The Sky News journalist, who opened up about the shame he felt as an Indigenous child in The Guardian, said the controversy was an opportunity for Australia to hold itself to account.

Grant told ABC's Lateline that when Goodes heard the crowd's boos, the wounds from the racism he experienced as a child were reopened.

"We don't hear just a boo, we hear - as I wrote in the piece - the howls of humiliation that we often grew up with as Indigenous people," he said on Friday night.

"The howls that echo across history of two centuries of dispossession and injustice and suffering."

Grant explained the visceral experience of racism that he, Goodes and other Indigenous people had endured.

"Not just as an abstract concept, but the mark it leaves on your body and the mark it leaves on your soul."

Grant said people were booing Goodes - "an extraordinary man" - for a range of reasons.

But, he said the behaviour stemmed from a racist incident when a 13-year-old girl called him an "ape".

"From that moment on there was a cleavage between Adam Goodes and the AFL, and AFL fans, and that has grown and widened as time has gone on," he said.

"So let's not imagine for a moment that there is not a racial element here."

Grant said Australians needed to ask themselves whether recognising that Indigenous people had suffered diminished the greatest of their country.

"Australia likes to celebrate its greatest," he said. "Well let's hold Australia to great account as well."

Grant admitted to being apprehensive going public with his views on the Goodes saga.

He said he didn't want to get into a "slanging match" about an issue as sensitive as race.

"[Something] that goes to the very core of the legitimacy of the country, that this country was founded on the dispossession of a group of people, my people, who still suffer today," he said.

"We need to enter this with caution and care."

He said leaders needed to speak to the healing of the country, not its divisions.

However, as a "civilised society", Grant said he would like to think Australians would listen if told they were hurting someone.

"That if someone says to you, 'that hurts, this has gone beyond just mere booing, this is hurting me, this is hurting indigenous people, it has racial overtones', we stop," he said.