Adam Goodes was dragged into the spotlight again this week amid accusations he milked free-kicks. But the Australian of the Year explains why he will never tire of using the public platform that award afforded him to fight for a better society.

Well, since you brought it up, Shane Warne, he didn’t ask for any of this.

He didn’t hit the phones, work the room or the numbers. He pressed no flesh.

He didn’t campaign to be standing on the lawn before Parliament House on the afternoon before Australia Day, nervously shifting in the fading Canberra light as Prime Minister Tony Abbott revealed him as Australian of the Year.

They chose him.

“My argument has always been, ‘I didn’t nominate me,”‘  Adam Goodes says. “I don’t have a vote on the Australia Day council. It’s their choice. But the platform I’ve got because of the award is something I will be forever grateful for. My voice can now reach a lot further than before.

“My Australian of the Year role never finishes, because being an Aboriginal person doesn’t stop.”

Surely, there are more worthy recipients: the doctors and neurosurgeons and professors who discover cures for cancer, the philandering leg-spin bowlers who took hundreds of Test wickets  … You’re just a footballer.

Toss that last statement out there as a piece of bait and that’s when Goodes reveals he is anything but.

“If people only remember me for my football,” he says, “I’ve failed in life. I live by that quote.”

He’s borrowed it from Isiah Thomas, the former Detroit Pistons point guard from the 1980s who is considered one of the NBA’s all-time greats.

“He uses basketball,” Goodes continues. “I change it to football. If I’m only defined by my sport, I really have failed. I’m not married, I don’t have children yet. But that’s my legacy: the children I bring into the world, and the impact they have. I have a great platform to do something special, before all that happens. Yes, I’ve opened myself up for more criticism, but I’m a professional athlete. I get criticised every week. I’m used to it. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, but you get used to it.”

Goodes told me these things a fortnight ago, in the café beneath Allianz Stadium, following a Swans training session at the SCG.

Among the throng of Roosters and Waratahs players, and the important suits from NRL headquarters, the hour spent with the AFL icon is privileged and rare airtime.

Since his anointment as Australian of the Year, the requests for interviews, speaking engagements, school visits and far more haven’t abated. There were 80 or so emails to his manager in the first week. About 50 every week since.

Time is something he doesn’t have much of right now, yet a fortnight remains an eternity in the life of Adam Goodes.

Since our interview, much has happened: he and Swans teammate Lance Franklin have been racially abused by a 70-year-old Western Bulldogs fan, who was evicted from Etihad Stadium at the behest of members from the same club; he’s been accused of “staging” for free kicks, attracting criticism from some of the greats of the game yet no rebuke from the match review panel; and he’s had his standing as Australian of the Year questioned by Warne via the former cricketer’s preferred mode of communication these days — Twitter.

“Like every other Australian, Warnie is entitled to his opinion on Goodesy’s football — so too the Australian of the Year,” says former Test wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist, the chairman of the Australia Day Council that decides who receives the title. “I love to think that people are discussing who the recipient is. It means they are engaging with the program.

“Some have misconstrued Warnie’s comments as racist. People have got wildly out of control if they think that.”

Despite this, the simplistic view from some within the AFL community is that Goodes received the award for being the victim of racism.

The defining moment came on May 24 last year, in the fading minutes of the Swans’ match against Collingwood at the MCG.

It was the opening round of the annual Indigenous Round. On that same day, Goodes had appeared in the Sydney press replicating the famous image of St Kilda hero Nicky Winmar, holding up his jumper and proudly pointing to his dark skin.

When a 13-year-old girl on the boundary fence called Goodes an “ape”, he stopped, removed his mouthguard and told the security guard: “Mate, I don’t want her here. Get her out of here.”

Goodes does not weary of speaking about that moment, and the good and bad dialogue that followed.

“I’m not tired of it,” he says. “That is one instance in a long line of instances in my life of racial abuse. It’s just the one most documented, because it was on TV, at the MCG, in the Indigenous round.

“We’re very resilient. We’ve had to be. Survival was a big part of it. Aboriginal people are a big group of survivors. I had an opportunity to speak up. I wanted to make the environment different for the next batch of minority groups coming through my sport, and community. Fifty years ago, others did it for me. Why shouldn’t I do it for others?”

Yet it still hurts. He reveals he has been approached to talk at the girl’s school, but has rejected the request.

“No, I haven’t spoken to the girl this year,” Goodes says. “I don’t think too many people would be surprised by that. My role isn’t to make sure they’re okay. They have contacted me. It’s my choice. They’ve gotten responses, but nothing directly from me. There was an opportunity to go to her school to do some stuff, but the timing didn’t work out and I was like, ‘Do I want to do that?’ It was just something I didn’t want to do to be honest. There’s been stuff for me and Eddie, too, but nothing to the point where I want to catch up.”

He’s referring to Eddie McGuire here, the Collingwood president who shook Goodes’ hand in the dressing-room after the MCG incident and said his club abhorred racism — then, days later, jokingly made comparisons between the incident and the new King Kong musical about to hit Melbourne.

Goodes says his relationship with McGuire will never be the same.

“No, it won’t,” he says. “Eddie and I have had a long relationship. He’s made a mistake but sometimes you don’t want to be around people who think a certain way, or say certain things.”

McGuire is taken aback when I suggest this to him. He says he had been in regular contact with Goodes via text messages during last year’s finals series.

When he saw Goodes at a function the day before last year’s grand final, he felt the bitterness was starting to cool.

“We hugged each other,” recalls McGuire. “I had my two boys, I introduced them to him. I thought this was hopefully the beginning of a reconciliation between us. I still hope we will. I know what we had before that, but it’s not for me to be concerned about that. When Adam is good and ready, I hope he realises I’m on his side.”

McGuire maintains his comments were misconstrued that morning on Triple M in Melbourne, but understands why they wounded Goodes so deeply.

“That’s bad luck for me,” he says. “But Adam has gone through this issue his whole life. The thing for me was not to drop my head. I try as much as I can to see it from Adam’s point of view. Okay, I was bruised and battered and terribly upset. But he’s copped this all his life. He’s a big, strong footballer, but this is generations of abuse and intolerance. When you’re a warrior, making a stand, sometimes you get hurt.”

For Goodes, football once broke down barriers. But now?

Whenever the Sherrin finds Goodes’s 34-year-old hands whenever he is playing in Melbourne, many opposition fans will boo and hiss. Whether it’s because they don’t agree with his stance at the MCG that night, agree with Warne’s sentiment that he didn’t deserve his Australian of the Year mantle, or believe that he’s a “protected species” when it comes to the act of staging is all up for debate.

“I think he’s been universally applauded by the football community for what he’s done,” McGuire insists. “Fighting this type of discrimination is at the heart of our game. Fans just boo great players. Bob Hawke walked onto the MCG at the height of his popularity in the 1980s. He was booed.”

Goodes has said before “Australian rules is the best way to express my Aboriginality”. The more he reads the more he strongly believes in the influence the traditional indigenous game of Marn Grook had on this giant of Australian sport.

Yet footy is more to him than that. Ask him what life would have been like without it, and he fires back with this: “It’s like asking me what it  would be like if I wasn’t black.”

He’s received a landslide of correspondence this year, from all corners of life. What broadens his smile the most are the ones from school children who are minorities.

“They talk about the inspiration they’ve gotten from seeing me stand up the way I have, for them to do the same, at school, on the sporting field, to say ‘Enough is enough’. That is so empowering: to see something that I will always do — stand up for what I believe in — has given other people the courage and the knowledge to do. It’s inspiring. It shows me this is working.”

That doesn’t mean he is oblivious to the hate.

“For every 50 letters I get, there are five that want to tell me how bad a person I am,” Goodes says. “They send it to the club. Some of them put their names to it, and I always like to thank them for their time and effort of writing a letter. And I’m sorry that I can’t change their opinion of me, and what I’ve done.”

Goodes, though, knows opinions are changing.

When Bombers fans reported one of their own earlier this year for making racist remarks, he knew how far the game had come in a short period.

“That’s the response we want,” he says. “Whether they are wearing black and red or white and red, or they’re just an AFL supporter, calling someone out for saying something inappropriate is the right thing to do.

“The way Essendon handled it was fantastic. They didn’t ban him forever. People make mistakes. We don’t have to behead everyone who makes a mistake. I’ve made mistakes in the past. He can learn about Aboriginal cultural and he can learn why it’s so offensive. I don’t want an AFL supporter booted out forever. I want to share our game with everyone. It’s a great game to share. Just be aware that the things you do or say at a football game, that people are watching and people are listening.”

Not so long ago, however, his voice wasn’t so loud.

When Goodes was drafted to Sydney from South Australia as a 17-year-old, he says he was “shy, not sure of myself and lazy”.

“It took a while to find my voice and accept that this is who I am and be a big part of that,” he says.

At Sydney, he found Brownlow medals and premierships, but he also found Michael O’Loughlin, a 300-gamer who still teaches him more about life than football.

“He was my first real male figurehead,” Goodes reflects. “A father figure but close enough in age to be my big brother. To have an older brother — something I had never had — has been priceless. To finally feel vulnerable and for that to be okay, to have someone to talk to who was older, and a bloke, was nice. It was nice to be in his shadow and grow in his shadow into the person I am now.”

Now, the pair spearhead their own foundation, which has the mission to develop and empower the next generation of Indigenous role models.

Goodes found strength in O’Loughlin, but he found it first in his mother, Lisa Sansbury, a member of the Stolen Generation.

“I can’t think of how you live your life without your biological parents and never seeing them again,” he says. “Then finding out that you’re a ward of the state since you were five years old. You have three kids to my father. Then after ten years of being engaged and married, and then have the courage to take the kids and leave, then bring the three kids up by herself. If my mum can do that, there’s not too much in the world that can happen to me that I can get really down about. That’s where I get my strength from. If my mum can get through, and do that and be the person she is, there’s not too much I can sit here and whinge about.”

He laughs. “And she won’t listen anyway,” he says.

The only time Goodes lapses into cliché during our hour together is when we talk about football.

He says his tricky knee is fine. He reports his instincts have never felt sharper. And he won’t give this non-AFL reporter the scoop on whether he’s going to keep playing beyond this year.

“Next year?” he says. “The best thing about what happens next year is that it’s my call. I’ve got no pressure from the footy club. I can play out the year and decide what I want to do. What I can say is that if I do choose to retire, I don’t have to do something straight away to pay the mortgage. It can be a calculated decision.”

A possible third premiership looms, yet you sense the gratifying moments of Goodes’ season have already come and gone.

“People who don’t know anything about football, but are grateful for the causes I’m involved with, are the best,” he says. “To have Jewish people, Indian people, all of them come up to me and say thank you for bringing awareness. Those things are what make it. I never find someone in the street who writes those bad letters, or says those bad things. It would be nice to see those people so I can have a conversation, so I can ask them why they think what I did was so, so, so wrong? I’m not afraid of confrontation.”

He pauses, takes a sip of his organic juice, and smiles.

“It doesn’t have to be an argument. We all have a voice. And they are all worth listening to.”