Australia Yearbook - 2001

526 Year Book Australia 2001
working man. Professor Anderson Stuart, Dean
of the Medical School at Sydney University,
supported Inglis but added another
explanation: that the immigrants to Australia
had been “drawn from an adventurous lot” and
that the qualities that contributed to their risk
taking conduced to success in sport.
Australians certainly were successful in
international sport. The country claimed its first
Olympic victor when Edwin Flack won both the
800 and 1500 metres in Athens in 1896. Edward
Trickett, though, was Australia’s first world
champion, having beaten sculler James Sadler in
England in 1876. There were others—Freddy
Lane, Frank Beaurepaire, Andrew Charlton and
Fanny Durack in swimming, Norman Brookes in
tennis. Numerous cricketers had international
reputations, and the ‘tests’ against England
confirmed their status and Australia’s growing
confidence in its overall sporting prowess in the
games that ‘mattered’.
Although linked with New Zealand as Australasia
for the early Davis Cup tennis competitions,
success against both the British and Americans
(1907–1911) boosted antipodean confidence,
especially in 1911 when the Americans were
beaten 5–0. International sporting success
continued as the century progressed: Bobby
Pearce and Mervyn Wood in the single sculls at
the Olympic Games (1928, 1932, 1948), Jack
Crawford winning the Wimbledon tennis title in
1933. Clare Dennis won gold in swimming at the
1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and
Marjorie Jackson and Shirley Strickland were
successful at the Games in Helsinki in 1952.
Walter Lindrum was champion of the world in
billiards from 1932 to 1950 and Don Bradman
“the world’s best cricketer”.
In the two decades of the fifties and sixties
Australia competed in nineteen Davis Cup finals
and won fifteen of them. When the Olympic
Games were held in Melbourne in 1956 Australia
claimed thirteen golds, four in athletics and
eight in swimming. This was the era of the
‘golden girls’ including Betty Cuthbert and
Dawn Fraser. When, in 1962, Sports Illustrated
judged the three leading nations in each of forty
sports, Australia ranked sixth out of thirty-four
nations. When scores were weighted on a per
capita basis, Australia was placed first, and
American sports writer Herbert Warren Wind
concluded that it was “a land inundated with
athletes”. Australia basked in the limelight,
enjoying the reputation of a sporting nation.
That ended in the sixties when other countries,
particularly in the Eastern Bloc, recognised the
value of sporting success, and developed
structural systems to support athletic talent.
After winning eight gold medals at the Munich
Olympics in 1972, the Games of Montreal in
1976 produced none. Dubbed the “Lucky
Country” by Donald Horne in the sixties, the
country seemed to be running out of luck.
When Australians were not winning in the
international sporting arenas (the seventies), the
Government was forced by public pressure to
match the efforts of other countries to maintain
an expectation that by now had become part of
the national ethos. The Australian Institute of
Sport was established in Canberra in 1981 and
was followed by State Institutes in the years
following. Talent identification programs and
elite athlete support at the so-called ‘gold medal
factories’ have reversed the losing trend, and
Australia has once more secured winners in the
international arena. Government initiatives now
seek actively to ensure that Australia’s national
sport is winning, and the population seems
prepared to pay the cost of that success.
However, there are some reservations about the
current program and the aftermath of the Sydney
2000 Olympic Games.
Conclusion: A sporting life?
In his anthology of contemporary Australian
writing (Sporting Declaration, 1996) Manfred
Jurgensen asserts that “it is difficult to
overestimate the importance of sport in the
establishment of an Australian cultural identity”,
but the question has to be asked: is the lifestyle
an active sporting one? Certainly ‘sportuguese’
seems to be the lingua franca of the
people—we even use the word ‘sport’ as a slang
term of endearment, interchangeable with
‘mate’! One of our most significant public
holidays celebrates a Melbourne horse race, and
we seem preoccupied with the results of our
national sporting representatives.
Our vicarious identification with successful elite
Australian athletes has given them hero/heroine
status, such that a christian name is enough to
identify them (e.g. Dawn Fraser, Cathy
Freeman, Kieran Perkins).
However, while there is a belief in the sport
obsession and its centrality in defining the
Australian character, active involvement is a
myth. Sports participation nowadays is
essentially reserved for the young and aspiring.