It was one of those strange nights that you just fall into. Two of us starving and thirsting after a day's work at the Sydney Olympics found a cramped basement pub that was selling food late at night. The food was good, the floorshow was brilliant. Through what was left of the night a drunken Japanese diplomat kept making cameo appearances attempting to buy carryout, we enjoyed tutorials on aboriginal rights, imperialism, Mike Tyson and how to get the best value out of hookers.

It was a place for anti-heroes and the walls were plastered with their images. All except Tyson's. To which there was a story.

When he was making The Matrix in Australia, Samuel L Jackson used to spend Sunday afternoons in this pub and Samuel got to ragging the guys about the big picture of Tyson. He wasn't denying them their right to worship, just pointing out that, with Mike being a convicted rapist, perhaps it wasn't good for business. The boys demurred and the argument went on every Sunday till Jackson was leaving Australia and out of good grace they let him remove their Mike Tyson photo.

They missed Mike, but gradually he was replaced in their affections. They pointed to a collage of photos of a rugby league player.

Meet Anthony The Man Mundine. In terms of giving the finger to society, he makes Tyson look like an establishment figure. A trawl through his press cuttings tempts one to divide them in two piles. The Mundine Goes Missing stories and the Mundine Triumphs stories.

If, like me, you have certain rules in life, never eating at places called Mom & Pops, never trusting people who describe themselves as The Man you will find it hard to be won over. Yet, yet, yet, Anthony Mundine has saving graces. He has an agenda, a political point of view, a history and a pedigree.

Aussies either love him or hate him. Indeed, in the supposedly classless world of Down Under he is a useful dividing line. A person's attitude towards Anthony Mundine will tell you a lot about his or her attitudes to everything else. You see, Anthony Mundine is an aboriginal, but he's not a good abo. He didn't endorse the Olympics, He's not cuddly like Cathy Freeman or Yvonne Goolagong. He's aboriginal and he's not happy clappy about it. He's mad as hell.

In 1998 he was at the centre of one of what has been a series of racial flashpoints in Australian sport, when he complained of being abused racially by Barry Ward of Canterbury. It was argued that a bit of slagging in the course of a match was just part of the game. Mundine stood firm. Ward was fined $10,000.

Through a rugby league career which has been as astonishing for its triumphs as for Australia's resolute refusal to give him an international cap, Mundine has persistently refused to separate being a footballer from being an aboriginal. You take him as one thing you take him as both and respect him as both.

He dedicates performances to the Stolen Generation of aboriginal babies of which his grandmother was one, he shapes up to the cosy consensus form of progress which still leaves Aboriginal people living in great heaving slums like Redfern in Sydney. In short, he makes people feel uncomfortable.

He rages against the expectation that, because he has earned a lot of money and a lot of fans, that he should be grateful for his lot. He howls against easy symbols, things which make white Australia feel comfortable about the present. "What are we to reconcile," he says. "Reconciliation means that we both have a problem. This is wrong. They did wrong. It's up to them to take the steps to right their wrongs."

YOU see his point. The same thing happened five years ago when this country sent Frank Barrett to the Olympics. Frank was a traveller. He wasn't angry like Mundine, but he was uncompromising. People asked him what he would do if he was famous, if he made a lot of money after the Games and Frank spoke in his terms.

He talked about getting a caravan, about the places he wanted to wander through, about the culture of travelling and how he would live his life as his parents had. We wanted him to be Francie the loveable traveller and see him settled in a semi-d and endorsing our lifestyle. He went his own way though and was the better for it.

Mundine is going his own way. Last spring he went missing from rugby league for the last time. He tore up his big contract. He was spotted in Honolulu, San Francisco, Vancouver and other spots before he came home announcing that he was beginning a boxing career. Last Monday night he became Australian super-middleweight champion. He intends to fight for a world title belt within a year.

And he has the pedigree. His father was Tony Mundine and he coulda been the champion of the world if he hadn't come out the worst from seven legendary rounds of boxing against Carlos Monzon back in 1974.

Today, Tony runs a gym in the heart of Redfern, one of those sweat-smelling dank kips that boxers just seem to flower from. Tony and his son would recognise something if they came to Galway and saw the trailer which Frank Barrett and his brothers grew up training in.

In Australia, they are waiting to see what the future will bring Mundine. They call him The Man. They call him The Mouth. We'll be hearing more from his viewpoint and we'll know that he speaks for a great swathe of his people. He was aboriginal of the year when Cathy Freeman was in her pomp. Boxing he says will enable him to bring his message and his people's message to a greater audience.

He has our ears. We'll listen with interest because his arguments have resonance right here in nimby Ireland.