THE exhibition space in Beverly Knight's Fitzroy gallery is currently filled with works by Rupert Betheras, a member of Collingwood's 2002 grand final side. It would be fair to describe Rupert as out there. When Collingwood cut him from its list at the age of 28, he went to Brazil and wrote a paper comparing playing AFL football with certain native Indian initiation rites. He is now pursuing a career as an artist and is on the edge of getting somewhere.

Knight's Alcaston Gallery is known for exhibiting major Aboriginal artists such as Ginger Riley, Barney Ellaga and Willie Gudabi. "All Essendon men," she says. Twice, she has attended funeral ceremonies in Arnhem Land where she has been the only woman present. At each, Michael Long's Essendon jumper, which she carried, was a ceremonial object like a message stick. For more than a decade, Knight acted as what she calls a "mentor" to Long, the 1993 Norm Smith medallist.

Knight connected with Aboriginal art in the 1980s after she decided to decorate two Melbourne restaurants she and her husband Anthony owned with Central Australian art. This put her in contact with Aboriginal artists. She's careful to point out the idea of opening a Melbourne gallery dealing in Aboriginal art was put to her by the artists and an organisation working on their behalf in Alice Springs. "They found me," she says. She'd always been "a commercially oriented person" and, in 1989, she added a gallery to her restaurants.

In 1993, she also became the AFL's first woman director when, with the encouragement of club champion Tim Watson, she joined the board at Essendon. Asked about the place of women and football, she says, "I always thought women were part of football". Her grandfather was an Essendon director and heavily involved in the club in a range of ways, acting as match manager for the reserves, running the social club.

A lot of her early life was spent at Essendon, and, to her eyes, there were always men and women around. "Women were part of what drove the club. They did a lot of work, they raised a lot of the money". Money was something she understood early. She had her first business at eight, sewing and selling aprons, doing it all the way through school. "I come from a family of pretty strong women," she says.

Before joining the board, she had sought to interest Essendon in a plan she had to use football to help the indigenous communities she travelled through for her gallery. "Out there, art was one thing, but the real conversation was about footy." Essendon advised her it had no program of that sort but then asked her if she'd like to become a player sponsor for a new recruit from the Northern Territory called Michael Long. She'd already seen him play, as a 17-year-old in the Central Australian grand final for Pioneers. He was best on ground.

"I was told he was shy and didn't speak. Of course, he talked his head off for the whole night." What happened was that Knight already knew part of his story - from Long's viewpoint, an extremely important part. A missing part. Knight knew Long's father, a member of the Stolen Generation, had been taken from Ti Tree, north of Alice Springs. She'd been told the story by members of the Ti Tree community. They knew who Michael Long was the Aboriginal way - that is, the way he connected with their land, Amudjera country, and everything on it. Long and Knight spoke almost daily for the whole of his career.

It was in Knight's Alcaston Gallery that Long handed over to Age journalist Robin Usher a letter he had written after hearing then prime minister John Howard float the idea that the Stolen Generation was a myth. Both his parents were stolen. His mother was given the name Agnes Brock because she was taken from beside the Brock Creek. When taken to Darwin, from where she was shipped to Melville Island with a group of other infants that included her future husband, she was terrified, having never seen the sea before. In the letter, which The Age published on the front page, Long called the prime minister a "cold-hearted prick".

Knight and former Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy are the most interesting people I've heard speak on Long. Having spent eight years supposedly writing a book on Long, I know what Knight means when she says Long "can write really well". He uses words like artists use colours. He doesn't use that many; he doesn't need to. "Whenever he felt passionate about something, he'd put it into writing. I'd put it into a form where he could use it."

But when these statements appeared, because he was Aboriginal, "people didn't think it came from him". "They thought it came from me. Lots of people said that, but Michael was a really good thinker, a really strategic thinker, with a very clear vision of what he was doing. He didn't have a chip on his shoulder. The way his parents had brought him up, he had respect for white people as well as black. He wasn't overtly political but as he matured, almost without realising it, he developed politics of his own and they were indigenous politics."

Knight is a key figure in the cultural revolution that came out of Essendon and swept through the AFL in the early '90s. Sheedy, who has a name for almost everyone, calls her Ms Mabo. Knight describes as "embarrassing" the lack of understanding of Aboriginal culture displayed in the opening sections of the AFL's official 150th history. "Where's the evidence anyone from the AFL sat down with senior people in Aboriginal communities with people who played footy before white contact?"

In 1996, when the AFL commemorated the centenary of the VFL, then commissioner Ross Oakley hit upon the idea of an exhibition by a group of artists expressing their feelings about footy. She persuaded Oakley to admit indigenous artists to the exhibition, most notably Ginger Riley. Ginger, as Knight calls him, believed life began at the base of the Four Arches, a rock formation in Arnhem Land. He believed it like Orthodox Jews and Christians believe life began in the Garden of Eden. She shows me a print of his painting of a game of football being played in front of the Four Arches entitled, Football, the Wet and Limmen Bight Country (1996).

Football, she says, was part of Ginger's dreaming, part of his creation story. She says another of her artists, Willie Gudabi, who didn't encounter whitefellas until he was in his 20s, had the same beliefs. "They told me the men who played the game were long and tall, giants of seven and eight-feet tall who could run and jump." She shows me the lean black figures leaping about in Ginger's painting and the Four Arches behind them. Ginger Riley believed footy was the game they played in the Dreamtime.

Knight was the legal guardian for former Collingwood and Essendon Aboriginal player Richard Cole when he was between the ages of 13 and 18. She is now the legal guardian of Long's niece and nephew, who are at school in Melbourne. One of the Tiwi artists she exhibits is Pedro Wonaeamirri, brother of Austin, who has made such an impact with Melbourne this year. In her travels through Aboriginal Australia, she frequently connects up with the families of players. "I'm like their Melbourne mother," she says. "I knew a lot of them when they were little. If they need help, they come to me."

Five years ago, she was approached by Phillip Warbridge, the chief executive of AFL Sportsready, whom she describes as "a very caring sort of man". He had this idea of a Dreamtime at the 'G game. This led to Knight making an appointment for Warbridge and former Richmond player Nathan Bower to have what she calls "a coffee with Kevin". Knight and Sheedy didn't always see eye-to-eye but Knight says Sheedy was "always a great champion of a cause". Dreamtime at the 'G was up and away.

When Knight became the AFL's first woman director, she didn't think it was an issue. "It didn't occur to me until the media made a bit of a thing of it". Her aunt was a St John Ambulance officer. That meant she was inside the fence each Saturday, on the boundary, one step from the game. The only difference between men and women she was aware of was that men stood alone at games in the members. She sat with the families of club legends such as Jack Clarke and Dick Reynolds. In her early teens, she stood with her cousins beside the players' race. In her late teens, she moved to the outer and stood on empty beer cans. Now she's back in the family block.

She believes in her club. "Looking back, the predominant thing for me is that Essendon has always lived its values. If you're going to say you believe in values, you've got live them. If that's women in footy, you have to live it. If it's indigenous footy, you have to live that, too."