my attitude was,] Someone else should do that job.”
But then, as Pocock tells it, that little voice that pipes up whenever you’re grappling with a big life decision got in his ear and it was saying, You’ll regret not having a crack at this.
If Pocock often sounded frustrated as a political outsider, the truth is, he still sounds frustrated as a senator, not least when the topic du jour is, say, gambling reform or political integrity. He may be a player now in the game of politics, but to use a couple of footy terms, he’s not a playmaker or an on-field general. He’s more like one of those wingers he was noticing at the Brumbies game who are limited in what they can do. This feeling of compromised effectuality has intensified during his second term, when it’s been easier for the government to pass legislation without his support. And he’s learnt the hard way the truth of that famous aphorism: “Laws are like sausages: it is better not to see them being made”.
“You get to see the system up close, and you can see why so many people have this anger and how people just seem to keep coming off second best to vested interests,” Pocock says. “It’s not working, whether it’s the cost of living or the environment. We’re not happier. Loneliness is on the rise. And we’re in a time when people are searching for something better. On the one hand, [being on the inside] has been such an eyeopener. And there are a lot of really good people in this place. But, in the end, they have to toe the party line.”
WHERE DID THIS man come from, this rugby titan with an acute social conscience who now walks the corridors of power? He comes from the best of circumstances. And the worst.
Pocock and his two younger brothers, Mike and Steve, grew up on a 2800-hectare mixed farm outside of Gweru, Zimbabwe. The early years were idyllic as the boys ran free. Young David developed an affinity for nature and wildlife around the same time he fell in love with footy.
“My dad [Andrew] was a huge, huge part of my early life,” Pocock tells me. “He was my hero growing up. Being on a farm, he’d be up at the crack of dawn. And when my brothers and I got home from school, we’d ride around on motorbikes with him, and he’d kick the footy with us or play hockey, whatever it might be.”
The boy had rugby heroes, too, none greater than Springbok legend Bobby Skinstad, a loose forward like Pocock but a very different type of player, more creative with ball in hand than Pocock would ever claim to have been, though not the immovable scavenger-colossus the Australian was.
But when Pocock was about 12, his world turned dark as the Mugabe regime initiated a highly volatile land-reform program that resulted in the seizure of white-owned farms across Zimbabwe. Previously, Pocock has recalled the terrifying events of the time, including the ambushing and killing of neighbouring farmers and the sound of chanting mobs near the family homestead.
In 2000, authorities handed his family a compulsory acquisition notice, giving them 90 days to vacate their property. Aided by the mother’s teaching qualifications, they were granted entry into Australia as skilled migrants and, in 2002, settled in Brisbane. David was enrolled at the Anglican Church Grammar School, where his rugby talents blossomed.
In his teens, Pocock was physically safe but psychologically scarred. How to cope with the anxiety? He committed himself to a regime of resistance exercise and complementary nutrition with the zealotry of a professional bodybuilder. The burly, granite-hard body that would underpin his breakdown mastery was taking shape, but it was also a mask of sorts, a suit of armour behind which he could feel a sense of control.
Thinking back on the values his Christian parents instilled in their boys, Pocock says “a lot of emphasis was just on respecting people, regardless of who they were in society, caring and being kind and a decent person. Another thing was trying to be part of something bigger than yourself. I often joke with my brothers how, growing up, we honestly can’t remember a time when we didn’t have someone living with us, in the granny flat or even in our house, someone just down on their luck or someone my folks knew who’d just got divorced and needed somewhere to live. There were constantly people around, and we just thought that was normal. We thought that’s just what you do.”
Aged 17, Pocock left home to play for the Western Force on the other side of the country, a move that triggered a period of self-examination. “You grow up in your household, and you take on the beliefs of your family,” he says. “I Ieft for Perth and you’re in a different state living with somebody you don’t know, a teammate, and you think, Well, what do I actually believe?
“I started reading heaps about these people I’d heard about growing up, people like Desmond Tutu” – the South African archbishop who coined the phrase ‘the Rainbow Nation’ to describe his vision for a unified South Africa after the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994: “A really phenomenal man who used so much humour and generosity in the face of awful oppression and struggle”. Ubuntu, a southern African philosophy that means ‘I am because we are’, has also shaped Pocock’s worldview. “It just makes sense,” he says. “You can’t be human on your own. It’s only through connections and spending time together . . . that’s where the magic happens.”
RUGBY AND POLITICS may be radically different pursuits, but Pocock insists the lessons he took from the former have helped him in his new realm. Indeed, despite the many and serious physical injuries the game inflicted on him, and its guardians’ occasional intolerance of his activism, gratitude is the pervasive emotion when Pocock reflects on his playing days.
“I know how much it did give me, how much I learnt, right from when I started playing in Grade 3 or whenever, all the way up,” he says. “Just the basic stuff around work ethic, continually trying to improve, your relationship with feedback, being able to take it on board, sift through it and implement it. And being part of a team: working with people you wouldn’t necessarily choose to hang out with all the time, but I guess seeing your shared goals and your shared humanity. Being able to take criticism. So much stuff. I think it was a really valuable grounding for what I’m doing now.”
Though renowned for his meticulous approach to preparation as a rugby player, Pocock says his workload is greater these days, with far fewer days off. Really, though, “both are fairly all-consuming”. If I’m reading him right, he sometimes misses the clear-cut, finite nature of rugby’s battles, where you win, lose or draw, then move on. Politics, in contrast, can feel like an endless chipping away at intractable problems. There’s no siren and rarely an occasion for unbridled celebration, because ‘victories’ for an independent often amount to the wrangling of an unappealing compromise. Pocock wants to become more effective at what he’s doing. “It’s one thing to keep banging on about issues, but I want to be part of changing the system so it actually delivers for people.”
Pocock’s a father now. He and his wife, Emma, had a child in 2024 and have another due early next year. Years ago, it was reported, as Pocock puts it, that the couple would refrain from having kids “to save the world” – but this was never their thinking. Yes, they had concerns about bringing children into a world imperilled by global warming. But then Emma became pregnant – “and it’s been great”.
There may be no fitter specimen in the upper house than Pocock, who still trains regularly but says his relationship with exercise is healthier (read: less complex) than it used to be.
Back then, “it was really, at the end of the day, a coping mechanism,” he says. “It was how I coped with the change of moving to Australia, the trauma of what had happened in Zimbabwe, and I justified it as, ‘This is good for my rugby’. And it was, though I overdid it at different stages and paid the price. Those sorts of patterns take a lot of unlearning. So, honestly, it’s an ongoing struggle to be kinder to myself. I actually just want to be healthy. Really trying to think this through, I want to do this to be fit and strong and able to do all the things that I love doing: getting outside, hiking, crossing the rivers, swimming, walks in the morning with my family. I certainly find it good for everything – mental health, how I think.”
Pocock needs to be on his game for what might be brewing in Australian politics – a sharp shift to the right precipitated by concerns about immigration and the cost of living. What’s happening in the US, he says, is a warning to which we need to pay heed. Angry, desperate people who feel ignored or disrespected will embrace populist leaders brandishing silver bullets.
Ask Pocock how he would describe himself today and he thinks hard before making a sound. Perhaps 20 seconds pass.
“I’m someone who is just on a journey of being more comfortable with who I am,” he says. “The struggle we all face is that we have to meet societal expectations, family expectations – and then you’ve got you. And once you’ve gone through the phase of your life where you’re trying to prove yourself and make something of yourself, how do you then really just try to contribute?”
In truth, Pocock has been contributing splendidly in different ways for 20 years or so. For as long as he can stick it out in Canberra, his country will be better for his presence.
Credits
Words Daniel Williams
Photographer Sam Bisso
Styling and Editor in Chief Grant Pearce
Production Director Rebecca Moore
Fashion Assistant Kailee Waller
