Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  In Victoria, Senator Kennelly urged all parties to show moderation. But the Victorian election was a bitter contest, and again Catholic ALP loyalists were condemned as Communists and were often willing to answer in kind. New South Wales premier Joe Cahill and his deputy R.J. Heffron, both Catholics, along with Evatt, helped launch Victorian premier John Cain’s campaign. But the Liberal Party under Henry Bolte was elected—on the preferences extended by the breakaway party, which now called itself the Democratic Labor Party (DLP)—on 28 May. Santamaria admitted that the election result was a ‘negative victory’, but that it at least showed that Labor could not win while it was seen as accommodating Communism. He forgave himself his own huge contributions to that perception.

  In the electioneering leading to the federal poll in December 1955, Labor men on a worksite in Adelaide challenged Stan Keon, one of the Victorian Senate candidates and one of the founders of the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), who goaded them in return and called them a ‘howling pack of Communist dingoes’. Some of those watching filled empty lunch bags with water and threw them at the speakers. Others attempted to pull them by the ankles from the platform, while one man tore out the microphone wires and another one was apprehended by a passing motorcycle policeman aiming to toss a house brick at Keon. In the December 1955 general elections, the Labor Party expected to win three of the five Senate seats available in South Australia, but they did not manage it because of the influence of the newly formed Anti-Communists. The term ‘Molotov party’ came from Keon, who declared from the back of a truck, ‘We stand for the Australian Labor Party; not the Molotov Party or the Evatt Party.’ This was a reference to the fact that Evatt had naïvely asserted in the House that he had written to the Soviet Union’s Foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, concerning the Petrov affair.

  DLP senators would, into the 1960s, hold the balance of power in the Senate. They had the satisfaction of seeing Evatt now reduced in mental sharpness due to some indefinite neurological disease retire from politics in 1960. It can be at least debated whether the DLP kept Labor out of office, since many of its supporters were members of a rising Catholic middle class and might have voted Liberal anyhow. The reuniting of the DLP and the Labor Party awaited a creative hand, and Gough Whitlam would provide it.

  Until then Calwell grew increasingly disgruntled with his party, his deputy leader Gough Whitlam (elected to that post in 1960), and with the Catholic Church, of which he remained an observant member. As his electoral failures grew he became particularly angry with Archbishop Mannix, who would die in the midst of Calwell’s travails in 1963, and with many other clerical and lay leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Victoria. He would write, ‘The Mannix inheritance of the 1950s still hangs like a pall over the Catholic Church in Australia and continues to poison the relations of the Church with citizens of other faiths, and with many Labor-minded Catholics as well.’

  PURE SPORT IN A FRAUGHT WORLD

  For Australians, sport was a joy unalloyed by politics or long-running history. Certainly a post-colonial desire to thrash England cricket teams had been enhanced by the Bodyline series of 1932–33 when Douglas Jardine, who went to some trouble to imitate the Australians’ idea of an Oxford University hyper-Pom, led an MCC (England) team to Australia. It became an Australian myth, but seems to have proved literal truth as well, on the later evidence of some of Jardine’s team mates, that he insisted his players refer to Bradman as ‘the little bastard’. Jardine set Harold Larwood, the working class bowler from Nottingham, the task of bowling aggressively at the bodies of the Australian batsmen while he himself grotesquely stacked the leg side with fielders to take catches deflected in terror away from the body by bats of (in those days) the un-helmeted victims. To Australians, Bodyline bespoke British mere lip service to the concept of fair play, and when Australian batsman and wicket-keeper Bert Oldfield suffered a broken skull, the relations between the Australian Cricket Board and the MCC soured, and the damage Bodyline was doing to relations between Britain and Australia was even seriously discussed at the Dominion Office itself.

  A generation later, however, the damage done through the unconscionable Bodyline stratagem had been largely forgotten, even if never forgiven. By 1956, Bradman and other Australian cricketers had taken devastating revenge on England before and after World War II. The author remembers the utter outclassing of an England team led by Wally Hammond (who as a member of Jardine’s team had opposed Bodyline) in Australia in 1946–47. Children twelve and under had never seen Ashes cricket before, and now beheld Bradman and his men triumph, it seemed, without raising a sweat. The Australians made the most runs, took the most wickets and won the series 3–0. Bradman scored 680 runs in the series for an average of 97.14. Three other batsmen had series averages over 70, and Ray Lindwall, Col McCool and the former fighter pilot Keith Miller massacred the England batting line-up. The First Test in Brisbane told the tale of easeful dominance: Australia, 645, England 141 and 172. The shaky but convinced proposition fathers brought back from the war that one Aussie was worth three Poms seemed nearly proven mathematically in such figures. It was confirmed again when Bradman’s ‘Invincibles’ toured and routed England in the summer of 1948. By 1954–55, when Australians generally were preparing for the Melbourne Olympics, their cricket side lost the Ashes 3–1 against a stellar England, but such defeats were considered interludes to Australia’s inevitable position as winners. Sport was that: an assertion of Australian fibre, a compensation for our Antipodean roughness and lack of cultivation, but at the same time something far more innocent than the claims to be a herrenvolk which had characterised Hitler’s Olympians in 1936. Australian claims went no further than: Australia made us; it made us very good; and we can give any bugger a shake.

  By the time the Olympics were mooted for Melbourne, the southern and western states were still in utter rapture to that uniquely national game about to celebrate its centennial, Australian Rules Football. In 1956, the year of the Olympics, the grand final record crowd of 114,000 people saw Melbourne, with the young Ron Barassi, defeat Collingwood, as it had also done the year before. There was to be an exhibition match at the Olympics, but even Melburnians, normally full of missionary zeal for their code, did not expect it to do much more than mystify visitors since it would be necessarily a game between amateurs, as the Olympic strictures then required.

  The eastern states’ passion, Rugby League, had been dominated since World War II by the same desire to defeat England as had characterised Australian cricket. On his journey to England in 1945, an interlude in his work on the United Nations, H.V. Evatt visited the Rugby League authorities in the north and asked them could they send a team to Australia for the Australian winter of 1946. The omens were not good—Central Park at Wigan was an installation for anti-aircraft guns. Rugby League had been played only intermittently during the war and chiefly amongst British teams from the various armed forces. But the British held trials, selected a team and despatched it aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable. The other passengers were war brides coming to Australia to be united with their former or serving RAAF husbands.

  It is said that when a crowd watched the England team and its monumental forwards leave a bus at the Sydney Cricket Ground, an Australian cried, ‘No more bloody Bundles for Britain’, a reference to the food hampers many Australians had regularly sent to the United Kingdom during the war. Led by the dazzling Welsh centre-three-quarter, Gus Risman, the English won the test series 3–0. The Australians toured England and France in 1948–49 and again the England team won all three games and then went to meet the French in Marseilles and Bordeaux. At last, in 1950, the touring Great Britain team was beaten 2–1, and a sense of God-ordained appropriateness was restored. In 1951 an exceptional French Rugby League team, one which had connections to the World War II French underground in the south of France, Rugby League having been outlawed by the Nazis, came to Australia. France’s talent had been bolstered by the fact that French Rugby Union had
been outlawed for violence and ‘shamateurism’ by its international body, and many French Union players had turned to League. The French won and, in the Olympic year, England also seized the test series back from the Australians. There were other ways in which Australian self-mythology was at least marginally challenged. Rugby Union, with its small player base, generally in the east, performed creditably against European teams, but found conquering the All Blacks of New Zealand generally too hard a task. Australians did not feel as challenged by New Zealand, however, as by what they saw as the former Imperial masters. And in any case Australians looked to their swimmers, runners and cyclists to assert their God-given sporting claims.

  Sport was thus a simple mechanism in Australia, and it would be the 1956 Melbourne Olympics which would show how serious an arm of politics it was. For one thing, Australian athletes would become aware of the use of synthetic testosterone by nations in the Soviet bloc, by team managements anxious to assert the obvious vigour imbued in their young athletes by Communism. Under Cold War pressure, the Americans themselves began experimentation, not least with anabolic steroids provided by their team physician John B. Ziegler. To the Australian athletes who trained on rural and suburban paddocks and in surf fed and municipal pools, these practices, if they heard rumours of them, would have seemed preposterous. Didn’t you just run? Didn’t you just swim? And didn’t Australia win more gold medals than it was entitled to? But there were even more sinister aspects of the Soviet system which would impinge on the Melbourne games.

  The new medium of television covered the Games in Sydney and Melbourne, but did not reach the other states and territories. It would take until 1961 before television reached the Australian Capital Territory, and even then not all country areas were reached by the networks. Television was a little over a month old when the Games began, initiated with an announcement by the broadcaster Bruce Gyngell, who faced the cameras and proclaimed, ‘Good evening, and welcome to television.’ By the time of the Games, less than 1 per cent of Sydney households owned one of the expensive sets, and perhaps 5 per cent of Melbourne residents. However, the old classic film houses became deserted. For some years to come, the fortunate owners of television sets invited neighbours and relatives in for TV evenings.

  On the track at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Betty Cuthbert won the 100- and 200-metre gold medals and, with Shirley Strickland, 110-metre hurdles gold medallist, took the four-by-100-metres gold medal as well. In the pool, the admirable, clean-cut, movie-star-handsome Murray Rose and the indomitable larrikin Dawn Fraser became national heroes.

  The Olympic swimming pool in Batman Avenue was also the scene of an extraordinary contest between the Hungarian and Russian water polo teams with—in contrast to what was happening in Budapest, where Hungarians were dying—Hungary winning a brutal game referred to ever after as the ‘Blood in the Pool’ semifinal.

  Stalin had died in 1953 but there had been no lessening of Soviet repression in Eastern Europe. In February 1956, however, the new Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, made a savage attack on the policies of the dead Stalin, and in July 1956 the Hungarian dictator Mátyás Rakósi was forced to resign by popular discontent. His repressive police force, the AVO, were attacked. The Hungarians now expected greater personal freedom, but when their hopes were disappointed, on 23 October 1956, students and workers took to the streets of Budapest and demanded liberty, better food supply, and the removal of secret police and Russian forces. Poland had already been granted some rights in 1956, which had resulted from street protests, and the Hungarians hoped for success by the same means.

  Imre Nagy was appointed prime minister by the Russians to quell the rebellion, in which many security police had been executed. The Red Army pulled out of the city, and Nagy announced that political parties could be founded as a basis to future free elections. To the delight of Catholics and other Westerners, Nagy released from prison Cardinal Mindszenty, who had been a famous prisoner of conscience for some years, and a favourite subject of the prayers of Australian Catholics.

  On 31 October, as the Hungarian Olympic team set out for Melbourne, Nagy broadcast that Hungary would withdraw itself from the Warsaw Pact, the alliance of all Eastern Europe against the West. The Russians considered this a step too far, and even Nagy’s deputy, János Kádár, left the government and set up a rival one in Eastern Hungary. Soviet tanks returned to Budapest on 4 November and attacked the populace, committing atrocities and dragging bodies behind them through the streets. Probably thirty thousand Hungarians were killed, and as many as two hundred thousand fled to the West, most walking to the Austrian border to seek asylum. Nagy was tried by the Soviets and executed. By 14 November, a week before the Melbourne Games began, Soviet rule had been re-established.

  At the time of the return of the Russian army, Australians wondered whether the West would intervene to protect the Hungarians. It was a very popular cause, but there was the distraction of a crisis over the Suez Canal, as well as the problem of the geographic location of Hungary, and the difficulty of moving sufficient forces to its borders. With the threat of nuclear war thrown in, it meant that nothing happened except solemn expressions of support, in Australia’s case from Bob Menzies. Australia took fourteen thousand Hungarians, but selected only the educated and highly skilled. Some accuse the Menzies government of admitting such a proportion of the refugees so that it could point to them now that White Australia was under pressure from increasing trade with Asia and what people saw as growing instability in countries like Malaya and Vietnam. Whatever the motivation, it was a concrete mercy for Hungarians, and indeed, a bonus for Australia. Yet one of those who fled Hungary, a young man called Michael Borsodei, would soon enough die when labouring at Borumba Dam near Gympie. The crane he was leaning on touched power lines. The crane driver, a Polish immigrant, was taken to hospital in shock. Jozsef Velm also fled Hungary and lived in Brisbane and became naturalised. Because he lacked documents he was described in his entry permit as ‘stateless’, and after living at Bonegilla camp he worked as a bricklayer for two years for the Commonwealth.

  Before leaving for Melbourne, members of the Hungarian Olympic team said, ‘We do not want to compete in this peaceful festival against our Russian murderers.’ They intended to protest against the inclusion of the Russians in the Games. ‘We are proud to have taken part in the revolt which is to ensure a happier future for Hungary.’ On the way to Australia, the team, having travelled from Budapest to Prague by bus, was put under a form of house arrest by Communist authorities until the overthrow of the Hungarian revolution was complete.

  It was reported that on the arrival of the Hungarian team in Darwin, they were met by Darwin Hungarian immigrants wearing black armbands and national ribbons. Some of the team lamented the death in the uprising of the 1948 London Olympics pentathlon champion, István Hegedüs, who had been killed in the fighting in Budapest three weeks before. They said they had kept a seat vacant for him on the plane trip to Australia. The athletes sang the Hungarian national anthem at the airport, and plainclothes policemen asked them not to do so in what was, even in Darwin, an inflamed situation. ASIO inevitably took an interest in the Eastern European teams coming to Melbourne. It was particularly interested in a statement by the Hungarian Olympic manager, Gyula Hegyi, that he would rather sacrifice his life than risk those of his team by returning to Hungary. Many of his team members were certainly looking for political asylum in Australia. The chief hesitation from Hungarian Olympians had to do with concern for families still in Hungary. Each Hungarian athlete was vetted as they arrived, as well as the team doctor, Gabor Kovanyi. By 15 November, Hungarian officials of the new regime were declaring that few if any of the team were likely to seek political sanctuary in Australia. There were sinister undertones to the statement, which pointed out that many members of the team were married and their wives and families were still in Budapest.

  Meanwhile, with the best will, in a torn world, Melbourne proudly asserted that these were the
Friendly Games. The press was angry at Dr J.J. Czonka, Secretary of the Council of Hungarian Associations in Australia, who claimed that he would approach every one of the boys and girls in the Hungarian team and ask them if they wanted to stay. The cry was that this risked the success of the Games by taking away the concentration on sport. ‘It’s a dangerous impertinence for Dr Czonka . . . to provoke a political explosion that could so deeply embarrass us,’ said the Argus.

  Soon the news emerged, however, that Hungarian Olympic athletes would ask the Federal government for permission to stay in Australia while Hungary was dominated by Russia. The 110 members of the team, they said, were ‘marked men’ and ‘it would be certain suicide to return’. ‘Some of us will go back,’ said a team member, ‘certainly, to be beside our families—if they are still alive. We know all competitors in this team are for a free Hungary. Some of the officials are suspect.’ The Hungarian team administrator, Hegyi, tried to hold things together by organising for the traditional flag of Hungary, rather than the Communist flag, to be flown by the Hungarian competitors at the Olympic Games.

  The Melbourne Games were, in a sense, a validation of the Soviets, who won thirty-nine gold medals. The United States was next, and Australia was third with thirteen gold. But Australia lacked the sophisticated sporting facilities of the United States and Eastern Bloc countries; Betty Cuthbert trained on fields little better than cow pastures, and Murray Rose in a surf pool at a Sydney beach. The Olympics thus reinforced the fact that to be a small country of massive sporting ability was one of the planks of Australia’s identity.