Chapter Five

It’s a Men’s Game

Robert Menzies reached London in June 1956, two days before the Lord’s Test match of the Ashes series. Menzies assumed a seat on the Australian team’s balcony at the fabled home of cricket for the first day’s play after Australian captain Ian Johnson won the toss and opted to bat. It was a pleasant day to be an Australian: England skipper Peter May dropped three catches, and, after an interlude for bad light, Australia reached stumps in reasonable order at 3–180.

England held the Ashes after a 3–1 trouncing of Australia at home in 1954–55, and the tourists had not started the 1956 tour in great form, failing to defeat a county in the lead-up to the Tests, and recording their first loss to an English county side since 1912. The First Test, at Nottingham, had ended in a draw, so the teams went to Lord’s for the Second Test with the series well and truly alive.

On the Saturday evening of the Test Menzies hosted a reception for the Australians at the Savoy. Earlier that day he had sat with Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Sir Donald Bradman, and watched Australia struggle in its second innings, after going in again with a lead of 114 runs over England.

Reports emerged that the British authorities, mindful of Menzies’ love of cricket, had installed a television in the Daimler that was his vehicle while in London. It turned out that, despite his wariness about television, Menzies paid £70 to have the TV put in the car. He left the ground early on Saturday and turned on the television, expecting to watch some cricket. Instead, Menzies saw Robin Hood. It was the children’s hour.1

Menzies’ official business in London was the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, an event that brought together the leaders of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Pakistan, Ceylon, and the Rhodesian Federation. Such was Menzies’ reputation in Britain, fresh reports emerged that he was contemplating retiring from politics in Australia and assuming a position in the British House of Lords.

Menzies usually timed his trips to England to coincide with the cricket. The game offered a particular form of relaxation that he could not find anywhere else. ‘It is occasionally left to people like me to carry with them through life a love and growing understanding of the great game — a feeling in the heart and mind and the eye which neither time nor chance can utterly destroy,’ he wrote.2 The game not only engaged him but provided him with a store of pleasant memories. ‘It is one of the glories of cricket that, when one looks back at it, one remembers the hours, not as something static but as something alive, and vivid, and full of action,’ he said in retirement.3 Cricket was also, of course, a fundamentally English game that underlined Menzies’ belief in the supremacy of the Empire and its civilising effect on the rest of the world.

But his enthusiasm for sport extended beyond cricket, to tennis, golf, and Australian Rules football — in particular, the Carlton Football Club. A special platform was made in Menzies’ later years at Carlton’s home ground, Princes Park, on which Menzies’ driver could park his Bentley so the former PM could watch the Blues play. Menzies moved among sportsmen with an ease but found particular comfort among cricketers, despite his inability to play the game with any skill. He established the Prime Minister’s XI match in 1951, a contest between an international touring team and a local side he helped to pick. The innovation enabled Menzies to get even closer to the men he admired. The presidency of the Australian Olympic Federation might have come a close second to his own cricket match, but the honour ensured Menzies had an extra level of connection to the approaching Games.

Menzies’ interest in sport meant that he shared something fundamental with many Australians. The nation’s international sporting success gave the prime minister a cachet, especially among his Commonwealth brethren. He could revel in some of the reflected sporting glory. Australia’s sporting triumphs, so often beyond what a small, remote nation should realistically have achieved, were an ideal way for him to promote the nation. The suggestion was that a land with an emphasis on the vast outdoors, with endless sunshine, and with a happy bounty of fresh fruit and quality meat, was the sort of nation where athletes could thrive. Arthur Hodson, the secretary of the Amateur Athletic Union of Australia, had no doubt about how sport carried the nation’s image to the world, saying in 1950:

Sport has become Australia’s biggest and best medium of world publicity. I doubt if there is a worthwhile newspaper or radio anywhere in the world that has not had to pay some tribute to Australia during the past 12 months. Now no one can deny that our successes this year have been worth a thousand times more than the Government spends yearly on publicity through the Department of Information.4

Others saw Australians’ preoccupation with sport not so much as a flippant activity but as an indicator of national maturity. ‘Australians are sometimes twitted [sic] by overseas visitors for spending too much time on sport to the neglect of other pursuits which might fill their leisure more profitably,’ G.V. Portus, the University of Adelaide’s former professor of political science and history, observed.

The gibe is not new … It derives from the grim outlook of the earlier stages of the industrial revolution, when God-fearing puritans worked little children for 14 hours a day in cotton mills. Moreover, as a gibe, it might (and in fact is) directed against many other countries besides ours. For a growing preoccupation with sport is characteristic of this stage of modern civilisation.5

Sporting success only increased Australians’ interest, not just in watching it but in taking part. And in the pre-television era, watching sport meant going along, either buying a ticket or watching park sport for free. A 1954 Melbourne survey found that 40 per cent of people spent their leisure time watching sport, but twice that number were actually playing it.6 It was evidence of a nation that wore its sporting commitment lightly, and whose anticipation of success rarely waned. This was particularly true in the Australian winter of 1956, when the nation’s cricketers, tennis players, and golfers were in Britain, still considered by many back home as the ultimate proving ground for Australian sports men and women.

Not only was it an Ashes year, but Australian tennis players were also expected to do well at Wimbledon’s All England Club. Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, and Ken McGregor were part of the boom in Australian tennis. They were at home on grass courts, masters of the serve and volley, tireless and usually impregnable. And on the links courses that were the home of golf, Peter Thomson had few rivals. Another British Open title — his third in a row — beckoned.

There was an unspoken belief in Australia that the country had an assembly line of talent that the rest of the world envied. Emerging talents came from the suburban blocks or the paddocks, rough, ready, steely-eyed, without a hint of wavering in their commitment to being the best. They might be unsophisticated, raw even, but they were world-beaters in the making. Look at that kid over there, the story went, he’s been playing cricket since the sun came up and he’ll be playing until it goes down again. He’ll be a champion. Every success story had its tale of precocious industry — a young Don Bradman practising with a golf ball and a cricket stump against a corrugated-iron tank at Bowral; Ken Rosewall playing tennis as a three-year-old, naturally left-handed but drilled by his father to become a right-hander; Peter Thomson becoming a club champion at 16.

The sporting system might have appeared haphazard to the casual observer, but there was method and organisation behind spotting and training talent. When tennis coaching legend Harry Hopman cast his eye over Queensland’s best tennis teenagers in 1954, he picked out two boys: Frank Gorman, 14, and Rod Laver, 15. Both had left school to pursue tennis and landed jobs in sports shops, like others had before them. Hopman could clearly spot talent – Laver became one of the finest male players of all time. Hopman’s confidence that potential could be translated into something permanent was based on the Queensland system that provided incentive and opportunity for young tennis players.7 There was a structure that provided the support, coaching, and competition that underpinned success. There was one other element, common across all the sports that Australians were playing internationally at the time: all of them — Hoad, Rosewall, Thompson, the cricketers — were amateurs. But that wouldn’t last. The era of professional sport was coming.

A new level of Australian success beckoned in July 1956. Athletes including John Landy, Dave Stephens, and Jim Bailey, had set new records; the swimmers, including Lorraine Crapp, Murray Rose, and David Theile, were setting new marks in the pool; the Australians went on to win the Second Test; Hoad defeated Rosewall to win the men’s singles at Wimbledon, and then teamed with him to win the men’s doubles. On the same Wimbledon Sunday Thomson won his third straight British Open.

The celebrations underlined just how much sport meant to reinforcing Australia’s sense of itself. ‘How proud we are of our unofficial ambassadors of cinder-track, centre court, oval, pool and fairway! These clean-limbed stout-hearted young people have made Australia known around the globe as a land of champions. They’ve given us — at the best possible time — a pre-Olympics boost impossible to evaluate in terms of cash,’ The Argus shouted.8

This rejoicing, maybe even triumphalism, pointed to a significant emotional investment in how Australian athletes would perform in Melbourne. The expectations were high, especially as success was popularly linked to Australia’s international kudos. It didn’t matter what else Australia did or was known for around the world, the path to international recognition seemed to be through the nation’s sporting achievements.

*

Television’s infancy meant that communicating and sharing that success was in the hands of the newspapers and radio. Precious few would be able to see what was going on if they weren’t at the MCG or the pool. Yet some nursed concerns that televising sport may actually have a negative impact on sport itself.

The arrival of televised sport in the US in 1948 triggered divergent views about its impact on gate takings and spectator numbers. Some sporting organisations blamed television for a drop in patronage, while others were thankful for the sponsorship or advertising dollars that came with being televised. Sports fans were in no doubt: ‘Sport is the best thing TV does,’ one Los Angeles correspondent claimed.9 It gave you the best seat in the house, with several cameras for different angles, and usually you didn’t miss a moment.

The man who would find himself televising some of the Games, Colin Bednall, was equally enthusiastic:

Spectator sports, like tennis, boxing, wrestling and football are nothing short of sensational [on television]. Sitting back comfortably at home, the television viewer sees incidents and even facial expressions that are denied to the crowd around the arena. Even people who would never think of joining a sports crowd are mesmerised by sport on television.10

Bednall had gone from the royal commission on television to the leadership of one of what Wilfrid Kent Hughes referred to as ‘infant TV stations’. At any other time such a swift two-step would have been considered unseemly, perhaps even a conflict of interest, but if the commission had revealed anything, it was Bednall’s clear agenda. Bednall believed in the need for commercial television, not a government-run monopoly; no one was under any illusions about that. One of his fellow commissioners, chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board, Robert Osborne, found it all wearisome and aggravating. ‘We continue to be embarrassed by Bednall, who not only cross-examines crossly as before, and discloses a patent bias by continual argument with witnesses,’ Osborne wrote to commission chair George Paton, who was overseas at that time.11

Osborne outlined Bednall’s latest transgression, which involved Bednall complaining about remarks the postmaster general (and therefore the minister responsible for television), Larry Anthony, made at a private dinner party given by the broadcasters. Bednall had taken issue with Anthony’s remark that the commission had been established to tell the government what it already knew. Bednall was unnecessarily sensitive about the commission being no more than a rubber stamp, as the framework for the Australian TV system was already well underway.

Legislation for the introduction of television was brought to the federal parliament on 18 February 1953, three weeks before the commission sat for the first time, and a year before its final report was released. It overturned the Chifley Labor government’s bill to establish a government-controlled television station in each state, which would have prevented any commercial player from entering the field. Not only that, but in September 1953 — after the commission had finished its public hearings but before it had reported — federal cabinet affirmed that it would go ahead with a dual system, comprising commercial and public stations.12

Bednall claimed to the acting prime minister, Sir Arthur Fadden, that Anthony’s remarks put him and the commission in an invidious position. Osborne pooh-poohed the idea. He had been at the dinner and assured Paton that the minister’s remarks were ‘facetious, as well as private’.13 Osborne was not particularly interested in the mechanics of broadcasting, and was particularly keen not to offend his political masters. He had a distaste for Bednall’s front-on approach to the issues thrown up at the commission’s hearings. Nor did Osborne care for breaches of protocol, such as making public reference to private speeches.

Bednall, on the other hand, had spent a career tilting at governments. He didn’t like the sound of the minister’s statement because it suggested the commission didn’t have a role to play. It most certainly did, but it didn’t have much to do with making the case for introducing television to Australia: that was already decided. Instead, it was trying to identify a system that enabled competition between the commercial networks (a hard task with a disparate regional and rural population and the high cost of television), as well as advise the government on how best to regulate the commercial networks.14 The broader consideration behind these challenges was how to make best use of television broadcasting in the public interest. Commercial operators could not just be on the new airwaves, pushing out material without regard for content and audience. The most pithy solution to this problem came from Noel Nixon, the president of the Australian Association of Advertising Agencies, who told the commission: ‘We believe that self-regulation takes care of morals and competition is going to take care of quality.’15

Bednall’s views about such things were what might be expected of someone who had written for and edited mass-market newspapers:

What is beyond doubt is that most people would react adversely to earmarking huge sums of public money to establish and maintain a service which was out of touch with popular taste. One wonders for instance the reaction of the Australian public to a TV service which presented Mourning Becomes Electra over two nights in the main listening hours. Yet this was regarded as one of the really big achievements in the BBC television service.16

Bednall had no time for elitism or high-end aesthetics when it came to engaging the public. The BBC could do it, because it was the government’s broadcasting authority. If people were going to pay to own a television, they would expect to be entertained. A government-funded television station would take care of the high culture so that Bednall and his commercial network didn’t have to.

Of course, Bednall did not come to the table with clean hands: he was working for Murdoch in Brisbane when he was appointed a commissioner. Sir Keith had been an aggressive defender of his own print business interests when ABC’s radio service was established in 1932, and the newspaper — and radio — tools he had at his disposal to prosecute his case in the looming battle for television licences were formidable. Bednall might have thought he was being the noble patron of a multifaceted commercial television industry, but it didn’t take much imagination to suspect he might actually be helping the newspaper industry.

Bednall did not think the ABC should have a monopoly, nor get a head start on its commercial competitors.17 His questioning of ABC general manager Charles Moses and ABC chairman Richard Boyer in the commission was pointed and argumentative. The commission’s final report was more nuanced than Bednall’s point of view, and recommended the gradual introduction of television across Australia. This would supposedly help ensure some level of sustainability and quality programming. Osborne’s Australian Broadcasting Control Board would be the regulator of quality. Moses’ ABC would be the national broadcaster that would be funded by viewers’ licence fees. Two commercial stations would be established in Melbourne and Sydney, with similar ownership constraints that applied to radio. Other stations in other cities would follow. These recommendations were delivered in 1954, with the intention of the nation being ready for the new medium in time for the Olympics.

*

On 25 June 1956 a handwritten letter arrived at the Customs and Excise offices of the Commonwealth government in Melbourne. Its tone was urgent, even demanding. ‘Dear Sir, I am writing to request you to forward a novel which you extracted from a parcel of books, posted to me by a friend in the USA,’ the letter began. The letter-writer, believed to be a young man from regional Victoria, was inquiring about his missing copy of The Catcher in the Rye, which Customs had confiscated some months earlier. Not that the book was named. It was not even clear that the writer knew which book was missing. He had some correspondence from Customs, he wrote, which explained the book had been kept to be reviewed, but the office had had it for five months now, so perhaps the review was over and he could have his book back? ‘I contacted my friend [in the USA] and he stated that no book in the parcel was objectionable and all could be purchased anywhere in the US. He was astounded that one had been taken.’18

It didn’t really matter what the gentleman’s friend in the USA said — those Americans were part of the problem, with their louche behaviour that encouraged people to write about such things with such unchecked candour. The office hadn’t finished with the book. Not by a long way. In fact, it had been sent to the Comptroller-General of Customs, Sir Francis Meere, in Canberra, who would make an adjudication on whether the book would be allowed into the country.

All of this was done in secret. No one beyond those who had seen the book at Customs and the young man in regional Victoria had any knowledge of what was happening. That was the way the process worked. It kept Australia free from the problem of fraying morals that was, it seemed, besetting many nations and their artistes. By association, it was the faceless bureaucrats who knew what was good for the rest of the country, and especially for one young man who wasn’t even sure what he was missing out on. He wouldn’t get his copy of The Catcher in the Rye any time in 1956.

It was perhaps just as well no one knew that one of the United States’ more successful novels was about to be banned in Australia. There was an enormous effort being mounted to get Australia — and Melbourne, in particular — on the world tourism map. Having an international debate about censorship six months out from an Olympics might well have been unwelcome publicity. The Olympic Games Organizing Committee had a subcommittee which focused on promoting Australia as a destination, with Melbourne and the Games as the centrepiece. At its first meeting, held at the Melbourne Town Hall on the propitious date of 26 January 1954, the committee resolved that its goal was to ‘convince people abroad that we were going to stage the Games properly and to work up enthusiasm for the Games in Australia itself’.19

Central to these goals was a perception within the Melbourne Olympic organisation that the world didn’t think the city (or the nation) could pull off the Games. There was a lingering lack of confidence among some Melbournians, who felt that the danger of falling short of delivering an eye-catching Olympics would, in some ways, confirm the view that Melbourne was a backwater in every sense — cultural, economic, political, and sporting.

Local journalists who had covered previous Olympics made it clear exactly what was at stake for Melbourne. ‘The Melbourne festival … will be the most international sporting series staged in this country,’ Melbourne journalist Peter Banfield wrote in The Argus. ‘That is important, but more important still is the immense amount of publicity it will gain us overseas in countries in which Olympics are almost a religion.’ Banfield had been in Helsinki and had a good idea of the impact a successful Games could have on a host city and nation:

We will be host city to large numbers of visitors and we must do our best to impress them with our hospitality, our willingness to aid them, and with the manner in which we produce the Games. To them, their reception by Melbourne people will be as important as the size of our stadium and the success of our team. They will judge us on a short stay and their countries will judge us on their reports and letters home.20

Every statement like Banfield’s only increased the heat on the locals.

The benefit of having seven years to prepare for the Games was that, if you were shrewd, you could build interest and a potential audience over time. Promotional material about Melbourne was distributed at the 1954 Empire Games in Vancouver, the 1955 Pan American Games, and the Mediterranean Games of the same year. There was a map of Melbourne with the Olympic locations marked, a world map with routes converging on Melbourne, pictures of venues, and action sporting photographs, accompanied by text that gave some historical background on the Games, and information about Melbourne and accommodation options for visitors. It was printed in English, French, and Spanish but not in any Asian or other language.21

Radio Australia started a monthly broadcast on the Games in April 1954, which eventually went to Singapore, Sarawak, North Borneo, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Burma (Myanmar), Ceylon (Sir Lanka), and Pakistan. The Australian National Travel Association printed 165,000 copies of a travel booklet featuring the Games and the nation, and sent them to ‘all leading travel agencies in the world’. It was also distributed through Australian government offices, consulates, and embassies around the world.

An Australian News and Information Bureau film about the opening of the Olympic box office in Melbourne was screened in 3,000 US cinemas. A Qantas Olympic Information Bureau opened in New York’s Rockefeller Center, with 5,000 promotional booklets and 5,000 folders on Australia and the Games. Even the International Scout Jamboree in Ontario was sent 10,000 promotional folders. A thousand ham radio operators around Australia sent out special monthly postcards that included Olympic material.

The sense of activity was impressive, driven, it seemed, by a naive faith that it was just a matter of telling the world Melbourne (and Australia) was here, and people would turn up. But it didn’t go anywhere nearly as well as hoped. By December 1955, just 11 months out from the Games, there were crisis talks within the publicity committee to deal with (among other things) problems around the overseas exposure the Games were getting.

There were complaints from some British travel agents that they couldn’t get adequate promotional material in London. Other observers judged the publicity coverage ‘inadequate’, the committee heard, and ‘most press stories featured unfavourable angles’.22 Some visiting US journalists had little good to say about Melbourne, in particular, and the six o’clock swill.

There had been plenty of grim post-mortems in Finland after the 1952 Helsinki Games, where expectations of a big international contingent of 50,000 visitors were rudely deflated to estimates as low as 13,000. Criticisms from some US journalists of the shortage of entertainment in Helsinki created a degree of anxiety in Melbourne about how the city would be seen. US journalist Tom Van Dycke wrote in Variety magazine after the Helsinki Games that the only night-time entertainment in the city was the midnight sun. There were no licensed cafes, and alcohol, only available from government-controlled outlets, was rationed. A worried Australian Olympic official admitted: ‘We are isolated from the world and handicapped by incredible drinking and entertainment laws.’23 The spectre of Melbourne getting a version of Van Dycke’s corrosive judgement on its nightlife loomed large.

The city’s isolation was an important consideration. The Melbourne bid’s forecast in 1949 that air travel would be quicker and more efficient by the time the Games rolled around was correct, but only up to a point. The introduction of Lockheed Super Constellation aircraft in 1954 made a difference to travel times, but the price of flying between London and Australia was almost the equivalent of buying a car, and it still took around three days to complete the journey, often in uncomfortable proximity to storms and turbulence. The inescapable conclusion was that if you wanted to come to Melbourne in 1956, you had to be reasonably wealthy, have time on your hands, and be resilient. Or live a little closer to Australia.

Sir Frank Beaurepaire had tried to dampen expectations about the number of overseas visitors, pointing out that Victoria’s country men and women were the most likely Olympic patrons. ‘Australia is off the beaten track and less than 20,000 people, including New Zealanders, will get out here,’ he forecast in 1955. ‘Melbourne will have to rely on Australians for good attendances …’24 Sir Frank knew Australia was still too far away and too much of a curio to engage the rest of the world. Australian National Travel Association managing director Charles Holmes spelt out another important consideration:

[I]t is well to remember that Australia is an outpost country on the travel map and that the majority of people with the time and money to travel half the world around are matured folk: they want comfort and are not much concerning with sporting events, even the most important international ones.25

Maybe there wouldn’t be that many people to impress after all.

Qantas Empire Airways, as it was then known, launched its inaugural Super Constellation flight to Japan in May 1955. The route was Tokyo–Manila–Darwin–Sydney, and it took 27 hours. Among the first passengers were five Japanese journalists and four Filipino journalists en route to Melbourne to tour the Olympic venues. The tour was an important reminder of the bid dynamics of 1949, given the issues then surrounding the Philippines and Japan.

The 1955 visit was the first time Japanese journalists had ventured to Australia since the war. Inevitably, one of them was asked directly about Japanese brutality. ‘I can see why Australians are strongly antagonistic to the Japanese. It is one of those things you can’t brush off,’ George Somekawa acknowledged.

Could it happen again, the Sydney journalist asked.

‘I hope not. I pray not. We want to meet Australians so that international barriers can be removed. We are both trying to fight Communism,’ Somekawa said.26

The communist threat might have turned previous combatants into allies, but there was no sense that this new-found détente was widespread in Australia.

*

Another visitor provoked more column inches and anxiety than the Japanese journalists: Avery Brundage, who by now had ascended to become president of the IOC. The chairman of the Melbourne Olympic Games organising committee, Wilfrid Kent Hughes, spent a great deal of time trying to find a way to placate the man he called ‘Mr Sonavovitch’. It was no consolation that his difficulties with Brundage were pretty standard fare. The legendary US sports journalist Red Smith watched Brundage up close for many years and observed that he was ‘the official target of abuse in every Olympic year since the invention of the discus’.

Brundage had competed in the 1912 Olympics for the United States as a decathlete and pentathlete, and was a Freemason, a Chicago hotelier, and developer. If he had a faith, it was in amateurism. It framed his world view, coloured his judgement, skewed his common sense, and, on occasions, put the Olympic movement under profound pressure.

That was only part of Brundage’s problem. In 1934, as president of the American Olympic Association, Brundage went to Berlin to check out the status of Jewish athletes in the Third Reich. There was growing support for an American boycott of the 1936 Games because of Hitler’s rise to power and increasing fears for the safety of the Jews across Germany. The US team’s participation in the Games would send a powerful message to many Western democracies which were starting to feel squeamish about what was going on in Berlin. Equally, the US withdrawal from the Games would show resolve in the face of Hitler’s bullying, wheedling, and aggression.

Brundage spent six days in Berlin, inspected some Olympic facilities, visited a museum, and seemed to run out of time for a deeper look at just what was happening to Jewish athletes in the capital or anywhere else. When some Jewish athletes told Brundage that they were barred from joining German sports clubs, the AOA president replied: ‘In my club in Chicago Jews are not permitted either.’ He returned home and told his Olympic committee that the German Jews were happy enough with their situation, and that the AOA should accept Germany’s invitation to take part in the 1936 Olympics.27

A more outward-looking Melbourne Olympic organisation might well have devised ways to treat Brundage differently, but the organisation instead opted to defer to Brundage’s belligerence and became hostage to his explosive missives, public-relations strategy, and toe-curling visits, almost all of which were larded with threats about taking the Games away from Melbourne. To be fair, he had some basis for frustration. The constant to-ing and fro-ing over where the main stadium would be, issues around the cost of the Games, the quarantine restrictions that eventually necessitated the Olympic equestrian competition being moved to Stockholm, and the trade union disputes on building Olympic facilities were a source of almost endless annoyance to the American. But these were even more frustrating for Kent Hughes and his committee, who struggled for several years to find their way through the haphazard and seemingly endless delays, obfuscations, and changes.

The clash between Brundage and Kent Hughes, in particular, was a battle between Brundage’s bustling can-do urgency that characterised his business approach and Kent Hughes’ more reactive strategy. For Kent Hughes, the role of leading Melbourne’s Olympic bid demanded a capacity to balance competing interests, seeking some form of consensus while trying to rein in a natural urge to speak his mind. It was a public role that he saw in old-fashioned terms of public duty. Brundage was belligerent by instinct, and couldn’t have cared less about treading on toes: he wanted the job done, quick smart, and for the greater good of amateurism and the Olympic movement. The two men might have shared a commitment to the amateur ideal and, consequently, to the Olympic goals, but that was about their only common ground. They were never going to become firm friends.

Brundage’s espousal of amateurism’s virtues was often married with an American zest for personal liberty and faith in free enterprise. He seemed to believe that the Olympics were above the exercise of base politics, but in practically all his dealings with the Melbourne organising committee Brundage displayed a refined sense of how to bully, belittle, and abuse those who were committed to the same Olympic cause.

When it became clear that Australian quarantine rules would prevent overseas horses being brought into Australia in time for the Games, Brundage wrote to Kent Hughes: ‘Some [IOC members] have already stated that they would prefer to have the Games cancelled than to violate the Olympic rules that all events must be held in the same city.’28 Kent Hughes reasonably replied: ‘[B]ut any serious suggestion to change the venue of the Games at this stage would wreck the whole of the confidence in the Olympic organisation.’29 Brundage kept on about it, just in case Kent Hughes was unaware of the gravity of what Australia was asking of the international Olympic movement:

There are many who are not very happy about this situation and when they are added to the number who felt the Games should not have been given to Melbourne in the first place because of the time, the distance and the expense involved, it makes a very considerable group that harbour unfavourable views. I trust you and the Organising Committee will always bear this in mind and that you will endeavour to make the Games even more of a success, in order to off-set this condition of affairs. In this I promise you my co-operation.30

Brundage’s ‘cooperation’ might have represented a highly important ally for Melbourne among the enemies he had referred to within the IOC, but there was no mistaking his intent: Melbourne was going to be held to a higher standard than other Games because of the difficulties that had littered its path, in the years from the bid presentation to the opening ceremony.

Brundage decided to see for himself how things were working out. He arrived in Melbourne on Tuesday 5 April 1955, and stayed for six days. The city’s major newspapers reported that Brundage seemed cautiously pleased with the progress of the facilities and Melbourne’s general preparedness. Then, on Easter Monday, Brundage gave a press conference that caused a massive fright among the city’s Olympic executives. He also made public the sentiment he had expressed to Kent Hughes about the possibility that the IOC had erred in giving Melbourne the Games. It was an old-fashioned backhander to a recalcitrant child, without giving the kid any chance to explain himself.

‘The Olympic Games were given to Melbourne in 1949. That is a long time ago,’ Brundage told the assembled reporters.

A group of leading citizens of Melbourne came to our meeting in Rome. They had the idea it would be a wonderful thing to get the Olympic Games here in Australia. They were pretty smart. I don’t know how they did it … Did we make a mistake? … Those other [bid] cities, willing to spend more than $20 million on them, thought they were the greatest international event of any kind. Those citizens of Melbourne thought they were doing a service to Melbourne and Australia to bring back this great prize, but many people thought that the IOC had made a serious mistake. They thought Australia was not ready for the Games; that it was too far away.

Brundage then returned to his analysis of the problems that had beset Melbourne:

For six years we have heard nothing but squabbling, a change of management, bickering. I can tell you that today more than ever, people all over the world think we did make a mistake. I think somebody let you down and let us down too.

… I spent a week looking over the preparations and venues. How do I know [Melbourne will be ready]? You ask me to tell the world. Is that my responsibility? I don’t know whether they realise here yet what the Olympic Games are. This is a movement which has swept the world. Over 80 countries are interested now.

The country that stages the Games has to spend a lot of money to stage them and it gets the benefits. It is not the only place that has to spend money. It is going to cost the United States Olympic Committee almost a million dollars to send a full team of approximately 400. Every one of the other 80 countries that comes is going to have to spend money here. The aggregate will be far more than is spent in Australia. The gate receipts, and the benefits which should last a generation or more, come to Australia and to Melbourne if the job is done properly. But will it be done properly? Frankly I don’t know.

Brundage was not someone you could accuse of being subtle. In case anyone missed the message, he went back to the well:

If it [the Games] is not a success Melbourne and Australia will be a laughing stock. You have an opportunity here you should not fumble. It will be a long time before you live it down and it is going to hurt us, too.

The eyes and the ears of the world are on Melbourne and will be until these Games are over. There is only one way to redeem the honour of this community, and that is to make a smashing success of these Games.31

The press conference was a tour de force. Brundage knew exactly what he was doing by pinching the Melbourne Olympic committee’s vulnerability. It is difficult to know just how real his threats were to take the Games off Melbourne. There had been suggestions that Detroit and Rome (which had been chosen to host the 1960 Games) were being lined up if Melbourne fell over. And Brundage theatrically referred to a cable in his pocket from a city offering itself as the saviour to Melbourne’s supposed ramshackle preparation.

It is problematic to try to assess just how devastating to Melbourne and Australia’s international reputation a poorly organised Olympic Games would have been. In the mid-1950s the capacity for international incidents, stuff-ups, and disasters to be communicated around the world relied on the limited electronic media coverage, newspapers, and perhaps word of mouth. Brundage was bullying the Melbourne bid team to get its act together with the threat of international criticism. Kent Hughes craved an opportunity to respond to Brundage’s critique but held his tongue, knowing that a ‘public controversy’ with Brundage would have been ‘a mistake’. There was, however, no mistaking his mood. ‘I hope no country or individual will in future be treated in similar manner by IOC leaders,’ Kent Hughes wrote.32

Don Chipp, a gifted runner, tennis player, and budding politician who was secretary of the Games civics committee, saw it all up close, and his view accorded with Brundage’s assessment, especially of the first few years after the bid. ‘We were slack on the job,’ Chipp said some years later.33 Kent Hughes took one positive away from Brundage’s press conference: ‘Brundage did one good thing in that he frightened the life out of the Treasury. In all other words, he is a B …’34 Kent Hughes couldn’t even bring himself to spell out the full word.

Brundage headed to Canberra to talk to Menzies after dropping his Melbourne bombshell. The prime minister assured Brundage that Melbourne would deliver a successful Games, but there were no details about what that meant for the Games’ budget or anything else. Exactly 12 months later, the Melbourne Olympic Games’ press and publicity committee decided that it would end its overseas publicity campaign in June 1956. The rationale was that five months out from the Games would be the very latest anyone could plan and organise a flight to Melbourne. From now on, the committee would focus on what Australians thought about the Games. The rest of the world could look after itself.