Prologue
April 1949
The Pan Am aeroplane touched down at Honolulu airport at 11.20 pm on Friday 14 April 1949. On board was a neat, spare 72-year-old Japanese man who was embarking on a mission that required a unique set of skills: diplomacy, discretion, patience, and the detachment, or perhaps imagination, to put international opprobrium to one side. Matsuzo Nagai was on his way to Rome to lobby the International Olympic Committee to re-admit Japan to the Olympic movement. World War II had ended less than four years earlier, and under the terms of the peace Japan was still under US occupation.
Dr Nagai was a long-term and ardent advocate of Japan’s return to the Olympic family. Before the war, he had been in charge of Tokyo’s bid for the 1940 Olympics; it took Japan’s war with China to end that dream. When the Games resumed in London after World War II, Japan and Germany were excluded, but later in 1948 Japan started organising itself for another tilt at hosting the Games. Dr Nagai told waiting reporters at Honolulu airport that he had been encouraged by a message from IOC vice president Avery Brundage that Japan’s application to rejoin the Olympic movement might be received favourably. And General Douglas MacArthur, running the Allied occupation of Japan, had sanctioned the nation’s participation in sports — so why not the Olympics, the greatest sporting competition in the world? The time, Dr Nagai argued, was right for Japan to come in from the Olympic cold. ‘I believe that through the medium of sports, nations can be brought closer to one another and a better spirit of understanding and friendship can be developed,’ he said.1
This might have been the kind of soothing message that the IOC wanted to hear, but its neutral tone was no great surprise. Dr Nagai had a keen understanding of how to navigate the often dangerous waters of international politics: he had been Japan’s ambassador to Finland and Sweden, and then Germany in 1933–35. It was a complex time to be a diplomat in Berlin, as the Nazi menace built its strength ahead of the 1936 Olympics. Now, Nagai was confident that his diplomatic skills would be rewarded in Rome with his nation’s return to the 1952 Games, to be held in Helsinki. On Saturday 15 April Dr Nagai boarded his plane for the flight to Rome. What no one in the Olympic movement could have predicted was just how important his appearance at the IOC meeting would be for Australia.
The Hotel Excelsior in Rome was a grand testament to a time of European peace and glamour. It was close to the Via Veneto, and between the famed Spanish Steps and the Villa Borghese gardens and gallery. The US embassy was a short walk away. The famous and the infamous were regular guests, ranging from Mafia figure ‘Lucky’ Luciano to Hollywood star John Wayne to philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The staff wore starched uniforms, and patrolled the high-ceilinged dining rooms and lounges with crisp efficiency. It was a hotel of old-world elegance, and for a week in April 1949 the IOC executive and its members based themselves there to decide who would host the Summer and Winter Games of 1956.
*
One city that had thrown its hat into the ring to host the 1956 Games was Melbourne. The origins of this bid lay in the first year after the war, when a former boxer, POW, and newspaper sales representative, Edgar Tanner, convened a meeting of the Victorian Olympic Committee, where a resolution was made for Melbourne to apply to hold the Games. The resolution moved by Carlton & United Breweries’ executive Ron Aitken, representing the Victorian Amateur Athletic Association, set in train what would become the first Olympics in the Southern Hemisphere. But that success had a complicated paternity: arguments went on for years among some Melbourne luminaries about just whose idea it was to launch the city’s bid.
Chief among them was a former Olympian, former lord mayor, and prominent businessman, Sir Frank Beaurepaire. Sir Frank was a hard man to like but easy to admire. He had an outstanding Olympic career, having swum at the 1908, 1920, and 1924 Olympics, where he’d picked up three silver and three bronze medals. Short but powerfully built, Beaurepaire had strong shoulders and the physical confidence to match his self-belief. He had been desperate to enlist in World War I but was invalided out with appendicitis before he could see service. Beaurepaire hated the implied physical frailty. If he could not be in the Australian Imperial Force, he would do the next best thing: he joined the YMCA in a recreational role with the AIF.
He worked so assiduously at building the troops’ morale through regular sport that Beaurepaire found himself as Sir John Monash’s recreation officer of choice, and served with Monash’s Third Division on the Western Front. Beaurepaire not only organised boxing tournaments for AIF servicemen but also established a theatre troupe of Pierrots: the soldiers dressed and performed in a disused stable behind the Western Front. Beaurepaire was also central to the organisation of the first overseas match of Australian Rules football, when two teams of AIF soldiers played at the Queen’s Club, in London, in October 1916. Only a debilitating dose of trench fever ended his war. Monash wrote to him:
As organiser of social work within the division, of comforts for the troops in the trenches and of sports and amusements, your work has been on a uniform plane of excellence. I trust that the gratitude felt towards you by all ranks will constitute some measure of reward for your labours.2
These were qualities that augured well for a post-war business career. In Sydney in 1920 Beaurepaire set up his own tyre retreading business; two years later he returned to Melbourne to establish a similar business under his own name in La Trobe Street. With the motorcar growing in popularity, Beaurepaire established a tyre manufacturing plant in West Footscray in 1933. Beaurepaire was well aware of the sales power of his own sporting success, so he decided to call the business the Olympic Tyre & Rubber Company. By 1940 he was lord mayor of Melbourne; he was knighted in 1942, and then elected to the Victorian Legislative Council for, appropriately enough, Monash Province. Conservative by nature, Beaurepaire tried but failed to win a Senate seat for the United Australia Party — the forerunner of Menzies’ Liberals — at the 1943 federal election. In May 1947 he became president of the Victorian Olympic Committee.
Beaurepaire’s chief ally in Melbourne’s bid was another former lord mayor, Raymond Connelly, who had been campaigning for years to break Melbourne out of its straitlaced ways. Connelly collected newspaper stories about the grim entertainment options in Melbourne, building his case for change when he became mayor. ‘Young people could not be expected to sit around on Sunday and twiddle their thumbs,’ he told one council meeting in 1946, while proposing Sunday sport, afternoon picture shows, and symphony concerts as the antidote.3 He wondered why Melbourne couldn’t have a month-long carnival in spring or autumn that involved the Yarra River, a music festival, a band contest, a floral pageant, and a bicycle race around the city.4 This modernising bent made him a perfect travelling companion for Beaurepaire: Connelly had started his working life in the grains industry, but he was also the managing director of LaTrobe Motors in the city, linking him, like Beaurepaire, to the motor vehicle love affair that was becoming integral to Australian family life. (The other lord mayor on the bid team, James Disney, owned a 40,000-foot showroom in Melbourne for motorcycles and used cars.) Beaurepaire and Connelly, knighted in 1948, believed the Games would lift Australia out of its post-war slumber. ‘From a commercial viewpoint, the possibilities are incalculable,’ Beaurepaire assured Connelly.5
When the time came to launch his home town’s bid to host the Olympics, Sir Frank put himself at its centre, even trying to ensure that his name was attached to the genesis of the idea. ‘It has been obvious for some weeks that … Tanner [is] trying to establish that the Victorian Olympic Council first mooted the Olympic Games for Melbourne,’ Beaurepaire wrote in early 1949.
This is far from true and I would propose that Sir Raymond Connelly not only release a statement … but also prepare a statement for the archives. Sir Raymond and I first discussed this matter late in 1945 or early in January 1946 … I personally do not much mind except that we should keep to factual things and not allow these chaps who have done so little to try and steer away from realities.6
Except that Sir Frank did actually mind who took credit for the idea, and in the years to come it was a theme to which he frequently returned: he and Sir Raymond were the parents of the bid, not the creaking, groaning old gentlemen’s club that was the Victorian Olympic Committee.
The battle for ownership of the idea was of course second to actually securing the Olympic bid, though, so from the moment it was clear that the 1948 London Olympics were going ahead, the Melbourne bid focused on lobbying for the Games to be held eight years later. The planning was initially built around the premise that the people Melbourne needed to impress would be in London for the 1948 Olympics. The intelligence they had gleaned from the IOC’s decision about the 1952 Games revealed that the successful city — Helsinki — was a clear winner, by 10 votes, from Minneapolis and Los Angeles, and then Amsterdam. Helsinki had been awarded the 1940 Games when Tokyo had pulled out, so it was no surprise that the IOC honoured its pre-war commitment to the Finnish capital. The IOC doubled down on Europe, awarding Oslo the 1952 Winter Games.
Melbourne understood that its biggest challenge was general ignorance about the city and the nation, which was exemplified by its distance from everywhere else. The city was not a metropolis like Los Angeles or Detroit. It wasn’t at the centre of the world, as London was, nor was it part of a broader continent of nations, like Finland, which was accessible to practically everyone in Europe. Melbourne was at the other end of the world, in a country few people knew anything about.
A closer look revealed a city aspiring to be cosmopolitan but not quite reaching the mark. City cafes were stuffy and drab, offering unappetising food chosen from dirty menus and served in chipped crockery, according to one newspaper survey.7 Arts and culture were only available overseas, unless delivered by seasoned artistes who had braved the journey from the Old Country. Even local businessman and Australian IOC delegate Sir Harold Luxton could see the city’s problems. ‘I love Melbourne and I have lived here all my life, but it is still deadly dull,’ he said.8
It was a difficult sell. Compounding the problem was the Melbourne bid team’s determination to stick to what it knew — in the months ahead, there would be trips across Europe, handshaking, meeting and greeting. But there would be no mission to the United States, nor to central or southern America, nor to Asia. For a team bidding to host an international event, it sure lacked a global strategy. The Melbourne bid decided early on that it would source its support from the old Empire, the Commonwealth of Nations, who at least had a nodding familiarity with Australia and Melbourne. Not surprisingly, the final bid team — plus Sir Harold Luxton — contained four knights of the Commonwealth, and two who would be subsequently honoured with the same title. They might have been modern in their outlook, but these were Empire men embarking on an international task that was already limited by where they came from and who they knew. But if their effort came off, the world might finally take notice.
Initially, a team of Melbourne’s great and good was established under Connelly’s supervision to prepare the invitation document for the IOC. Connelly followed this up in January 1948 with an invitation book that was sent to IOC members. The grand publication – some copies of which were covered in lambs’ wool, some in suede – documented Melbourne’s appeal and preparedness to host the Games. Later that year, in London for the Olympics, a special lunch for 300 officials was held at Mansion House. It was nominally hosted by the lord mayor of London, but it was acknowledged during the banquet that the actual host was his Melbourne equivalent. Food and wine from Australia had been shipped to London for the event, and, for a city still in the grip of post-war rationing, the Australian largesse suggested a land of plenty on the other side of the world. Prince Bertil, the president of the Swedish Olympic Committee, was so taken with the Lindeman’s burgundy that he asked Sir Raymond where he could get more. In fact, the wine was so popular that cases were sent to IOC members around the globe. In Tokyo Dr Nagai and two colleagues received a case each.
Plans were put in place to generate positive stories about the bid in the Melbourne press, with the intention that IOC president Sigfrid Edström’s business representative in Melbourne would dutifully send them on to his boss. Every visiting notable was identified and lobbied. Prince Axel, Denmark’s IOC delegate, came to Melbourne on business and was lobbied by Luxton and the Victorian-born governor of New South Wales, Lieutenant General John Northcott, to vote for Melbourne; the prince promised he would.
Following the London Games, Sir Raymond went on a European tour, distributing bid books and reminding the IOC committee members he met of Melbourne’s desire to host the Games. At a meeting in London with the Earl Mountbatten and his wife, fresh from their time presiding over Indian independence in 1947, Sir Raymond extracted a promise of Indian support for Melbourne. It was a peculiar demonstration of the lack of Indian independence that the Mountbattens felt they could make such a promise, but Sir Raymond did not linger to debate the diplomatic niceties.
The next leg of his tour was to Europe’s Catholic nations. It was the former Xavier boy’s Olympic pilgrimage. He spoke to the Italians, who told him they were supportive of Melbourne; the mayors of Paris and Rome, neither of whom had a vote at the IOC, were also given a bid book. So too was Pope Pius XII, whom Sir Raymond saw at the Vatican, ostensibly to help engage some Latin members of the IOC but perhaps also because Sir Raymond was seeking some spiritual balm. It appeared to be a trip with no strategy, other than to cover territory and fly the Melbourne flag. Sir Raymond confessed, with a mixture of pride and fatigue, that he had covered some 7,000 miles in the Melbourne cause. ‘In every country we have visited, I have seen as many as possible of the members of the International Committee,’ he wrote to Beaurepaire, ‘and they were all very pleased at the visit, particularly coming — as we did — from so far away.’9
Distance was the acknowledged issue, and Melbourne decided to tackle it head-on. The bid team enlisted the help of the federal minister for the air, Arthur S. Drakeford, to write a letter to the IOC outlining that distance, in the aircraft era, was not such a big issue. Drakeford pointed out that Australia was indeed linked to the world by airlines:
[T]hese services ensure that Australia can be conveniently reached at present in a matter of a few days from anywhere in the world. Australia’s progress in air travel is such that planes are already being envisaged for stratosphere travel in pressurized jet-propelled aircraft and these will reach Australia from London in 24 hours.
Distance, the minister concluded, was no longer an obstacle to coming to Australia.10
There was some optimism behind Drakeford’s forecast — in the immediate post-war transport world, the big problem was actually finding enough ships to transport soldiers, refugees, and travellers to where they needed to go. For quick and effective transport, everyone had to hope that jet airlines would be sufficiently reliable by 1956 to make coming to Australia appealing. Drakeford’s other implied point was that airline travel was really the best way to come to Australia, and to cross the vast continent: two of the nation’s airlines ranked among the top 14 biggest operators in the world, he told the IOC, proof of the nation’s acceptance of airline travel.11
But how many IOC delegates found this crystal-ball gazing reassuring, a kind of Jules Verne forecast of the future? It did look difficult. The distance was even an issue for the Melbourne bid team: airfares to Rome with Qantas were over £300 each, a hefty fare, considering the average price of a five-roomed cottage was about £3,000.12 So an approach was made to Prime Minister Ben Chifley for financial support. Reluctantly, Chifley agreed that the government would give £1,000 to help cover the travel costs.13 The PM knew that the grant was also a demonstration of the federal government’s support for the Games coming to Australia.
There was another key issue related to Australia’s remoteness: the athletic season in the Northern Hemisphere was held in the summer. An Olympic Games in Australia would likely be scheduled in late spring or early summer, out of season for the Northern Hemisphere athletes. (It was, of course, a clear demonstration of the Games’ historical focus on the Northern Hemisphere that this out-of-season competition was not an issue worth contemplating for Southern Hemisphere athletes who had to compete in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, or Berlin during their home winter months.)
A related consideration went to the ‘amateur ethos’ at the heart of the modern Olympics: many of the athletes were students at universities and colleges, and used their summer break to compete. An Olympics in Australia would effectively mean the athletes were compromising their education. Professional athletes were never worried by such prosaic considerations — they were paid to compete whenever and wherever they could — but professional athletes were not welcome at the Games. Melbourne’s answer to this issue was vague: because a date had not been finalised to hold the Olympics, there was a suggestion that the Games could actually be held in early spring in Australia, eliminating the need for a significant break after the Northern Hemisphere competition. The Melbourne Olympics would become an extension of the Northern Hemisphere season. The secondary response was that the students would not miss much of their academic year because the competition would last only two weeks, and they could return home quickly because of the wonder of air travel.
The trickiest part of the bid was trying to convince the IOC that the Games could go south of the equator for the first time, without letting the perceived impediments of that move overwhelm the novelty of Melbourne playing host. A sophisticated approach was needed.
In the end, the Melbourne team at the 43rd IOC Session, in Rome in April 1949, comprised Lord Mayor James Disney, the Australian Olympic Federation chairman Harold Alderson, Victoria’s agent-general in London Sir Norman Martin, and Sir Frank Beaurepaire. Australia had two votes. One was held by the Melbourne-based businessman — and former state political ally of Robert Menzies — Sir Harold Luxton. The other belonged to Hugh Weir, who had been involved with athletics, boxing, and wrestling for two decades, and was a stalwart of the Victorian Olympic Committee. He had become the manager of a Sydney-based shipping company two years earlier and couldn’t make it to Rome because of competing business and family interests. Weir hoped to lodge a postal vote.
Sir Frank was confident, boldly predicting several months before the vote that Melbourne had an even-money chance of securing the 1956 Games. There were two other main contenders, he argued: Buenos Aires (‘6/4 against’) and Detroit (‘2/1’). All the others had ‘Buckley’s chance’, Sir Frank forecast.14
Being in the Southern Hemisphere, Buenos Aires had the same appeal and the same impediments as Melbourne: it was hard to get to, and it was out of season for Northern Hemisphere athletes. Unlike Melbourne, it had the appeal not just of being exotic but also of having strong links to Spanish-speaking communities across the IOC network. Detroit had emerged as the favourite of the United States Olympic Association, largely because of the city’s wealth, built on the thriving automobile industry. But there were long-term festering racial issues; they would finally erupt 20 years later. In an inexplicable repeat of the strategic error of the 1952 bids, a number of other US cities decided to effectively cannibalise Detroit’s bid — Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia added their bids to the ticket, and then San Francisco and Chicago came on board. Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne were the only non-US cities to offer themselves as hosts. By the time the IOC delegates gathered in Rome, the bid resembled a confused assemblage of US Olympic interests and some hopeful participants from the new world.
Just four days before the IOC met, a report was lodged in the Filipino parliament that created a furore which threatened to undermine Melbourne’s bid. The report centred on a debate against non-discriminatory immigration policies, but it led to a discussion of Australia’s position on race — and the shadow of the White Australia policy was never far away. The critique was set against the role the Philippines had played in halting the Japanese advance on Australia during the Pacific War. ‘Were it not for the heroism and patriotism of the flower of our manhood on the battlefields in Bataan and Corregidor in delaying enemy operations,’ one Filipino MP said, ‘Australia would have been invaded by the Japanese, and would now not be a land of white people but of coloured people.’ He pointed out too that Australia was originally a country of black men that had been ‘usurped’ by the whites. The language was strong, and motivated largely by Australian immigration minister Arthur Calwell’s decision to prevent a Filipino and naturalised American sergeant, Lorenzo Gamboa, from entering Australia.
Calwell’s decision spurred the Filipino parliament into delivering a pointed rebuke to Australia at its most vulnerable point — the Olympic bid. It came when the Filipino MP linked the situation to an approach from the Melbourne bid team asking for Filipino support in Rome:
Australians are the biggest hypocrites in the world. When it comes to propagandising their country, they want coloured people to do it, but when it comes to equality they do not accept coloured races because they are inferior. I believe we would be doing a grave injustice to the Philippines if we consented to Melbourne as the seat of the 1956 Olympics.15
The Filipinos took the matter seriously enough to invite an Australian parliamentary delegation to Manila to sort out the situation, although the likelihood of such a dialogue taking place was remote. The Australian government was not inclined to participate.
What the Melbourne bid team thought of this outburst is not recorded, but it was a powerful demonstration that Australia did not come to the Olympic vote without political baggage. Australia had a reputation, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, for its commitment to the racist White Australia policy, which had been in place for years with the aim of fostering the growth of a white, homogenous population. The policy was dismantled in stages, with the first significant change occurring in 1950 when the Menzies government allowed 800 non-European refugees to stay in Australia, followed by the approval for some Japanese war brides to migrate to Australia in 1952.
Calwell might have opened Australia to a steady stream of post-war European migrants, but there was still little affection for Asians, officially or otherwise, especially after Japan’s role in World War II. And it was wilfully naive of the Melbourne bid team to expect that such political concerns would not have an impact on the final vote in Rome. Equally, there was nothing the bid team could do to mollify the Filipinos or induce the federal government to arrive at a diplomatic solution.
*
Since the conclusion of World War II, Japan and Germany had excluded themselves from IOC meetings. But Dr Nagai’s appearance in Rome changed all that, and put the IOC in something of a cleft stick — what to do now about Germany? The IOC decided to alert Germany to Dr Nagai’s presence and leave the German delegate to make his own decision. Germany, though, was not quite a nation anymore; in the aftermath of the war, it was being divided between east and west. It was logically impossible to have a German delegate.
Dr Nagai’s determination to have his country back in the IOC’s embrace was partly an echo of Japan’s pre-war disappointment at having to withdraw from hosting the 1940 Games. Japan had wanted the Games to restore its place in the world after it was expelled from the League of Nations in 1931 for invading Manchuria. The IOC was won over to the Japanese bid in 1936, but within a year the nation’s claim to the Games was imperilled by its aggressive penetration deep into China, brutalising Nanjing and Shanghai. But the world’s hostile reaction to the incursions initially failed to dent Dr Nagai’s confidence that the Games were destined for Tokyo. ‘People abroad have the false impression that the Japanese were no longer interested in anything pertaining to peaceful attainments of mankind, but ordinary life, including sport, was going on as usual,’ Dr Nagai told the West in 1938.16
The war with China, however, told another story. Five months after his statement, Dr Nagai was forced to concede the Olympics could not happen. He went on radio in July 1938, in his role as the head of the Tokyo bid, to explain to listeners in the United States why Tokyo could no longer host the Olympics. In English, he explained that the ‘protracted warfare’ with China meant Japan had to concentrate its national resources on the conflict, but added that Japan wanted to make an application to host the Games in 1944, so that ‘the torch of Olympia will then burn in the eastern sky brilliantly’.17
Japan’s decision actually pointed to something potentially more dangerous: its general withdrawal from the world, and its increasing nationalism. This proved a toxic and tragic signifier of the abandoned Olympics.18 Dr Nagai’s appearance in Rome in 1949 was an indication that some in Japan now wanted to re-engage with an international community that had made it a pariah. Just as they had used the Games as a means of rebuilding their international reputation in 1936, so the Games again became a ‘safe’ way of showing Japan had changed. It was classic soft diplomacy.
*
The US Olympic Association president (and IOC vice president), Avery Brundage, was a former Olympic pentathlete and decathlete with a fat wallet and a skill for tactless candour. No one was ever in any doubt what Brundage thought about anything, especially his wholehearted embrace of amateur sport: it was his raison d’être. But spreading the word put many people offside. Not for nothing was he called ‘Slavery Brundage’ or ‘Avery Umbrage’. He was also parochial when required: before leaving for Rome, he told the US press that Detroit was the favourite to win the Games. The voting was a secret ballot, so there is no way of knowing how much vote-counting took place before the final ballot. And there is no telling what role Brundage played in assembling or directing votes to any of the bidders. What did happen in Rome was that the IOC spent some time trying to reduce the number of US bids. It was a sensible approach, but the Americans wouldn’t have it.
The Melbourne bid team hung out its shingle in a suite that displayed large tinted images of a proposed stadium, the new swimming pool, and the stadium for boxing and wrestling. The drawings also emphasised the stadium’s proximity to the athletes’ village, considered an advantage over the Detroit bid, which had proposed a village some distance from the main stadiums. Beaurepaire approached as many undecided delegates as he could find, joining some for breakfast, extolling Melbourne’s charms, reminding Iron Curtain countries that they had nothing to fear from a secret ballot, which apparently relieved one delegate, who had instructions from his national Olympic committee not to vote for Melbourne.19 Others in the bid team were more obvious about their tactics. ‘We were perfectly friendly with everybody,’ Harold Alderson said, ‘and told them what we were going to do. No one ever asked anyone to vote for us. We just went around and made friends.’20
On the day, the Melbourne message was explicit: Australia had taken part in every Games dating back to 1896, and no nation had had to travel further, every four years, to demonstrate its commitment to the Olympic movement. This was the obverse of the distance argument against Melbourne, a plea for returning the Antipodean favour that had been racked up over half a century of Olympic participation. Alderson also put the somewhat unusual case that Melbourne had successfully prepared for two world wars, so why not a sporting event?21 Melbourne’s final presentation to the IOC concluded with a short film that traversed the cityscape, its beaches, the sporting arenas, and deliberately tried to inject Melbourne with an air of glamour and sophistication.
Beaurepaire had his fingerprints all over it, having advocated for the inclusion of footage of a ‘Learn to Swim’ campaign with which he had been intimately involved. He was even cautious of the language used. ‘I would suggest that you are particularly careful to avoid the use of the word “workers”, which has such unpleasant associations, concentrating rather on as many variations as possible of “Australians” and “Melburnians”,’ he said.22 It was a wise point — ‘workers’, with its echoes of communist terminology, might well have spooked some of the finer political instincts of the IOC delegates. But the film’s end result was a melange of exaggeration and cultural envy, describing Collins Street as ‘the Regent Street, Fifth Avenue, Rue de la Paix of Melbourne’.23 And the film highlighted Melbourne’s dining and entertainment scene, an odd choice given that the city was still firmly in the grip of the notorious ‘six o’clock swill’.
Ultimately, 41 IOC delegates voted. Hugh Weir’s application for a postal vote was rejected, so Australia could bank on only Sir Harold Luxton’s vote. Inevitably, the US vote was split in the first round of voting, and several of the US cities dropped out. Mexico City was a casualty of the second round. The final preliminary ballot had Melbourne on 19 votes, Buenos Aires on 13, Los Angeles on 5, and Detroit on 4. That left a final ballot between Buenos Aires and Melbourne, the two first-time hosts and also both in the Southern Hemisphere.
On the numbers, Buenos Aires needed to pick up at least eight of the nine votes that had been shared between the two US cities to win the bid, assuming Melbourne retained all its votes in the final round. Prince Axel, of Denmark, who had been lobbied with such success in Melbourne months earlier, was the official scrutineer for the final ballot. He kissed the ballot paper and announced: ‘Melbourne.’ The city had got over the line by one vote, 21 votes to 20, the smallest margin in Olympic history. Buenos Aires had moved seven votes, but Melbourne had picked up two from the penultimate ballot.
Whose vote made the difference? Some suggested that it was the Philippines, but that seemed unlikely, given its anger with Australia over the Gumbao incident.24 In fact, as was revealed six months later, the vote that secured the Olympic Games for Melbourne came from the Japanese delegate, Dr Nagai. This extraordinary development only became known when Sir Harold admitted that, to his ‘utter amazement’, Dr Nagai had told him Japan had supported the Australian bid.25 Japan had probably voted for either Los Angeles or Detroit in the early ballots, and when it came to the final vote Dr Nagai shifted to Melbourne. Why he did so remains a mystery.
Detroit’s mayor, Eugene Van Antwerp, blamed his city’s loss on the IOC’s determination to ensure the Games went to the Southern Hemisphere. ‘Spanish nations of Latin and South America lined up solidly for Buenos Aires, while the British Empire nations voted solidly for Melbourne,’ he said.26
The Detroit bid boss, Fred Matthaei, was less diplomatic, claiming the city could not compete with rival bidders who, he said, had offered money and gratuities to IOC members. He claimed the Argentine dictator, Juan Perón, had backed the Buenos Aires bid with US$30 million, a huge amount that would have dwarfed any other city’s bid. He also believed the Australian bid had effectively bribed IOC voters:
Melbourne is paying the complete expenses of all members of the International Olympic Committee and a companion to the Games. The complete spirit of amateurism for which the Olympics are supposed to stand has been violated. Instead of following an orderly procedure, the award of the Games has been made the occasion of an international auction, with the site chosen being the highest bidder.27
This sounded like the whine of sour grapes and was quickly rejected in Melbourne, where a level of bemusement at the implied riches of the bid was the dominant theme. ‘The Melbourne delegation so far as I know had neither the authority to guarantee payment of any money for fares, nor the money with which to back it up,’ Hugh Weir responded.28
Avery Brundage might have looked sceptically at the mention of Melbourne’s financial health. The most persuasive element of Melbourne’s bid for the IOC vice president’s vote had been its assurances about the investments it would make in Olympic-standard facilities.29 These would haunt Melbourne during the next seven years, and drive Brundage’s nagging about the city’s lack of progress.
Back in Melbourne, Sir Raymond Connelly lit a replica of the Olympic torch that was at the Town Hall to celebrate the successful bid. Just a few days later, he collapsed on Swanston Street and died in hospital. He was 53.
*
Immediately following the IOC decision, Australia’s ambassador to Japan, Patrick Shaw, was sent a series of questions by the United Press of America, including:
In Hong Kong and other places in the Far East the question has been raised whether or not the so-called White Australia Policy will prohibit Asiatics from participating. Will Japanese be permitted to enter Australia and participate in the Olympic Games providing Japan’s participation in the Olympic Games is approved?
Shaw cabled the question to Canberra and included his proposed reply:
I am sure the teams of athletes from Asiatic countries, as from all Nations affiliated with the Olympic Games, will be hear[t]ily welcome[d] in Melbourne in 1956. In regard to such visits no question of our immigration policy is involved. With reference to Japan it is hoped that Japan’s status in international spheres and the Olympic Committee will be clarified by that time. There again it would be [no] question of applying the Australian immigration policy.
The approach to Shaw was a smart piece of journalism: at least one overseas reporter had realised that the White Australia policy could pose a problem for Asian athletes travelling to the Melbourne Games.
A day after receiving Shaw’s cable, Don Rodgers, Prime Minister Chifley’s press secretary, told Shaw to not make any response. But it was too late; Shaw’s statement had already been sent to United Press. Shaw was contrite, up to a point:
I regret any possibility of embarrassment but consider the statement factual and non-controversial. It seemed the least that could be said in the face of increasing comments and criticism regarding Australia’s alleged discrimination against Asiatics which is now coming from both American and Asiatic sources here and in Hong Kong.30
Rodgers had a fine nose for potential pitfalls, and his instincts about the dangers of commenting on the issue were correct. But Shaw was equally seasoned, being a diplomat with a skill for not saying too much. His response didn’t add any fuel to a debate about Japan competing in the Games, even though the issue was becoming more heated in Australia.
The Returned Sailors’ Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Imperial League of Australia had written to Chifley stating that its federal executive had resolved that ‘in view of the inhuman acts committed by the Japanese during the 1939–45 War … such a race is not worthy of the honour and privilege of competing in the Olympic Games’.31
Immigration minister Arthur Calwell didn’t want any Japanese entering Australia either; the recent history was overwhelming. ‘I think the feelings of those relatives of men who were butchered fiendishly are more worthy of consideration by a Minister of State than the profits to be made from trade and the laurels to be won from sport,’ he said in November 1949.32 He was reported even to support Australia losing the Games rather than allowing Japanese athletes to compete.
Australian nurse Sister Vivian Bullwinkel, the only survivor of a Japanese attack on a group of nurses off a Bangka Island beach, didn’t want any Australian athlete to look like they supported what Japan had done during the war. ‘[S]urely no Australian sportsman can condone the actions of the Japs a bare five years ago,’ she said, ‘in their machine gunning of defenceless women, their calculated fiendish bashing of our men and the withholding of medical supplies.’ Sister Bullwinkel saw a similarity in the way the Japanese went about war and the way they competed: ‘If anyone wants to see if the Japs are in sport for sport, go and see the newsreels of their swimmers in America. Just look at the swimmer’s [sic] eyes. You will see they are out to do only one thing — to win at all costs.’33
Despite US approval, Australia opposed Japan’s return to Davis Cup tennis in 1949. One Japanese tennis official commented: ‘We remember Australian sportsmen as generous and goodhearted. How long will this Australian quarantine continue?’ At the heart of the conflation between Japan’s behaviour in the war and sport was Australians’ belief that sport was a privileged place where excellence was equated with virtue. Fraternising with Japan on the sporting field, it was thought, could offend the idealism many Australians still had about the purity of sport, and stir their memories of the Pacific War.
Japan, though, saw sport as a way of addressing the hostility, and its Olympic Society secretary, Masaji Tabata, invited Australia to take part in the 1950 Asian Games in New Delhi. The ostensible reason for the invitation was to affirm Australia’s place in the region. ‘Our plan to have Australia invited to the games is not turning the other cheek,’ Tabata explained. ‘Geographically and politically Australia is just as much part of Asia as is Indonesia. Australian participation would greatly improve goodwill between Australia and Asia, besides adding immeasurably to interest in the games.’34
As a statement of fact — and as an expression of goodwill — this move had a lot going for it. But no Australian athlete went to New Delhi for the 1950 Asian Games. As one US occupational officer in Japan remarked, ‘Your Aussies are sure good haters!’35
Sir Frank Beaurepaire and Wilfrid Kent Hughes — a former Victorian deputy premier, Olympic sprinter, World War I hero, and World War II prisoner of war — both spoke out against stopping Japan from attending the Games. Sir Frank argued that Italy, one of Japan’s Axis partners, had been allowed back into the fold, and had been granted the 1956 Winter Games (in Cortina), so why penalise Japan? The final decision about Japan’s participation in the 1952 and therefore the 1956 Games would be made at the 44th IOC Session, to be held in Copenhagen in 1950.
In the meantime, there was plenty of international speculation about what Calwell’s stance would mean for Australia’s reputation. Kent Hughes didn’t like it one bit. ‘The matter of vital importance to Australia is the legacy of reciprocal hate that some “Nip-happy” people, who should know better, are building up against us in the Far East,’ he said. ‘These “frantic boasts and foolish words” do us no good and a lot of harm.’36 The post-war politics had inevitably infiltrated sport. The old notion — and the hardy determination to maintain the pretext — that sport and politics somehow existed in separate universes was a fallacy.
Japan tried to remain above the debate. Its athletics coach talked about the team already preparing for the Melbourne competition. Dr Nagai’s IOC colleague Chingoro Takaishi took it upon himself to respond to Calwell:
We are quite harmless now and it is most surprising to hear such remarks from a man of Cabinet rank. The Japanese are all sick of war and really believe in peace. We are going through a bloodless revolution … and Japan is becoming a democratic peace-loving nation without any thought of aggression.
Lest Calwell think Japanese athletes would miss out on this ‘bloodless revolution’ and come to Melbourne with their imperial aims intact, Takaishi added: ‘Our purpose would be to show how the Japanese can swim … and run as an expression of goodwill.’37 There was no word from Dr Nagai. After the Rome vote, he had been confined to bed because he felt ‘feeble’, and took his time returning home.
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The war that occupied everyone’s mind in 1949 would, by the time the 1956 Olympics arrived, be replaced by a different, distinctly chillier form of conflict that would frame international relations, and Australia’s place in the world, for the next generation. But for the meantime it was sufficient to dream about what it meant to be an Olympic city. Sir Frank told the Victorian parliament in November 1949 that the benefits of hosting the Olympics extended beyond Melbourne, to the nation:
Every aspect of city, state and commonwealth life can benefit from this great occasion. It will focus for all time, greater attention upon this country. It is up to us to make the Olympic Games of 1956 memorable, not alone in the annals of the Olympic movement, but in the furthering of world appreciation of our country as one of the leading nations in hospitality, in stature and in the graciousness of modern civilization.38
Sir Frank had lifted the bar of expectation as high as anyone could have imagined. Several weeks later, Robert Menzies led the Liberal–Country Coalition to victory at the 1949 federal election, establishing a personal hold on power that would last for 16 years. Middle Australia — the ‘forgotten people’, as Menzies had dubbed them years earlier — would sustain and nourish the new prime minister in the years ahead. They would be the beneficiaries of the nation’s new prosperity and take comfort from Menzies’ determination to shelter them from an uncertain world. A new era was about to begin.