Chapter Three

The Enemy Within

Every Australian athlete was fixated on the Olympic Games in Melbourne. It was the nation’s first home games. This was the place to shine, in front of local crowds at the international showpiece of sport. Every previous Australian Olympian had travelled halfway around the world, competed, and maybe, if they’d won a medal, managed to get some newspaper coverage back home. This time they would hear Australian accents in the crowds and know that the cheers were for them.

There had been promising signs at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics that Australian athletes could hope for even better performances on their home turf: the team took home six gold medals in all, with sprinter Marjorie Jackson winning two gold, hurdler Shirley Strickland one, cyclist Russell Mockridge two (one with Lionel Cox), and swimmer John Davies one. There had been something about the Australian women sprinters, in particular, that caught the eye. They seemed faster, stronger, and more competitive than their rivals. And now it seemed that there was an assembly line of talent behind Jackson and Strickland, poised to make their own mark in Melbourne.

Marlene Mathews knew that her time was coming. There had been speculation that she would go to the Olympics four years earlier, but Mathews had known she wasn’t ready. She was barely 18 then, a promising sprinter but still short of her best. No one was in any doubt that the girl who had first shown her talent at the Fort Street Girls School in Sydney had the speed to win Olympic gold. In 1949 Mathews had recorded the national best time in the 80 metres hurdles, and then the fastest time in New South Wales over the same distance. In March 1949 she won the junior 75-yard national championship in a record 8.4 seconds. By the time Mathews turned 15, she was training four days a week and relaxing with some tennis.1

Although Mathews had taken part in the usual sports day competitions at her South Strathfield Primary School, it was at the Fort Street Girls School that she reached another level. The school offered a rare opportunity for Mathews to observe some of the older girls who were already making a name for themselves on the track. No school in Australia had such a bounty of teenage talent. June Maston and Betty McKinnon, who had both been part of the women’s silver medal 4 x 100 metres relay team at the 1948 London Olympics, and Judy Canty, who competed in the long jump at the same Games, were powerful role models for Mathews. They were older but were happy to guide Mathews, and on their urging she joined them at the Western Suburbs Athletic Club.

Sport was organised and competitive, and, most importantly for Mathews, she could see that athletics had a pathway that enabled her to commit to it. In the year Canty became the senior athletic champion at Fort Street, Mathews took out the junior title. In 1950 Fort Street proudly described Mathews as ‘the runner of whom we are most proud’, a big rap for a school that already boasted three Olympians. She ran a scintillating 11.3 seconds for the 100 yards during the school’s Annual Field Day, and then, in what was to be a curse throughout her career, pulled a leg muscle and had to withdraw from the rest of the program.2

The blooming of Mathews’ sprint talent coincided with the start of her senior school years. Fort Street tried to support her, and Mathews dropped one of her Year 11 subjects — geography — so that she could spend more time studying her other subjects. Mathews was cradling a desire to be a physical education teacher, but her running was occupying most of her time. She still managed to be one of nine girls to receive a bursary for 1950 on the strength of her academic results. It was a situation that puzzled Fort Street principal Nelly Cohen. In front of a crowded assembly Ms Cohen read out the names of the girls who had won a bursary. Before she got to Mathews’ name, Ms Cohen stopped. ‘I really don’t know how this person was successful because she only seems to think about how fast she can run.’3 Speed became Mathews’ preoccupation, and it led her to consider taking the unusual step of leaving school to start an athletic career.

These were not easy decisions for a teenage girl in 1950. Some of her parents’ friends encouraged them to let their daughter leave school. Let her have the experience, let her travel and see the world, they told the Mathews. She could always go back to school later, if she chose. Mathews herself was stuck on the idea of being a teacher, and was concerned what pursuing an athletic career at the expense of her schooling would mean when she wanted to get her teaching qualification.

It was a rare dilemma for a family that was typical of the time. Mathews’ father was an electrical engineer with the NSW railways. Her mother had always done home duties, raising Marlene and her three younger sisters. The family lived in Strathfield, in Sydney’s inner-western suburbs, and Mathews would catch a bus to Burwood to do her training. Her mother kept her dinner warm, on top of the stove, until she returned. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the family — except that their eldest daughter was one of the quickest runners in the country.

Inevitably, much of the family’s activity focused on Marlene’s athletics. The approach was rudimentary and unscientific but routine and predictable. On competition days Mathews would have a small piece of fillet steak with a poached egg on it. She would have nothing to drink from Friday lunchtime until after she finished competing on Saturday because liquids, so the theory went, made you heavy. Her father would then stop in at a pub near the track and buy her a shandy. It would be the girl’s first fluid in 30 hours.

By the start of 1956, Mathews was in excellent form. She headed to Brisbane for the national women’s athletics championship in April, primed to do well. She arrived in Brisbane only to find that the city had been caught in the aftermath of the cyclones that had battered Far North Queensland; the Gabba oval was a bog.

Everything seemed to be upside down. Olympic gold medallist Shirley Strickland was disqualified for breaking in her pet event, the 80 metres hurdles; the 220-yard event (as it was then) finished on a bend, not a straight, causing some agonised discussions between athletes and officials; and a 17-year-old called Betty Cuthbert, in her first nationals, beat Mathews in the 220 yards. Mathews witnessed the women’s shot-put take place in farcical circumstances when the heaved shot became stuck in the mud. Even the official starter was ‘timed out’ by the crowd and replaced on the second day of competition.

Strickland, a straight talker, explained her breaking by blaming some spectators for banging the picket fence and making a sound like the starter’s pistol. But she accepted the result. She was less accepting of the championships overall. ‘It was shocking,’ she said. ‘The track was dangerous. We were up to our ankles in mud. The judging was better today: there were no tight finishes as on Saturday when the judges panicked and gave the wrong decisions.’ Strickland shared with Jackson national pre-eminence as Australia’s best female athlete, but Strickland thought these titles were hopelessly compromised by the conditions. ‘These championships can’t be taken seriously as Olympic Games’ tests,’ she said. ‘The lightest girl in the best track won every race — the heavier girls, who normally would get wonderful drive from the cinder track were left floundering in the mud.’4

Strickland’s critique was a sharp reminder of what was expected at Olympic level and how far Australia seemed from that standard. Not for the first time, athletes who had Olympic experience wondered if Australia could get it right in Melbourne.

The claggy surface was the worst kind of track for Mathews, who derived her speed from a powerful leg action. Cuthbert, who had a lighter frame, seemed to run on top of the ground. When the provisional women’s team was named for the Games, Strickland, Cuthbert, and Mathews were all included. There would be another competition in Melbourne, closer to the Games, to finalise the team. No one was sure how many sprint places there would be in the final team. But the Melbourne trials would at least take place on a cinder track, and provide a fairer picture of who should run for Australia. The Olympics were still eight months away, and Mathews knew that all roads led to Melbourne.

*

It was, said the legendary British actress Dame Sybil Thorndike, a piece of drama that could ‘only come from the soil of the country’. She was talking about Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. It was unmistakably Australian in subject and idiom, written by Ray Lawler, a young man from the western suburbs of Melbourne, and featuring a couple of Queensland canecutters. Within weeks of its opening on 28 November 1955, London theatre agents were circling: suddenly, something artistic that looked and sounded Australian could be exported for overseas entertainment. There was no knowing how this could have happened.

In 1950 the writer and critic Arthur Phillips wrote a provocative short essay in the literary quarterly Meanjin, identifying what he called the nation’s ‘cultural cringe’:

Above our writers — and other artists — looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon achievement. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe — appearing either as the Cringe Direct, or as the Cringe Inverted, in the attitude of Blatant Blatherskite, the God’s-own-country-and-I’m-a-better-man-than-you-are Australian bore.

Perhaps The Doll’s success made better sense when it was viewed in the context of how it came to be performed — and that was, in a roundabout way, to do with the nation’s enduring connection with the British crown. In 1954 Australia hosted a visit from the young Queen Elizabeth II, a trip that injected some glamour into the monarchy and had Australians in a kind of royal rapture. About 100,000 people waited to see the Queen at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Thousands lined the street wherever she went. Newspapers talked about the arrival of a ‘new Elizabethan era’. Across the country, there was a sense of excitement and a desire to celebrate how far the nation had come in what one newspaper calculated to be ‘166 years’.

The royal tour made a particular impression on Herbert ‘Nugget’ Coombs, an economist and brilliant public servant, who had been privately agitating the federal government for a decade to invest in the arts. Coombs was an incisive and strategic thinker, with a grizzled countenance and a fine line in patience. He had led Chifley’s post-war reconstruction and became governor of the Commonwealth Bank, and he knew how both ends of town worked. After the Queen’s visit, Coombs noted in discussions with businessmen how enthusiastically Australians had responded to the tour’s colour and pageantry. He observed:

Not that there were doubts about the fundamental loyalty of the Australian people, but rather that Australians who had a reputation for being hard-boiled and unemotional had responded vigorously [to the tour]. We said ‘Surely, there is something in this which should be kept alive. When the Queen leaves Australia we should not just drop back and forget the pleasure that her visit has given us.’5

The result of Coombs’ efforts, the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, was an updated version of a proposal for a national theatre that he had presented to the Chifley government. Chifley was all set to implement it when he lost office. The big difference with the new model was that there would be less government and more private investment and engagement. Coombs held dinners in Melbourne and Sydney with executives from major businesses to enlist their financial support. Only when that was locked in did he go to Menzies, knowing that the government would not have to be the organisation’s financial lifeline.

Coombs also wanted to inject some business acumen into the arts industry, so that there was a quality of administration and management attached to running it. Perhaps most importantly, he wanted the new trust to go beyond the local amateur theatre organisations and foster a national outlook for the arts that embraced theatre, opera, and ballet. Part of that approach meant enlisting experts including John Sumner, a former merchant seaman who was the director of the University of Melbourne’s Union Theatre. And it was Sumner, an Englishman, who brought Ray Lawler’s Doll to the stage.

The play had shared the 1955 Commonwealth Playwrights Advisory Board prize with Oriel Gray’s The Torrents, another drama that captured the Australian experience. That recognition did little to ease the anxiety that there was only a small audience for local stories. Lawler was worried that his play was so unmistakably Australian that it would fail to be popular with audiences used to seeing overseas drama and international actors. The view of the prime minister’s own wife, Dame Pattie Menzies, summed it up: ‘We have no good theatre in Australia. There still aren’t enough people in one town to make it worthwhile for a good company to open one. But we do get all the good films from Hollywood.’6

Theatre in post-war Australia was dominated by J.C. Williamson and overseas touring companies. Audiences came out in force to see Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh when their Old Vic company toured Australia in 1948. The stars arrived in Australia to be treated like some kind of exotic bird that had woken up miles from its gilded cage. ‘We know practically nothing about Australia,’ Olivier confessed at the start of the four-month tour. ‘We want to see the country. We want to see every kind of animal or bird there is.’7 Seven years later, expat Robert Helpmann and American Katharine Hepburn arrived in Australia with the Old Vic to tour Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure.

The tour was well patronised and collected some breathless reviews, but the local actors’ union made a formal note about the need for everyone who toured with such a company to be of ‘world calibre’. ‘[O]therwise we shall refuse to agree to the importation of what often amounts to a touring company being publicised as a world theatre company,’ the union stated. ‘The Old Vic Company must understand that the Old Vic Company is always welcome but we should not be treated as provincials.’8 ‘Provincials’ was a word dripping with a range of meanings, none of them good, for cultural purists, even if the actors’ union was only trying to stress that local actors should not miss out on work.

The early days of Sumner’s new job suggested that nothing much had changed. The opening night of his new Elizabethan Theatre, in Sydney’s Newtown, in July 1955 starred two pillars of the British acting fraternity, Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Ralph Richardson, in two plays by their compatriot, Terence Rattigan. Not only was it odd that the new Australian cultural initiative premiered with overseas plays performed by overseas actors, but the point was reinforced at the opening night reception. The gala event was attended by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Governor-General Sir William Slim, a list of Sydney society’s finest and the overseas cast members. The Australian cast members didn’t even score an invite.9 It was self-evident that the best way for locals to find a vehicle for their talent was to create their own drama. The Doll arrived at the right time.

Ray Lawler was unmistakably a local product. He was born in Footscray, a tough part of Melbourne, the second-eldest of eight children. Lawler’s father was a labourer, and the family, like so many, struggled through the Depression. Lawler left school at 13 to work in a factory that made farm equipment. For him there would be no high school or university, but he had passion and a determination to find a way into the theatre world.

Lawler believed British films were of ‘superior quality’, and the best way he could see them was at the Athenaeum Theatre, in Collins Street. It became his regular haunt: he’d visit the art gallery on the third floor, and eventually joined the Athenaeum Library on the second floor.10 He found his way to the Union Theatre and started working on Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1954, drawing on his vivid recollections of seeing Queensland canecutters — confident, with an easy physicality — wooing chorus girls at the Brisbane theatre where he had once worked. Lawler’s story featured two canecutters who travel to Melbourne in the off-season each year to visit two women living in a Carlton terrace. Each time, they bring a kewpie doll with them. While Lawler was touring Twelfth Night with Barry Humphries, Zoe Caldwell, and the company, Lawler would hole up in a hotel room, working and reworking The Doll.

Lawler had a long discussion with Sumner about an early draft of the play, and then presented him with the rewritten work, in a brown paper parcel, on the eve of Sumner’s departure to Sydney to join the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. Sumner got on with his new job and Lawler became the manager of the University Theatre. Later the following year, the trust put £500 towards a staging of the play, honouring its commitment to present original Australian drama. But both Sumner and Lawler knew it still needed work.

One of the elements that had to be worked through was its Australianness, which proved a challenge for the local actors, who had spent years playing parts that were far removed from the way their countrymen and women spoke and behaved. No one sounded Australian on stage. ‘[T]here is scarcely a glimmer of an Australian accent in the idiom of our concert halls and playhouses,’ The Sydney Morning Herald’s theatre critic Lindsay Brown observed in 1954.11 The Australian accent had been derided for years. Winston Churchill called Australia’s version of English ‘the most brutal maltreatment that has ever been inflicted on the mother-tongue of the great English-speaking nations’. Australians adopted an English version of their accent, a ‘received pronunciation’, that was designed to cover up any drawl or twang. Most of the nation’s cultural institutions subscribed to this way of speaking; it wasn’t until 1952 that the ABC allowed distinctively Australian accents on air.12

The nation’s theatres took a little longer. Sumner got to work on The Doll and paid particular attention to the accents. According to Lawler:

At first we all started on the same level with ordinary Australian accents but gradually Sumner graded the ‘Australianness’ of the speech. He pointed out that men from the outback would speak with rougher voices and would be less articulate than city women working in a hotel bar. Incidentally, the cast found the Australian rhythm of speech much more natural to them than the usual English or American rhythm they have to use.13

It wasn’t surprising that Australian actors’ own accent came more naturally, only that it had taken so long for them to find a vehicle for it. For a country about to embrace the world, it was important that it actually heard the sounds and characteristics of its own people too.

For Sumner, the challenge also went to the play’s turn of phrase. ‘We were in strange territory: until then little Australian drama had been able to catch the colloquial ear,’ he said.14 On opening night, 28 November 1955, in Melbourne, the audience hooted with laughter at the opening-act phrases they recognised — ‘Goodo sport, be with you in a minute’ … ‘steak and oysters’ … ‘Young and Jacksons’. Niall Brennan, the theatre manager, knew instantly that the audience had found a connection with the play:

[I]t was the best dressed and most sympathetic first-night audience I had ever seen at the Union. They came rolling in, in furs and starched shirts, and I remember saying to one of the usherettes … ‘I think this play is going to be a great success.’ None of us could understand it … They clapped every actor who came on and the roars which greeted Ray’s own entrance were tremendous. When the curtain came down at the end, the theatre almost shook …’15

The laughter no doubt dried up as the drama became more compelling, but Sumner and Lawler believed they were onto something. They discussed it with the trust’s inaugural director, Hugh Hunt, at midnight after the first performance, and agreed the play should be transferred to the trust’s theatre in Sydney. The Doll opened at the Elizabethan Theatre on 10 January 1956.

The Sydney season was a triumph. Within days of it going on tour in early 1956, the play became a sellout through regional Australia. The roads as the tour embarked were flooded from torrential rains, but the bleak weather did nothing to deter locals who wanted to see a play that sounded like them. Theatre critic and arts publisher Katharine Brisbane noticed something was stirring in the nation’s cultural landscape. ‘Self-assertion was in the air,’ she said, ‘uncertainly expressed in a yearning to mix on terms of equality with those older civilisations thousands of servicemen had glimpsed during the war and from which a daily increasing number of new Australians had come.’16

If only the nation’s politics showed such self-awareness.

*

By 1956 Les Coleman was hanging on tenaciously to the last of his political preferments — chairman of the Olympic Games’ construction committee — and to his place on the Melbourne City Council. He had been appointed to the Olympic role in 1953 by Premier John Cain, and helped the committee to get its financial house in order at a time when planning for the Games was at a low point. In the intervening two and a half years, Coleman had gone from being Cain’s trusted cabinet colleague to a Labor Party pariah. He had turned his back on the party that he had supported — and that had nourished him — for almost 40 years, to effectively become the first leader of what would become the Democratic Labor Party. Coleman’s political odyssey took place against the backdrop of Olympic controversies, but in the end it was the bitter Labor split that ended his political career. He was one of many who were consumed by Labor’s internal fires.

There was little evidence to suggest that Coleman’s career would take this path. He was a quiet and serious man, a skilful footballer and debater who became an accountant and also ran some hotels. Coleman had joined the ALP as a young man, but just what he believed in remained something of a mystery, even to his close friends.17 His political philosophy was more altruism than ambition. ‘I believe everybody should make some contribution by way of public service to the general welfare of the people,’ he said. ‘This applies particularly to those who have had someone success in life because they should give something back.’18

The one constant in Coleman’s life was Catholicism, the faith he was raised in. It was also a source of fraternal support at a time of sectarianism and discrimination against Catholics. Coleman would do what he could to advance fellow Catholics, and his social circle in and around the heavily Catholic Port Melbourne, where he spent much of his time, included James O’Collins, who would become bishop of Ballarat and an important figure in the Labor split.

Coleman worked his way through the Labor branches, was a delegate to the Victorian Labor conference, and was then elected to the Melbourne City Council. In 1943 he won a seat in the upper house of the Victorian parliament, and when Cain became premier two years later he was given the job as assistant treasurer. It was Cain’s first gesture of confidence in Coleman, and it would not be the last.

Coleman was voted Labor’s leader in the Legislative Council in 1952, and Premier Cain gave him the transport portfolio to bring the railways’ £9 million deficit to heel. Coleman’s performance across his portfolios — and in the Olympic cause — suggested to some of his parliamentary colleagues that he was a potential successor to Cain as premier. But there was no natural affinity between Cain and Coleman that might enable a smooth succession plan.

Coleman joined Bill Barry in a group of four Labor MPs, a tight constellation of Catholics that became the most enduring of his political associations. It was not a true factional base, which meant that Coleman had no safety net in troubled times. He was in Cain’s favour because of the quality of his work, but if his performance became somehow compromised, there didn’t appear to be any way of averting a fall from grace. And with the deep fissures that were about to open within the Labor Party, Coleman was vulnerable.

Cain’s biggest problem in 1953 was trying to resolve the ongoing saga of the location of Melbourne’s Olympic stadium. For months the IOC had been agitating Melbourne for a resolution: would it be the Showgrounds, Princes Park in Carlton, or the Melbourne Cricket Ground?

The debate dated back to before the 1949 bid, when the premier of the time, Tom Hollway, had counselled silence about where the main stadium would be until after the IOC made its decision.19 It might have been smart short-term politics but it created a huge long-term headache. At one stage even the University of Melbourne’s sports oval, Albert Park, and the St Kilda Cricket Ground were considered. The MCG was an outstanding sporting facility, close to the city and to public transport. The problem was that it had several significant stakeholders — the Melbourne Cricket Club, the MCG Trustees, the Victorian Cricket Association, and the Victorian Football League — and each of them had different priorities. The MCG would also need to be renovated, to add more seating and a cinder track. Some of the traditionalists in the MCC’s Long Room no doubt reached for a large drink at the mention of such heresy.

By the time the IOC convened in Helsinki, the message from Melbourne was that Princes Park would be the venue. Back home, though, it was anything but clear, especially when it was estimated that it would cost £2 million to create an Olympic-class venue at the location.

Premier Cain was an MCG Trustee, and knew the history of the extensive and ultimately futile negotiations about securing the MCG as the Olympic venue that had been held in 1949, and again in 1951. He now decided that the best way of sorting out the issue was to ask a simple question: what could Victoria afford? Cain’s tactics would be pure brinkmanship, linking the continued financial cost of the Games with a solution to the stadium mess, but he knew there had to be an end to the impasse.

The premier convened a meeting in Melbourne in February 1953 with Prime Minister Menzies, the MCG Trustees, Australia’s IOC delegate, Hugh Weir, MCC representatives, federal opposition deputy leader Arthur Calwell, and the Melbourne City Council. Menzies had taken a similar line to Cain, and was cautious about committing more money to the Games. Cain’s two confederates on the city council were Les Coleman and Bill Barry, but they both supported the Carlton plan. So too did the prime minister. Weir believed that shifting the venue from Carlton to the MCG would spell the end of Melbourne’s Olympic bid, because the IOC would not tolerate Melbourne making another change so late in the day. Also, he didn’t believe there was a way to turn the MCG into a suitable venue. Even Menzies was sceptical, pointing out that the MCC hadn’t even put forward any details of what the stadium could look like. Cain was unfussed. ‘It’s the MCG or you get no money from us,’ he told the Olympic officials.20

Coleman’s value to Cain was that he delivered independent, occasionally uncomfortable advice, but that didn’t mean Cain had to listen to him. Now Coleman warned Cain that some MCC members would get together to challenge the right of the Olympic Games to use the ground. Cain didn’t care about that either, and reminded Coleman who he worked for. ‘If there is any trouble in that direction I will bring in legislation at the top of Bourke St to prevent it, and you will help me,’ he told Coleman during the meeting.21

Cain’s strategy carried the day, and it was agreed that the MCG would be the main stadium. Weir left the meeting consumed by gloom: he was certain the venue change spelt the end of the Melbourne Olympics.

Nine days later, Cain appointed Coleman to a subcommittee to liaise with the MCG Trustees about the terms of the agreement for the Olympics occupancy and the necessary preparations that had to be made to the MCG. By the end of May 1953, Coleman was in charge of the Olympic Organising Control Committee (later to become the construction committee) after Arthur Coles — a member of the supermarket family — resigned in frustration. Coles had famously declared when he took on the job, ‘I don’t get ulcers, I give them.’ But the constant battles within the committee and the mixed messages that were going to the IOC exhausted even his patience.22

Coleman was swiftly on the offensive, telling The Age:

There should no place in this organisation for the individualist or one with a chip on his shoulder. All must work together if we are to achieve success because there is less than three years in which the job must be done. Time is fast running against us and when you appreciate the fact that only one site has been chosen, and that neither a sod has been turned or a nail driven, it will be appreciated how difficult the task is going to be.23

It was a pointed reference to end the infighting and a reminder of the need for an urgent resolution to the problem. Coleman wasn’t by nature a panicker, but he understood that the Melbourne Olympics was at a perilous moment. His membership of the government and the city council gave him a powerful presence on the two most important non-Olympic organisations. He was the right man for the job, calm, meticulous, sensible, and focused.

Cain again turned to Coleman to resolve an Olympic matter in 1954, when he made his party ally chairman of the new Olympic Park Trust. It didn’t appear to be a contentious appointment, but it wasn’t long before the trust’s old stagers started to mutter that Cain’s intervention was really about marginalising amateur sport. Cain’s move again highlighted the divergent interests that were involved in the implementation of Melbourne’s Olympic dream.

Cain was one of those in Melbourne — along with Sir Frank Beaurepaire, Sir Raymond Connelly, and a few other modernisers — who understood that the purity of amateurism was all very well, but it probably wouldn’t get the job of organising the Olympic Games done. That needed the practical application of some sound business skills. Cain’s appointment of Coleman was part of a broader restructure of the Olympic Park Trust that left the new board of management with just two representatives from amateur athletics.

This wasn’t acceptable to Edgar Tanner, secretary of the Olympic Organising Committee and something of a Beaurepaire bête noire. ‘This is definitely a State political move and indicates that the State government thinks the amateur body is not capable of controlling Olympic Park,’ Tanner grumbled.24

He was right — Cain didn’t think the amateurs could do it, but he kept his own counsel. Coleman took the reins without further ado. But Cain and Coleman were soon about to be caught up in something much worse.

*

In the aftermath of Labor’s narrow loss in the 1954 federal election, leader H.V. ‘Doc’ Evatt denounced the activities of the right-wing anti-communist agitators within the party, known as the Groupers. The ‘industrial groups’ worked within labour unions against Communist Party candidates, or even those who were comparatively less radical but still left-wing. The Petrov Affair only emboldened the Groupers, who fed off the growing anxiety across Australia about the communist menace.

Initial support for the Groupers came from B.A. Santamaria’s Catholic Social Studies Movement (known as the Movement), which began to take on what some on Labor’s left believed was a sinister and covert role agitating within the ALP. Under Santamaria’s charismatic leadership, the Movement became a political force, and managed to effectively control the Groupers — and therefore key elements of the Labor Party.

Those in the Movement believed they had God on their side. Pope Pius XII had, after all, decreed in 1949 that any Catholic who collaborated with communists in any form would be excommunicated.25 In Victoria, where the battle was at its most intense, Archbishop Daniel Mannix became the Movement’s patron and Santamaria its strategic director.26 When Evatt prevailed against the Groupers in a battle at the Labor Party’s national conference in March 1955, the Groupers opted to set up their own Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist) in Victoria. The fallout was significant — Labor Party members resigned and trade unions disaffiliated. The Victorian ALP’s sectarianism, which had largely been kept away from public scrutiny, emerged to divide the party.

Coleman found himself in one of the key battlegrounds: transport, where left-wing unions had strong representation. Coleman had reduced costs across the railways, helping set up the platform for Cain to extend and fund his social reforms in other portfolios. Coleman’s ultimate success was to ensure the railways’ revenue grew ahead of inflation. This was the triumph at the core of Coleman’s fiscal discipline. But his political instincts could not match his feel for a balance sheet, and Coleman’s problem crystallised around the so-called One-Man Bus dispute.

It seemed a simple enough issue: the Tramways Board maintained that the new 41-seat buses needed only a driver, not a conductor, during off-peak times. Under this initiative, the driver would collect the fares. The union’s response reflected concern among bus crews that drivers needed conductors, and it told its members not to man the buses. Coleman fired back a rejoinder that played into the loaded language of the day: ‘I appeal to the union members to reject what appears to be an instruction from the Kremlin and not be misled by those leaders who have done little to improve working conditions in the industry.’27 In the febrile and paranoid political environment, even legitimate disputes took on greater significance.

It was soon clear that the One-Man Bus dispute was going to be a political stoush between some formidable ideological opponents. Typical of the time, it was a dispute made up of a mosaic of ideologies and personal vendettas, subterranean alliances, and deep animosity. Former communist-turned-Grouper Denis ‘Dinny’ Lovegrove was the ALP’s state secretary, and suspected the Tramways Union’s strong communist base was preparing for a major confrontation with Cain. Lovegrove urged Coleman to stand firm.28

The union was led by the communist Clarrie O’Shea, who was prepared to settle in for the long haul, knowing that he had the support of Trades Hall secretary Vic Stout. O’Shea’s dealings from the first day with Coleman fostered in him a long-standing, almost visceral, dislike of the minister. The feeling was mutual. Coleman detested communists and quite simply wanted to get rid of O’Shea, but it was a battle he was never going to win.29 There were personal issues, too, between Stout and Coleman: the trade unionist was a non-smoker and a temperance advocate, so it was no surprise that he looked askance at Coleman’s interest in pubs and judged the transport minister accordingly.

Coleman’s propensity for acting unilaterally in the dispute, taking initiatives that he only later reported to the ALP caucus, accelerated his declining support within the party.30 The longer the dispute went on, the greater the political cost to the Cain government. Despite the growth in car ownership, more than 60 per cent of Melbourne’s workers still used public transport to get to their jobs and back home again.31 That was a big constituency to be affected by any kind of industrial discord, and Cain could not afford the stand-off to run for too long.

Even so, the One-Man Bus dispute ground on for almost a year before an independent arbiter ruled on 7 January 1955 in favour of the unions. By then the Cain government had lost significant skin, and Coleman’s star was fading.

Two months after the dispute was resolved, the divisions came to a head at the ALP’s national conference when two Victorian ‘executives’ — one led by Groupers and the other by Trades Hall secretary Vic Stout — presented themselves to be confirmed. In tumultuous proceedings and a subsequent picket, Stout’s ticket was endorsed, leaving the Groupers to retreat to Melbourne, where they held a meeting of their own. Stout warned those who planned to take part that they would be expelled from the party. Coleman defied the directive and went ahead and joined the meeting of 25 state and federal Victorian MPs. Perhaps Coleman’s decision was motivated by a bruised and vengeful mood after the One-Man Bus dispute; more likely it was his Catholicism and anti-communism that motivated him to attend the meeting that would ultimately end his time in the ALP. There were personal elements to his decision too: while there was scant evidence of Coleman having anything but a cursory relationship with Santamaria, and he knew Mannix only through their paths often crossing at official functions, he certainly disliked Stout’s militancy.

When the 17 state MPs were subsequently suspended from the Labor Party, Cain demanded that the four cabinet ministers among them, including Coleman, resign. All four tried to stare Cain down, but the premier went to see the governor, who issued Cain with a new commission to form government. Cain selected a new cabinet and tried to go on as before. But the world had changed irrevocably. Coleman, who remained on the Melbourne City Council with fellow expelled cabinet minister and Catholic Bill Barry, formed an alternative group, called the Coleman-Barry Party, which became a forerunner of the Democratic Labor Party.

It was Barry, with his tub-thumping rhetoric about Doc Evatt being ‘the most dangerous man in Australia’, who garnered most of the headlines. And it was Barry whom Cain would later publicly demonise for his treachery, linking him with state opposition leader Henry Bolte in the no-confidence motion that tipped Cain out of government on 20 April 1955. Cain did, however, go public with a criticism of Coleman’s intransigence on the One-Man Bus dispute, blaming his former transport minister for bringing the wrath of the community down on the government’s head.32

Barry was a bluff soul who was more comfortable in the limelight than Coleman, who, although he had cultivated the press while in government, eschewed building a profile in the aftermath of the split. The Movement had a view about who should lead the new Labor offshoot, and neither Barry nor Coleman suited their goals. Barry was already in parliament but was considered to be rough around the edges — and he was associated with an old conniver and fixer of Victorian politics, John Wren. Coleman was a smoother, more measured character for the job but lacked popular appeal.33 The end result was a compromise leadership, a double act, which immediately made the new grouping — the Anti-Communist ALP — look like a party run by committee. In reality, Coleman and Barry had no real issue on which to contest an election, other than what they opposed among their former colleagues. For many voters the new grouping was inevitably linked to the Catholic Church, and to a group of faceless men engaged in subterranean activities that seemed to have little to do with governing. Such conditions could only lead to one outcome.

Cain was forced to fight the 1955 state election on two fronts — the enemy within and the enemy without. He was a second-generation Irish-Catholic, but Cain’s attitude to Catholicism shifted from tolerance to distance as the sectarianism within the Labor Party pulled it apart.34 When Cain delivered his election launch at Northcote Town Hall on 9 May 1955, he felt he had to repudiate the Barry-Coleman group before he even addressed his plan for re-election:

There is no room for those who would do the work of Labor’s enemies; no room for those who refuse to carry out the decision of its governing bodies or the policies that have been hammered out at conferences and have made the party great. The attempt to link the Labor government with Communism is fraudulent and false and those responsible for such statement know that they are false. Let me make it perfectly plain that we are opposed to Communism in every shape and form.35

It did no good. The election was bitter and discordant, full of vitriol and recrimination. The new grouping failed to make an impression on the electorate, and Barry lost his seat in the lower house. Labor’s primary vote plummeted, prompting Calwell to call the result an unmitigated disaster.36

The Legislative Council elections were held in June, and Coleman, as the other half of the leadership group, and a councillor, took up the cudgel. His pitch to voters was entirely in keeping with the tenor of his public life, and a stark contrast to Barry’s gruff electioneering. ‘The lesson of the Legislative Assembly election was that Labor cannot have electoral success until it faces the people united,’ Coleman said during a radio address. And governing would only occur when the unions were ‘in sound and sensible Labor hands’.37

That approach didn’t work either: Coleman and ten other candidates on his ticket were defeated. Coleman himself only received 40 per cent of the vote that the Cain Labor candidate achieved in his Melbourne West province. But if there was one foretaste of what was to come for Labor in the years ahead, it was that the Coleman-Barry Party overall garnered 16.53 per cent of the council vote, compared to Cain Labor’s 39.42 per cent.38 Henry Bolte became premier on the back of the Coleman-Barry discord, with an almost 13 per cent swing. It was a model of how Labor would be shut out of power for almost two decades.

Through all of this, Coleman somehow managed to maintain his hold on his Olympics roles. It spoke volumes for Cain’s cool appraisal of Coleman’s work. Cain also understood that it was wise to keep his former cabinet colleague working on the Olympics because it would help mollify the IOC. Avery Brundage was coming to Melbourne for a final inspection of venues and facilities, and it would be disastrous to remove the man in charge of the stadiums.

Coleman himself put his head down and kept doing the job. By the early months of 1956, as the Games accelerated into view, there was no time for political point-scoring and personal agendas. At the start of the year Coleman expressed doubt that the boxing venue in West Melbourne would be finished in time. Two months later, he announced that the gates at Olympic Park would commemorate the late Sir Raymond Connelly, because no one would forget the work the former lord mayor had done to secure the Games for Melbourne.39 It seemed to be a mundane and uncontroversial statement compared to the brutality of the politics in the previous 18 months.