The Fairytale

by H. G. Nelson

  Suddenly, Harold was in trouble, caught in a rip. He disappeared from view. An eyewitness, Karen Carpenter, from Reservoir, who was holidaying nearby, blubbed to senior newsman Kevin Loaf from Channel Nine News in an exclusive:

  Ah no, Kevin, I had a perfect vantage point up on the cliffs, but it all happened so quickly. One minute Harold is grinning and waving at us up here and the next moment he is gone. Honestly, he disappeared like half a kilo of high-quality weed power flushed down a dunny when the Victorian cops are bashing on the door. Tragic! But what a way to go! It’s a national tragedy, Kevin!

  Her final words were: ‘Sadly the sea did what the great whites couldn’t!’

  There were so many questions about Harold’s end. Early QAnon theories alleged that Harold had faked his own death, knowing a Chinese submarine was on its way to pluck him from the soup. In fact, cliff-top observers claim they saw an unmarked submarine on the surface chugging west, past Inverloch towards Point Nepean, minutes before the PM went into the brine. The sub sighting lent credence to the view of the Chinese involvement in events. An extensive sea and beach search failed to find any trace of Harold Holt.

  One of the great ironies of his life and his mysterious demise is that even though he disappeared in the drink there is a wonderful swimming pool named after him, located in the Melbourne suburb of Glen Iris. The Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre is a beautiful pool. It was under construction at the time of his death. Only in Australia is it possible to name a swimming complex after someone who has drowned. What a thought-provoking warning to those who may be slack in the surf. It is a powerful reminder that trouble always lurks wherever the surf meets the turf.

  Only in Australia is it possible to name a swimming complex after someone who has drowned.

  There are also five fishing reserves named after Harold, including ones at Point Nepean, Mud Islands and Pope’s Eye.

  The spearfishing PM made a significant contribution to Australian slang, as in the phrase ‘doing a Harold’ as in ‘Holt’ rhyming with ‘bolt’, meaning to nick off quickly, without leaving a trace.

  He cashed his cheque doing what he loved: Bill Snedden, Opposition Leader 1972–75

  Bill was born in West Perth. He and two friends tried to join the navy at fifteen as under-aged recruits. The navy saw the troublesome treblesome coming and would not allow them up the gang plank, but the RAAF squawked, ‘Why not have a crack at the sky, Bill!’ two days after his eighteenth birthday.

  As World War Two came to an end Bill was able to transition, getting an early step up in the hospitality industry tending bar in the officers’ mess. Barman Snedden could whip up all the popular drinks, the Brooklyn, the Manhattan and the Diamantina cocktails.

  In his playing days he was talented footballer and played a few games for the West Perth Football Club in the 1944 WANFL season: the Falcons’ colours are red and blue, and their motto is ‘Does your heart beat true?’

  Bill must have a had good leg on him as he represented WA at the Australian Amateur Football Carnival in Melbourne in 1951. He left for the Carnival touching six feet and weighing thirteen stone ten in old speak. He did not bother the All-Australian selectors at the Carnival. There were other fish to fry.

  Later that year he became president of the Young Liberals and began the long march towards a seat in federal Parliament.

  Bill relocated to football central, Melbourne, where he practised law for a crust. In 1955 he had a successful tilt at the outer suburban seat of Bruce. He camped in Bruce until 1983. The seat was named after Stanley Bruce, 1st Viscount Bruce of Melbourne and the nation’s eighth Prime Minister, who ran the big show from 1923 till 1929.

  Once in Canberra Bill had a go at everything. He was Leader of the Opposition, Attorney General, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Leader of the Liberal Party and Treasurer.

  As Speaker, he loved to frock up when working the point-of-order coalface. He was the last Speaker to go strolling in the traditional gear of the full-bottomed wig and gown. It was a rig that featured in the House of Commons. He was a total conservative and loved the dress-ups.

  He became Opposition Leader after ‘Tiberius with a telephone’ Billy McMahon lost to Gough Whitlam in December 1972. The next election in 1974 was a double dissolution affair after the Senate and the Opposition led by Bill tried to block the Whitlam government’s budget.

  Bill stumbled and fell short when results came in, and his post-vote quote to all Australians was, ‘While we didn’t win, we didn’t lose all. We just didn’t get enough votes to win.’ He could not admit failure. That was pure Snedden.

  He could not admit failure. That was pure Snedden.

  Bill was a supporter of the Melbourne Football Club, often turning up at training to demonstrate how he did it in his day – much to the amusement of the current players who treated him as a hopeless joke.

  He served as a director of the Victorian Football League and was patron of the Professional Boxing Association of Australia. How did he find the time to cram it all in? They were different times with simpler responsibilities.

  He had a good turn of phrase, once describing Vietnam Moratorium organisers as ‘political bikies pack raping democracy’. It is hard to get the mind around the exact image in his head.

  In fact, a colourful turn of phrase followed him out the door. On 27 June, hours after attending John Howard’s campaign launch for the 1987 federal election, Bill checked into the Travelodge at Rushcutters Bay and checked out for the long goodbye in curious circumstances.

  The newspapers of the day bellowed, ‘Bill Died on the Job’, and the ‘Condom Was Loaded’. No further explanation is required. It was a great end to a sporting career. Bill, like Harold Holt, went out doing what he loved.

  THE OLYMPICS

  There are wonderful forgotten years where Australia made its mark in precious metal at the Big Show. They are worth a squiz!

  AFTER A 1500-YEAR PAUSE, the quest for golden success was suddenly back. The ancient Games concept had ground to a halt due to corruption, war, cheating, international indifference, pandemics, lack of interest and people having different things to do with their time. The whole concept had carked it and was lying on a cold slab, out for the count. For centuries, medical experts thought that the pose was a fair indication of death.

  But in 1896, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French PE teacher, passed the cold marble slab and detected a flicker of a pulse in the lifeless body. He applied the electrodes to the nodes and turned on that gold medal juice. He brought the five-ringed beast back to the perpendicular with an ambitiously bigger card of events than featured in the original shebang run around the suburbs of Olympia in ancient Greece.

  These modern Games offered many more chances for gold than the old, ‘prehistoric’, all-nude circus. The Baron realised times had changed, and to be taken seriously competitors had to compete in pants. The show needed a new-look line-up if it was to be relevant in the twentieth century. The old agenda of war-related sports looked tired and quaint. The big parade had to be jazzed up and plugged into the power board of modern times. After all, electric light was a real thing now.

  The old agenda of war-related sports looked tired and quaint. The big parade had to be jazzed up and plugged into the power board of modern times.

  Any thumbnail sketch of Australia’s Olympic involvement in the first ten Olympiads of the modern era illuminates how crucial and central the Olympics are to the total package of Australia’s sporting identity since the turn of the twentieth century. Australia has been to every modern Olympics since the burly, bearded Baron summoned the youth of the world to Athens in 1896 for the relaunch of the five-ringed competition.

  Our sporting greats have graced every summer Games and every winter wonderland white-out, with the exceptions of 1924–32 and 1948. Although, and this still pains every right-thinking Australian, in 1908 and 1912, Australia competed with New Zealand in a combined team. What! Stewards, call for the screens!

  Sin
ce the Baron got the ruckus underway twelve-and-a-half decades ago bellowing, ‘On your blocks! Ready, steady, go!’, Australian athletes have scooped up 169 gold, 178 silver and 215 bronze, totalling 562 (counting Tokyo’s COVID-era games). This impressive haul of loot puts the lucky country in ninth place against all comers.

  The star attraction of the medal tally is Australia’s poolside effort of sixty-nine gold. Getting wet has produced a sustained and sensational streak. The team did not always win, but Down-Under splashers were knocking on the door more than most. Australia’s tally in the pool is second only to that of the United States. When things looked bleak, Australian swimmers have been the hope of the side.

  Australians live on a big island ‘girt by sea’ with the majority camped along a long sandy coastline. We cannot stay out of the soup even when the shark alarm is blaring. Swimming is part of the national DNA. Is it any wonder we are champs of the damp?

  Swimming is part of the national DNA. Is it any wonder we are champs of the damp?

  Women were late to the Olympic pool party, but they have put in and quickly made up for lost time. Australian swimmers have struck gold surging from the deep end to the shallow end and back faster than their opponents, a dribble of showboating dawdlers.

  With such a long and sustained interest in going to the five-ringed rumpus overseas, it is no surprise that the Olympic cavalcade has washed up on Australian shores twice, once in 1956, when no other city in the world wanted the international school sports carnival, and in 2000, when Sydney staged ‘the best Games ever’.

  In recent coming attraction news, Australia has snared another chance to shine with the big golden thing lurking off to south-east Queensland and set to drop in 2032. A decision that gives confidence to those who worry about the future of the planet, that the international festival of leisure wear, lycra and poorly tailored tracksuits will be happening in Brisbane at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Life on Earth as we know it will last till then. The battle it took to get the Tokyo Games to the starting line suggests the Olympics will survive anything.

  Home ground advantage is a huge leg-up when the Games rumble into town. The green and gold crew came from the clouds for a fast-finishing third in Melbourne in 1956. Our swimmers snared eight of the thirteen gold medals up for grabs in the pool. In Sydney, the Fatso-powered Team Oi! Oi! Oi! blasted to the higher altitude with a be-on-me-next-time fourth.

  From the current vantage point on top of the ten-metre diving board, the chances of a golden clean sweep in every event, apart from break-dancing, look very good in Brisbane. The Australian Olympic Committee would be mad if it did not go into the 2032 meet with winning every event as their simple ambition and mission statement.

  Incidentally, the jury is out on the depth of break-dancing talent. Australia does not know if local funksters, as in b-boys and b-girls, have the footwork and chops to compete in the toprock, downrock, power moves and freeze caper at Olympic level.

  Australia’s Olympic story is a tale that needs its own book. Thankfully there are several already written by superb Australian authors.

  The Fairytale is not a vehicle for an in-depth examination of our historical successes or a probe into our winning times. Others have done that with great enthusiasm and dedication.

  The facts and figures of our Olympic tilts have been beautifully recorded in Bruce McAvaney’s Special, a nine-volume set detailing every Australian Olympic performance from 1896 to the present day, and his award-winning Away! My Olympics is Bruce’s hilarious behind-the-scenes tell-all personal diary of his Games experiences dating back to Helsinki in 1952.

  To get an essence of the excellent handiwork available from this nation’s top writers let’s turn to Wally ‘Fitzy’ Goffage’s bestseller My Golden Trout. On page eighty-nine he captures the moment of unexpected athletic success that is always tinged by both elation and terror.

  It’s the medal presentation for our coxless pair. But only the backend of the boat, ‘Lonesome’ Cyril Stiles, stood on the third step when the medals were being handed out after a personal best performance in Brazil 2016. Fitzy takes up the story in Lonesome’s own words:

  No writer in the world can describe the alarming thrill of standing unexpectedly on the third step of the Olympic podium waiting for the medal presentation ceremony to begin. Failure is there for all to see and yet you feel as though you have won against tremendous odds.

  I did not think I could race, let alone podium. I came down with gastro last night, I had pulled the groin off the bone in the first twenty metres of the race. I spewed as we reached halfway. Then Brayden ‘Snare’ Drum caught a crab and was flung from the boat. I was now on my own. I had lengths to make up. I could not let Australia down. I went for it. When it was over, I looked at the scoreboard and our tub, Australia 69, had finished third. Go figure!

  Sure, a couple of crews capsized, and two crews collided in lanes seven and eight. That doesn’t happen often. I channelled Steve Bradbury and ploughed home as others tipped over.

  The atmosphere for the medal presentation was electric. Knowing that you have beaten the best in the world, apart from those on the two steps above on the podium, is a tremendous thrill. But up there, there is no place to hide. Standing in the green and gold lycra, all you can think about is the flimsy stretched fabric between excitable flesh and the watching world. The emotions are running riot. Panic is suddenly lurking.

  Without even thinking, the sloop begins to point north at the thought that one of the big names of international sporting glamour is coming down from the committee room with your medal in their hands.

  Paranoia takes hold in a mind weakened by physical effort and the mid-race vomiting. Would the IOC send out one of the new breed of medal givers, like Princess Anne, Sporty Spice or stars of Game of Thrones like Brienne of Tarth or Missandei? It would be too much!

  Your eyes dart around looking for a soft spot to collapse. If the worst was to happen, you could stack on a faint. But there was nowhere soft to land safely. It was rock hard concrete everywhere.

  The sense of relief is enormous when you see one of the old Lausanne IOC crew like Prince Albert of Monaco, Lord Sebastian Coe or John Coates, the Aussie supremo, on the stroll, hobbling down the gangway with the three lumps of metal. That athletic trio of stars have stood on this very spot with the hand-out and know that just being on this spot can play havoc with emotional equilibrium.

  In those beautifully crafted paragraphs, Fitzy sums up the turmoil and mixed emotions that always accompany an Olympic medal presentation.

  But the dishing out of medals on the steps of the podium is the end of the process. Fresh starts and new beginnings are interesting because no one knows how the story will unfold, let alone end. The narrative is revealed with each step of the journey. That is the fabulous and compelling uncertainty of all sport. Let’s take the long amble back through the fogs of time to the beginnings of the modern Olympic era.

  The first ten Olympiads rapidly accelerated advances in Olympic competition and culture. Along with our medal success, the Australian Olympic Committee’s contribution to the Baron’s rumble off the track has been remarkable. Our administrators have shouldered the burden of supporting the Olympic ideals and principles. If this meant giving away soccer balls to an under-thirteen team in the Chang Mai region of Thailand or funding a go-kart track in the northern suburbs of Montevideo, or setting up appointments with Swiss dentists for the president of the Nigerian high jump community, then our frontline sporting diplomatic troops were up to the task.

  But back to Athens in 1896: Australia’s great success rests on the shoulders of one champ, Edwin ‘Ted’ Flack, aka ‘The Lion of Athens’. Ted, the only Australian competitor, burst onto the international scene, rewriting the Olympic record book. Obviously, the old record book had been lost long ago and very few in the Athens organising committee were fluent in ancient Greek. The new record book, an A4-sized lightly lined school exercise book with the word �
�Ted’ hastily written on the cover, was picked up from the local newsagent on the morning of the meet.

  Knowledgeable and award-winning athletic podcasters Vera Verushka and Trevor ‘The Underpant’ Staines argue in their weekly ninety-minute spray on Olympic issues, The Golden Shower:

  The Lion was the greatest Australian athlete of all time. He was the first modern Olympian and arguably our best GOAT ever. Look at the record. Ted did the lot. He won on the track in the 800 metres and the 1500 metres. He paused to settle the breathing before pulling on the Volley OCs and having a crack at the marathon. A day later he put the OCs on again and medalled in tennis. Who else is there? Who else is on the list?

  The 1896 marathon was a run with a tale. At the thirty-two-kilometre pole, Ted was in the lead and running beautifully. His main rival at this point was the French middle-distance star and shooter, Albin Lermusiaux. The Lion’s rival was no slouch, he had won the bronze medal in the 1500-metre scamper, but he found Ted’s pace in the big one too hot and dropped off, leaving just the finishing tape between our hero and another finish in first place.

  Tragedy struck the Flack tilt eight kilometres later. At the forty-kilometre mark Ted collapsed on the track. A French spectator stepped out of the crowd to help The Lion to his feet. This unsolicited intervention broke all the complex Olympic rules of the long stagger.

  Ted did the only thing any right-thinking Australian would do. He flattened the Frenchman.

  Ted did the only thing any right-thinking Australian would do. He flattened the Frenchman. It was a lucky punch, but he was red-carded by officials, removed from the course and taken by horse-drawn carriage back to the main stadium where controversial Prince Nicholas, who was president of the shooting sub-committee and part-time organiser of the 1896 Games, gave him the once-over with the stethoscope. No harm done. Ted resumed the perpendicular and was able to take a seat in the stand and watch the finish of the race.