Olympic champion and civil rights campaigner Peter Norman has been honoured by his nephew Matt in a new film, Salute. He spoke to Colin Fraser.

“He’s the skinny white guy in the photograph,” Matt Norman says. He is talking about his uncle, Peter Norman – Olympic champion, holder of the Australian men’s 200-metre sprint record and, for one fleeting hour in 1968, the World Record. It was a year when social activism was reaching a crescendo; the year Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated; and the year Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families.

Flanked by black sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Norman mounted the dais in Mexico wearing a badge in support of the Olympic Project for Human Rights. What he didn’t know was that Smith and Carlos would join in with a civil rights salute. One snapshot later and history was made for the second time that day.

Outraged authorities reprimanded the athletes and while the record Norman set for the men’s 200-metre sprint still stands – no Australian athlete has beaten it – when icons were lined up to open the Sydney Olympics, Peter Norman was not among them.

Salute documents a man who was more than the white guy in the photo. “For the last 37 years no one knew who Peter was,” Matt Norman says. “That he stood up for human rights, that he wore the badge.

Without straining the point, his film managed to choke an audience of 1500 when it premiered at the Sydney Film Festival. “I always knew that it would affect people,” he muses, “but I didn’t expect a whole audience to have a tear in their eye.” An emotional crowd gave him a standing ovation. “Someone timed it, they rang to tell me. Five minutes, twenty four. Amazing…”

Perhaps learning a bitter lesson from Norman’s experiences, Australian voices are deafening by their absence. “Peter had a lot of great friends, but they didn’t want to talk. They have careers in the media and I think the last thing they wanted to do, especially with Tibet/China, was to put anyone out of place. Despite what Peter achieved, it shows that we’ve learned nothing.”

The US Track and Field Federation proclaimed the date of his funeral to be Peter Norman Day. In Sydney, a mural depicting one of the most significant moments in Australian sporting history languishes hidden behind roadside barriers.

Salute is in cinemas from July 17.