And yet it’s a little known fact that the 190-game All-Australian representative was actually born in Kantara, a small town in Northern Lebanon.
Hanna is but one of a number of senior players both past and present who make the cut for Carlton’s International XVIII - recently named to coincide with the AFL’s Multicultural round. Amongst them is Peter Bevilacqua, the one-game player acknowledged as the game’s only Italian-born footballer, and Val Perovic, who with his three brothers followed their parents from Croatia to Australia, disembarking the passenger ship Toscana in Melbourne in 1958.
So what, if anything, does Mil remember of Kantara?
“I was only five and I don’t remember much of the old place,” Mil said. “I can remember the certain smells like the herbal aniseed tea my mother still makes. It’s beautiful, delicious and it always takes me back.
“In Kantara everybody grew their own produce, including honey, and I remember poking a stick into where the bees were . . . so as a kid I was very annoying.
“I also remember this dog that belonged to a friend of my father’s there. Whenever the bloke tied the dog up I’d be over like a flash to let it go, so it was no surprise that on the day I left for Australia the bloke said he was glad to see the end of me.”
Mil, together with his mother and his younger sister, completed the historic flight from Lebanon to Australia on Melbourne Cup Day 1971. Again, the experience left an indelible impression
“The one thing I do remember about that flight was seeing a cloud out the window and thinking ‘Australia must be on that cloud somewhere’. As a five year-old your imagination does run riot,” Mil said.
In Australia, the Hannas were reunited with Mil’s late father who had made the move in ’67. As Mil recalled: “Dad came to Australia alone after the civil war broke out. It took him four years to save enough money to get a house and then he sent for us. But it wasn’t until 1976 that my older brother and sister completed the move because they were being looked after by my Grandad and didn’t really want to leave.”
Mil’s schooldays were happy days for him, and for good reason too. As he said: “I went to school with mostly Lebanese, Turkish and Italian kids, so I did feel at home”.
“And of the 500 students at East Brunswick High only ten were what you’d call Anglo-Saxon”.
Taken aback by the fact that a team of Carlton internationals can be named, Mil said that Australian Rules and indeed sport in general provided that level playing field.
“It’s the same all over the world,” he said. “You look at sport and whether the competitors are Mexican, Spanish, Chinese or whatever, there’s no barriers. Once you step over the white line you’re okay.”
