Australia Yearbook - 2001

524 Year Book Australia 2001
Certainly we seem to believe that sporting
success can help define our place in the world
and illustrate who we are. Some years ago, in an
article that attracted a lot of attention but little
critical comment, I described ‘Australia’s
national sport’ as “winning”. Few have disagreed
with that assessment. Indeed many social
commentators (e.g. Horne, McGregor, Stoddart,
McKay et al.) have claimed the Australian
“passion for sport”, as Trollope described it, as
obsessive, as a perceived defining characteristic
of national identity, and as perhaps an
explanation of “a sporting lifestyle”. Brian
Stoddart (1988) admits that, like it or not, “sport
has been the central agency in the creation of
an Australian sense of community and identity”.
The national commitment to the Sydney Games
and the athletes who will represent Australia is
continuing proof that these observations and
that of Donald Horne (“…sport to many
Australians is life…”) are true. Indeed, critic
Keith Dunstan’s 1973 claim that sport in
Australia “is the ultimate super religion” still has
an accepted credibility in the wider community.
Origins
This preoccupation with sport can be explained
in historical terms. Given the European
colonisation of Australia, it was natural that
‘home’ practices, including sport, would be
transferred to the antipodes.
Anglo-Celtic settlement ensured that British
games were dominant and preferred, although
some ethnic groups (e.g. Germans) were able to
retain some of their pastimes within their
community. The Roman poet, Horace
(65–8 BC), was right when he observed:
They change the sky, but not their ways,
Those who rush across the seas.
However, there was a conscious effort to
develop “an entire British community…a new
Britannia” in the colonies of Australia, and
British sports and games helped to illustrate the
success of this transposition. The editor of the
South Australian Gazette and Colonial
Register, George Stevensen, acknowledged the
success of this in Adelaide, South Australia,
when he confirmed in an 1845 editorial that:
“English society, manners, language and habits
have been successfully transferred” (Register,
9 August 1845). Sport was one of those ‘habits’.
Francis Dutton, describing South Australia
ten years after its foundation for a British
audience, noted with satisfaction that “all the
British sports are kept up with much spirit in
the colony; hunting, racing and…cricket are in
the proper seasons much patronised”
(Dutton 1846).
Hunting and racing were the favoured leisure
pursuits of the colonial gentry as they were of
the upper class in Britain. The distinctive
uniform, imported pack and horses defined a
group of people who sought to be regarded as
the leaders of “the new Britannia in the
antipodes”. Edwin Blackmore, an early master of
the Adelaide Hunt, claimed that “South Australia
was the first of the Australian colonies to
possess a pack of hounds…” (Register,
5 September 1870), and while it is true that the
hunt was “fully established” there by the early
1840s, there were hunt clubs in the older
colonies that preceded the Adelaide Hunt.
Thomas George Gregson, gentleman farmer of
Jericho in Tasmania, possessed “a fine pack” of
hounds in 1828 and “with his scarlet coat and
good hunter…cuts no despicable
figure…”(cited in Von Stieglitz 1960). In New
South Wales John Piper was riding with the
Bathurst Hunt in the 1830s, and Bonwick in his
Discovery and Settlement of Port Phillip
describes a “hunt with hounds…and
15 redcoats…” in 1839 (cited in Daly 1986).
Describing the sports and pastimes of the
British in 1869, the Earl of Wilton wrote: “let but
a few Englishmen assemble in any quarter of the
globe and it may safely be predicted that a horse
race would be organized…”. Within a year of
settlement, the first ‘Adelaide Races’ were held
on the extensive plains west of the new town in
South Australia. While horse racing claimed
broad-based community support in the early
settlement period, particularly as it provided
opportunities for the ‘lower orders’ to gamble,
the fact that race meetings were organised as
mid week occasions indicated the intention of
the colonial gentry to keep the sport exclusive.
Indeed recent historical research indicates
“there is very little evidence that an egalitarian
sporting culture was forged during the
foundation years of white settlement in
Australia” (Adair and Vamplew 1997).
In New South Wales, officers of the 73rd
Regiment, who had been involved in horse racing
in India, organised a racing carnival in Sydney in
1810. A course was established in Hyde Park and
most of the horses involved in the three day
meet were owned (and ridden) by the officers.