Chapter Six

One-Armed Bandits

The seeds of a political disaster that would propel Menzies into an invidious role on the world stage started with an act of retribution. On 26 July 1956 Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal after US president Dwight D. Eisenhower cancelled a $56 million grant promised to Egypt to build the Aswan Dam. Nasser planned to use the revenue generated from nationalising the canal to compensate for the loss of the US money.

Of course, there was much more at stake than the future of the Aswan Dam. Egypt had formally recognised communist China, and Nasser was also encouraging Soviet investment in the dam. Both were provocative acts in the Cold War. Britain had been in Egypt in one form or another since 1882, and nearly two-thirds of Britain’s oil came through the canal. The canal had been built (and designed) by the French, and the company that ran it was still based in Paris; the British had acquired a major interest in the company years earlier.

Conservative British prime minister Anthony Eden had been careful not to push Egypt into a Soviet embrace after it had started receiving tanks and aircraft from the Soviet bloc in 1955. But as soon as Eden heard the news about Suez — during a dinner at his Downing Street residence — he reached the view that Nasser had to be removed, probably by military action. The initial rhetoric set an appropriate diplomatic tone, but behind the scenes 20,000 British reservists were called up. Eden secretly assembled an ‘inner cabinet’ of five men, who would coordinate a detailed military operation. Eden had to determine if Britain could act alone when it deployed force, or whether it would have to join with the United States in a military incursion to drive Nasser from power.

Eden condemned the nationalisation of the canal in parliament, and all Egyptian funds in Britain were blocked. He worked on building support for Britain’s response at home, and his view was echoed in the newspapers’ condemnation of President Nasser’s actions. The early days of the crisis were Eden’s best, but it didn’t take long for support for his position to fragment. The Labour opposition leader, Hugh Gaitskell, initially agreed with Eden but soon became critical and advocated for the United Nations to intervene. Eden contacted Menzies, who was in the United States, between Chicago and Washington, and on his way home. The plan now was to hold a conference in London of the main maritime powers, to discuss ways of managing the canal. Nasser was invited but unsurprisingly declined.

The conference was convened for foreign secretaries rather than prime ministers, but Menzies consulted his cabinet, which urged him to attend; ultimately he was one of two prime ministers there. His external affairs minister, Richard Casey, who was regarded as an expert on the Middle East, went as well. Casey was wary of Britain pushing for any military solution and argued that Australia had limited involvement in the conflict. The canal was important to Australia’s interests, but no Australian oil imports went through Suez, so the nation’s stake in the crisis was significantly less than Britain’s. Casey tried several times to offer Menzies counsel on the issue but found no support for his argument. The two men had a history of difficulties, initially as rivals to succeed Joseph Lyons as prime minister in 1937. Casey was sceptical about Britain’s impatience and unwillingness to negotiate with Nasser. Putting British troops in Suez would look like an act of aggression, Casey told Menzies, but the prime minister did not engage with the point. There was little rapport between the two, and all Casey’s advice on the canal would be ignored.

There were no such problems between Eden and Menzies. The pair were, in Menzies’ words, ‘old and intimate’ friends. The British prime minister was grateful to Menzies for lending his gravitas to the crisis, especially given the regard in which Menzies was held in Britain; The Times had described him as the most well-known Australian in the country after Donald Bradman, an observation that no doubt pleased Menzies greatly.

Menzies was a Commonwealth man who was observing how the old order was changing and how the Empire was shifting. The ‘new’ Commonwealth required a different approach. ‘To put it another way, the future of the British Commonwealth is no longer a matter to be decided by formulates or by generalised expressions,’ Menzies wrote in The Times in 1956. ‘Everything will turn upon our means and spirit of contact and consultation.’1 Now was the time for ‘contact and consultation’, but there would be no pandering to extremists or dictators, and no obeisance paid to the United Nations.2

As he confronted what was looming as a serious Cold War conflict, Eden believed he needed a Menzies, not a Casey.

*

On 31 July 1956 the NSW Labor cabinet agreed to legalise poker machines. It made New South Wales the first state in Australia to do so, and one of the few jurisdictions in the world to make money-paying pokies legal. Southern Maryland in the United States was arguably the first, in 1947, but New South Wales jumped on board quickly, confirming for many temperance and church opponents that there was a devil in the machine. ‘We believe that gambling is a social evil and also that the legislation of lotteries, poker machine and other forms of gambling is not only a step toward moral degradation but will have the effect of perverting the true spirit of adventure in Australia,’ the nation’s Council of Churches claimed two weeks after the cabinet decision.3

Compromising the spirit of adventure was a novel reason for opposing poker machines, but it was also calculated that poker machine gamblers could lose their average weekly pay packet of £16 in only 27 minutes.4 The Bishop of North Queensland, Ian Shevill, was not fazed by the mathematics. For him, the gambling spirit was embedded in the Australian character. ‘The founding fathers gambled their future and the lives of their families,’ he argued.5 Bishop Shevill might have been onto something: gambling had come to Australia with the First Fleet, most prominently in the form of card games. Over time, gambling on two-up, lotteries, horses, dogs, and pretty much everything in between became part of what many Australians did for leisure and entertainment. And it was widely known that some of the more regular punters wore clerical collars.

When in 1956 the US sports journalist Red Smith visited Flemington, the home of the Melbourne Cup, he was amazed at just how far afield racegoers spread their punting pounds. ‘There are … 261 bookmakers under green parasols, some of them booking races in Sydney, Adelaide and Tasmania. The 66-page booklet that is your race program lists entries for other tracks and you can play a horse a thousand miles away and hear his race broadcast in the betting ring,’ Smith told his US readers.6 There was no doubt: gambling was integral to the Australians’ recreation.

The goal for some NSW politicians, though, was that by legalising pokies they would end the years of conflict between pubs and clubs about the role poker machines played in pubs’ declining business. They were wrong. Some of an even more naive mindset might have expected that the sinister personalities who had risen to the surface in the previous few years during the legislation debate would skulk back into the shadows now that everything was legal. They too were wrong. In fact, the whole poker machine industry was about to take off; bizarrely, it would have a strange and compelling presence at the Olympic Games.

Poker machines had a rich and complicated history in New South Wales. They had been operating illegally since the 1880s but openly tolerated, because authorities understood that they were situated in clubs that provided some kind of social benefit to their members. Clubs were seen fundamentally as not-for-profits, and were originally subsidised by members’ fees. As the 1932 royal commission into greyhound racing and fruit machines said: ‘[S]uccessive [government] Ministers took the view that club members using these machines were in reality, contributing to the support of their own clubs, and that there was no element of private profit for the occupier or owner of the premises.’7

That effectively meant the police didn’t care about gambling machines in clubs but made sure they were outlawed in pubs. But with the influx of money from the machines, clubs became more affluent. Many of them were connected to ex-servicemen (the RSLs), and as a result occupied a special place in their communities. In comparison, many pubs were run-down and hamstrung by the restrictive trading hours that followed World War I. By contrast, you could get a beer at a club at any time. The growth of the clubs was remarkable: from 85 in 1905 to 793 in 1955.8 As far as the government was concerned, the new legislation would give it control over the proliferation of machines. Incredibly, perhaps cynically, it did not publicly admit to any forecast big increase in gambling.9

There was also something entirely in keeping with the kind of place Sydney appeared to be and the arrival of the poker machine. ‘It is a gay, pagan, boisterous, raffish city, full of oysters and beer and pretty girls in summer frocks and white sails on the harbour, but full also of hard-faced businessmen and angry policemen shouting at street corners and traffic jammed in narrow streets,’ one Scottish migrant wrote of his adopted city.10 Sydney sounded just the place for what would become ‘one-armed bandits’.

There were occasional outbreaks of concern about trying to control the prevalence of gaming machines.The clubs offered to pay a tax on each machine, and the hotels responded with what became a highly organised, if covert, operation to identify the number of machines and their revenue across NSW clubs. The state Labor government announced the machines would become legal in clubs as long as they paid a licence fee to the state’s Hospital Fund. So far, so good. But what was happening on the ground revealed a far more disturbing picture.

The machines themselves had been imported at the start of the twentieth century, and were only made in Australia after World War II. A company started by Sidney Muddle and Roy Nutt became a manufacturer of machines under the eye-catching trading name of ‘Nutt and Muddle and Sons’. Soon a young man called Len Ainsworth, the son of a dentist, wanted to find a way to make some extra money so he and a mate could build dentist chairs, where they thought the real money was going to be. They started making poker machines and the business took off. According to Ainsworth:

The contact in the first place was for two machines a week, and within a week [our agent] was back saying ‘could he have four a week’ … Then another week went past and it was eight a week … and then it became 16 a week … and then it was 32.

It all seemed to be too good to be true — and it was. Things started to get a little willing. Ainsworth answered a telephone call from the man who lived next door to the Ainsworth factory: the factory roof had been blown off with a bomb. Outside, there was mayhem: fire engines, ambulances, and a reporter, who asked Ainsworth if he had any enemies. ‘You know, I’m beginning to wonder,’ Ainsworth told him. The police eliminated any doubt. ‘The police said to me “buy a shotgun and put chicken wire on your windows. You’re in the big league now, son.”’11

Another member of the big league was Raymond Smith, a man with a notorious criminal pedigree and a bad habit for living up to it. Smith’s father — or part of him, at least — was famous for all the wrong reasons. In April 1935 a four-metre tiger shark was caught off Coogee Beach. After being kept alive for several days so it could be viewed at the Coogee Aquarium on Anzac Day, the shark disgorged a human forearm. Featuring a tattoo of a couple of boxers, the well-preserved limb had once been attached to Raymond Smith’s father, James. No one was sure where the rest of James was, but it was clear he had met a premature end — not because of the shark but because of his criminal associations. James was a former boxer and SP bookie who was involved in a number of nefarious activities around Sydney. The police investigation turned up a couple of likely suspects for Smith’s murder; one soon died in mysterious circumstances, and the other was acquitted. Who killed James Smith remained a mystery, to be forever known in Australian criminal history as the Shark Arm Murder.

Raymond Smith was a little luckier than his father in 1954, when he ran foul of some of his competitors in the poker machine distribution business. Smith’s business employed six people and was sufficiently lucrative for him to live in a pleasant house in Drummoyne. On the night of 3 December 1954 — only a few weeks after the explosion at Ainsworth’s factory — Smith was in Wollongong on business. While he was away, two men placed a homemade gelignite bomb in his car, which was parked outside his home. It blew off the roof and sent shrapnel and shards of glass 20 metres down the road. No one was hurt, but Smith was shaken up, perhaps even more so after he was questioned for four hours by police. He couldn’t think of anyone who would do such a thing, he told them.

Later that day two men approached Smith, and one of them demanded £500. Smith refused to pay, but he was getting a little tired of all the unwanted attention. At 2 am on the next Saturday morning, just two days after the explosion, Smith and his family were disturbed by an intruder at their home. That was it for Smith — he announced he was going into hiding.12

Smith’s predicament was the clearest indication that the stakes in the poker machine business had reached a new high. As one clear-eyed Sydney journalist explained:

It is probably the surest, most ruthless and lucrative money spinner ever invented. And the fact that it flourishes in an atmosphere of barely tolerated semi-legality is an added inducement to the underworld to hop in for its cut. Slot machines in Australia are almost in the same position as the world’s oldest profession; they are tolerated, but not condoned, restricted but not protected, and their clients are generally assumed to be ‘asking’ for it.13

And the planned arrival of legalised machines had the Sydney’s criminals’ eyes spinning at the prospect of a big payout. Police were nervous that an underworld war could erupt. There were only seven recognised manufacturers, so there were clear targets for anyone seeking to exert some leverage.

Smith’s fear for his safety led the police to take an unusual step: they assigned him a bodyguard. This was a police constable named Murray Riley, who was also known as an Australian rowing champion. Riley and fellow NSW policeman Merv Wood were aiming to win gold in Melbourne in the double sculls.

Wood was a 19-year-old Sydney police cadet when he went to the Berlin Olympics in 1936 as part of the police rowing eight. He had been rowing for six years by then, despite a childhood elbow injury that gave him recurring pain. Wood won gold in the single sculls at the London Games in 1948, and carried the Australian flag at Helsinki in 1952 at the age of 35. He went on to win a silver medal in the single sculls.

By this time Wood’s police career had started to take off. He was a highly regarded fingerprint expert, in demand in court cases for his learned explanation of scientific evidence. The year before the 1950 Empire Games, to be held in New Zealand, a couple of unnamed scullers told Wood that he may well be Australia’s representative in the single sculls, but they had the double sculls selection sewn up. ‘I didn’t like their tone,’ Wood said. ‘I set about looking for a partner.’ Wood turned to the police club and identified a young policeman who he thought had promise — Riley. ‘[B]eing his senior in the police force I was in a position to nominate the terms,’ Wood later said. ‘And I virtually ordered him to row with me.’14

The pairing of Wood and Riley worked out so well that they not only qualified for Auckland but won gold in the double sculls. Then they repeated the success in Vancouver four years later. In 1956 the pair had medal hopes for Melbourne, even though by now Wood was 39.

Riley was an enigmatic figure: no one seemed quite sure what he thought about anything. He had joined the force in 1943, eventually reaching the rank of detective sergeant. The NSW CIB at the time was notorious for its methods, only some of which were legal. Its two biggest names were Ray ‘Shotgun’ Kelly and Fred Krahe, two coppers who were happy and willing to verbal witnesses. They pushed the law, stepped over it, cultivated a range of snouts, played hard, and had the loyalty of those young detectives who thought the Kelly and Krahe way was for them too. Riley was one of these acolytes. What soon emerged from Riley’s work protecting Smith was that Smith had his own set of important connections — and one of those was with Len McPherson, one of Sydney’s most notorious crooks.

The hotels had been fighting to keep up with the clubs for years, and attempts to provide entertainments, such as talent quests, caused an eruption of infighting about costs, timing, and, well, talent. But as the legalisation of poker machines loomed, the NSW hotel industry started to get serious and to get organised. At a ULVA meeting in January 1956 it was resolved to ‘take all possible constitutional and legal steps to see that the use of mechanical gambling machines in Clubs is eliminated’. The hotels were desperate. This would be a bitter fight. ‘Competition from clubs was continually increasing to the detriment of hotelkeepers, particularly those in Country Areas … The use of gambling machines in Clubs gave them a decided advantage over hotels,’ the minutes recorded.15 The ULVA linked up with the Council of Churches so they could campaign together against the evil of poker machines.

The ULVA stepped up its campaign in the first half of 1956, lobbying members of Labor premier Joe Cahill’s government and spending £3,000 of members’ money to investigate and object to clubs’ licence applications. It also hired private investigators to go into clubs across the state, at various times on different days, to record how many poker machines were active, how many people were playing them, how long they played for, and how much they won. The reports were detailed and revealed a picture of extensive poker machine use across the state. These were clearly illegal machines, but few MPs were bothered about it.

An exception was Cyril Cahill, the Labor MP for Tamworth and a staunch Catholic, who expressed his views in a letter to the Reverend Gordon Powell, of St Stephen’s church in Macquarie Street:

In some of the mushroom clubs, gambling is permitted all night and all day Sundays, and they provided certain officials with the opportunity of picking up big money. In many instances it is these officials who are spearheading the agitation for legislation of the Poker machines. They fear the loss of a highly lucrative racquet [sic].16

His observations were accurate, but the clubs were not about to surrender their advantage. They directed members to boycott those hotels that had objected to their licences being granted on the grounds they had poker machines. Club members who didn’t observe the ban on patronising those hotels would be asked to restate their reasons for joining the club. Until the licence issue was resolved, the clubs said, ‘we carry on as before’.17

The hotels were outflanked, and the clubs were in a prime position to make the most of the new legislation.

*

On Tuesday 24 July 1956 a plane wobbled down onto the tarmac at the Alice Springs aerodrome. A banner reading ‘Welcome to a town like Alice’ fluttered in the warm breeze. On board the plane were a number of out-of-towners, celebrities, including the actor Peter Finch and the writer Nevil Shute. They were in Alice Springs for the Australian launch of A Town Like Alice, the movie starring Finch in an adaptation of Shute’s novel.

The film had already premiered overseas, and had been scheduled to debut amid the glitter and elegance of the Cannes Film Festival. But in what was an extraordinary gesture, the organisers withdrew the movie in case it offended Japanese festival-goers, who would have seen Finch’s character being tortured by Japanese prison guards. The international sensitivities about the war, and Japan’s role in it, remained. Yet somehow there was a secret screening in Cannes for a Japanese audience, who appeared to be neither offended nor uninterested in the movie.

By the time Finch and his planeload of celebrities arrived in Alice Springs, the locals were ready to show them some authentic Alice activities. A hockey match between local girls had been organised, along with an Australian Rules football game between Indigenous players and other locals. Later, the film would be screened outdoors under a big outback sky, by the River Todd, with the audience reclining in canvas chairs.

The film was set in Malaysia during World War II, and, unusually for its time, featured a predominantly female cast, led by Virginia McKenna, playing an Englishwoman (Jean Paget) who finds herself in charge of a group of women and children who are captured by the invading Japanese and forced on a brutal march through the jungle. Paget befriends an Australian POW, Joe Harman (Finch), and they fall in love, although both believe the other is married. Harman helps the women with supplies, against Japanese orders, and when his cooperation is revealed Harman is tortured and left for dead. Paget finds out much later that Harman has survived, and she decides to find him. When she’s asked if she knows where Harman came from, Paget replies: ‘A town called Alice. He made it sound … all right.’ She sets off for Alice Springs and manages to track him down.

The irony was that the film itself, for all its supposed sense of Australia, was a strange hybrid that was unrepresentative of the Australian experience, let alone a rich portrayal of Alice Springs. The town features for only a few minutes towards the end of the movie, with wide shots of the streets, and Indigenous horsemen trotting across the screen. Most of the film was shot at Pinewood Studios, in England, including a scene purporting to be a conversation in Alice Springs’ main street. Similarly, only a small film crew went to Malaya to shoot wide-angle jungle footage that could be used as a backdrop for the set-piece moments filmed at the studio. The Japanese sergeant was played by Kenji Takaki, who was not even an actor but a lampshade maker based in London. Perhaps the most Australian element of the movie (and the book) was that the title was appropriated by some wits in Melbourne, who described their city and its meagre nightlife as ‘A Town Like Paralysis’; in the Olympic year, this was a little too close to the truth.

The book of the film was written by a London-born aeronautical engineer who was already a well-established novelist before he and his family migrated to Australia. Nevil Shute Norway (to give him his full name) arrived in Melbourne in 1950 and wrote A Town Like Alice in the same year. For Shute, Australia represented a kind of naive and decent alternative to his homeland, with all its post-war problems. It was a charming faith to have in his adopted country, but that element of Shute’s novel never even made it to the cutting-room floor: the film omitted the portion of the book in which Jean Paget establishes a new life in Australia.

Finch was also born in London, migrated to Australia when he was ten, and returned to London in 1949 after Sir Laurence Olivier had seen him perform and offered him a leg-up in the industry. Perhaps it was Finch’s role in A Town Like Alice that helped define the image of the Australian male for overseas audiences: the lean and laconic, resilient man, with no respect for authority and a capacity to endure the consequences. Finch’s and McKenna’s performances won them each a British Academy award, and the movie was a commercial success overseas. Unsurprisingly, though, it did little for Alice Springs.

Finch’s reputation for charm and ease in female company preceded him. His guest for the launch in Alice Springs was an airline hostess, Beryl Oliver, who had been on Finch’s flight up from Melbourne. Eyewitnesses recounted how Beryl had helped Finch put on a navy woollen coat for the screening, and the pair smoked cigarettes during the film. At the intermission some of the local Arrernte people attached to the Hermannsburg mission appeared wearing khaki riding pants and tartan shirts to sing ‘Lest We Forget’ and ‘The Lord Has Ascended, The Lord Has Ascended on High’ in their language.18 It was a vivid, if somewhat incongruous image of how to launch a movie in the Top End.

For Shute, A Town Like Alice’s success was a pleasant prelude to the far less happy outcome of On the Beach, his bestselling novel published the following year, which became a more infamous piece of celluloid. Shute was not particularly worried about such things — he never saw himself as highbrow and happily admitted that he struggled to finish Patrick White.19 But in 1956, there were some rather more high-minded types in Australia who agreed with him.

The overseas reaction to Patrick White’s fourth novel, The Tree of Man, had begun with a breathtaking endorsement of the Sydney writer’s skill in that benchmark of critical acumen, The New York Times Review of Books, which referred to it as ‘a timeless work of art’. That enthusiasm was echoed in The New York Post and The Herald Tribune. The reviews helped shift 10,000 copies of the book in two weeks in the United States.

It was a giddy prelude to the novel’s Australian publication in June 1956. White had started to give Australian literature some recognition in North America after US critic James Stern spoke of White’s 1948 novel, The Aunt’s Story, with deep enthusiasm:

I had never been to Australia, yet here was prose which, by its baroque richness, its plasticity and wealth of strange symbols, made an unknown landscape so real that I felt I could walk out in to it as into country I had been brought up in. I could see the black volcanic hills, the dead skeleton trees … I could all but touch the rock, scrub, bones, the sheep’s carcass, the ox’s skull, as they lay bleached in Australia’s eternal greyness … under the immense blue of its skies.20

White was not only being recognised internationally for the quality of his writing, he was doing so through his rendition of the Australian landscape and way of life. The US reaction was more than flattering, but White knew that The Tree of Man — a novel that followed the domestic fortunes of the Parker family — was fundamentally an Australian book, and Australian reviews would ‘really be the test’.21

The task of reviewing the book for The Sydney Morning Herald was given to the poet Alec Hope, who was professor of English Literature at University College, in Canberra. He would become one of Australia’s finest poets and a venerable literary presence, but Hope’s review of The Tree of Man affirmed the difficulty many Australian artists faced in the 1950s to find acknowledgement among their peers. Central to the judgement in this instance was the suspicion that White’s book was perhaps that rare and desirable thing called the Great Australian Novel. Hope didn’t think so.

In his most memorable assertion, Hope wrote: ‘When so few Australian novelists can write prose at all, it is a great pity to see Mr White, who shows on every page some touch of the born writer, deliberately choose as his medium this pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge.’22 Hope’s beef with White’s style was that it contained too much poetry, which is perhaps a strange observation for a poet to make.

White was appalled and wounded by the review. It wasn’t the only critical review — The Age actually criticised the enthusiastic overseas reception to the book for being based on mistakenly believing White had accurately captured Australia. Not at all, the reviewer said. ‘He has nothing much in common with other Australian novelists …’23 It didn’t seem to occur to The Age’s reviewer that such a difference might be a good thing. Here again was an example of local reviewers churlishly dismissing international recognition of an artistic work that aspired to the highest standard.

The premise behind this form of criticism was that there was a common but unstated understanding of what it was to be Australian, and there was an agreed artistic form or style for expressing it, whatever it was. The approach raised some compelling questions. Just how well did we know our country and the people who lived in it? And what exactly was this essence of ‘Australianness’, which remained, silent and amorphous, at the heart of our national imagination? Either way, it appeared the Australian reviewers had got it wrong. Australian book buyers in 1956 were perhaps more interested in finding out why overseas critics thought so highly of an Australian novel: 8,000 copies of The Tree of Man were sold in Australia in the first three months after publication.

*

If White — or any contemporary Australian writer — was expecting some kind of affirmation and recognition in the Olympic cultural program that was scheduled to coincide with the 1956 Summer Games, they were to be sadly mistaken. The festival’s literature component was actually an exhibition of published works, most of which were secreted away in the State Library of Victoria. Despite some agitating from the frequently agitated editor of the literary quarterly Meanjin, Clem Christesen, for a standalone literary festival, the literature element of the arts festival contained no novel more recent than Roy Connolly’s Southern Saga, published in 1940. White never got a mention. Nor did Kylie Tennant, Alan Marshall, Dymphna Cusack, Ruth Park, Katharine Susannah Pritchard, D’Arcy Niland, and Jon Cleary, all of whom had published significant novels in the previous decade.

Geoffrey Serle, later to become one of the nation’s finest historians, wrote in the festival catalogue: ‘[O]nly in comparatively recent years has Australian literature developed in quality, quantity and distinctiveness.’ The reason for this late flowering of local literature, Serle argued, was because Australia had inherited the English literary canon, stretching back to Chaucer. ‘In a sense, literature had to start from scratch, had to be created entirely afresh. Similarly, literature would not flourish in Australia until the country’s baffling strangeness had been overcome and it was seen through appreciative eyes as a fit and proper subject for the artist.’24

Whatever this ‘baffling strangeness’ was — presumably, different things to different writers — White and his contemporaries apparently did not qualify. But each of them, in their own way, and none more so than White, had deemed Australia to be ‘a fit and proper subject’. At the moment when the world was supposedly turning its gaze on Australia, the nation’s foremost contemporary novelists were nowhere to be seen.

In fact, it was lucky that any novelist, poet, or dramatist was there at all. In the early discussions, the University of Melbourne’s professor of English, Ian Maxwell, proposed that literature should not be part of any proposed arts program during the Olympics. His position was sufficiently regarded for the Fine Arts Festival subcommittee, of which he was a member, to agree ‘that Literature be eliminated from the Festival as it would be difficult to organize satisfactorily’.25

Professor Maxwell’s deeper reasoning is not clear. He was also chairman of Meanjin’s Advisory Board, so was probably aware that his magazine’s founder and editor disapproved of the eventual decision to stage a limited display of Australian literary works, plus a selection of the State Library’s aged holdings. By the time a decision was made to hold the exhibition, the budget was set at only £200. The catalogue budget for the whole arts festival was £500.

The festival itself was another Brundage moment. Previous Olympics had actually run a cultural Olympiad, whereby local artists in the Olympic host city competed for medals. Brundage, bear-hugging amateurism close to paralysis, determined that ‘professional’ artists should not be part of what was an avowedly ‘amateur’ sporting festival. Brundage directed Melbourne, instead, to hold an arts festival. As it happened, Brundage fancied himself as a man with some artistic credibility: he had a 3,000-piece collection of Asian antiques and professed to a love of literature.

The initial reaction in Melbourne to the idea of a festival was positive. ‘Most of our visitors will probably have very little idea about Australia’s cultural achievements: they may not know we have any at all to show,’ one arts critic wrote. ‘To the world at large we are the nation which produces fine wool, Davis Cup players and John Landy. We have something else to show them …’26

But the organisers were less than impressed. Don Chipp, who was the secretary of the committee that had oversight of the festival, said it was against the idea from the start. Organising the festival was ‘a thankless task’, he said later, in an implied recognition that no one was ever going to be happy with the outcome.27

Contrary to the staid literary selections, the festival curators showed much more dare and insight with their selections for the painting and sculptural exhibitions. Bernard Smith, the distinguished Australian art critic and historian, bemoaned that Australia was better known internationally for its athletic achievements than its artistic prowess, but he nonetheless identified an emerging sense of Australian art. ‘There are many paintings in this exhibition in which the attempt to meet the claims of place and tradition have been met, and it is to that we must look for the emergence of an Australian artistic tradition,’ he wrote.28 The exhibition featured work from contemporary artists John Brack, Charles Blackman, Russell Drysdale, Arthur Boyd, and Sidney Nolan, as well as the ‘old masters’ Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, and Frederick McCubbin. The overall impression was of something new emerging from the gloomy artistic focus of the 1940s.

The English art critic John Berger had identified this three years earlier, when he reviewed a London exhibition entitled Twelve Australian Artists. ‘One thing, however, I am certain about: very few mixed exhibitions in either London or Paris imply the underlying unity which this one did,’ he wrote in Meanjin.29 ‘This unity had nothing to do with any common style but with something much subtler: the birth of a national tradition.’ As evidence, Berger singled out Drysdale, Lloyd Rees, Nolan, and Boyd.

In sculpture, too, there was an attempt to capture ‘the moment’, rather than just the artefacts of previous generations. The approach meant the cast of exhibitors was broad and diverse. A batch of migrant sculptors, including Andor Mészáros, became part of the festival program. Mészáros had consolidated his reputation since his first exhibition 15 years earlier, and now the catalogue noted that he was a sculptor ‘of note and a medallist of world renown. If the Commonwealth Government could be induced to commission this designer of the Olympic Medallion to design future coinage they would at least succeed in putting aesthetic value in to a highly inflated pound,’ the catalogue noted waspishly.30 Mészáros had three pieces in the festival, and helped to organise the sculpture exhibition at Wilson Hall, at the University of Melbourne.

Although Mészáros had won the first prize in the 1951 world exhibition of medallists, it was his Olympic medal that gave him an international profile beyond artistic circles. As the newspaper reports about his medal noted, with a distribution to Olympic representatives from more than 70 countries, the ‘medallion will take Australia’s art to every part of the world’.31 Mészáros had effectively made it: he had been ‘claimed’ as an Australian artist by the nation he had adopted. Perhaps no less significant was the recognition of the medallion as art, affirming Mészáros’ own ambition for the Olympic souvenir.32

The medal could have come spectacularly unstuck but for a last-minute intervention from an unlikely source. While Mészáros was working to finish the medal templates before they were sent to London, his ten-year-old son, Michael, noticed something about the wording on one side of the medal. Mészáros had been given free rein on the design of the medallion: on one side he had set the City of Melbourne’s coat of arms amid the five Olympic rings. On the other side was a range of athletes bearing the Olympic flag, and around the medal’s edge was the march of athletes. In the middle of the medal was the Olympic motto: ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’ — faster, higher, stronger. Except, as Michael pointed out to his dad, the words weren’t in the right order. Mészáros told his son he was wrong. Michael said he was right. They checked, and Michael was proved correct. Mészáros went back and fixed the die, and just in time. Otherwise 12,000 Olympic athletes and officials might have wondered.

*

On 1 August, with the Games less than four months away, the Olympic catering committee admitted it had employed no ‘Asiatic’ cooks to prepare food for teams from the region. The Melbourne organisers had searched across the nation but had been unable to find suitable Muslim or Hindu cooks anywhere. It was a bizarre problem to have so close to the Games — but then again, the Melbourne Olympic organisation had been characterised by a Western focus from the day it started canvassing for votes.

The shipping line P&O offered to return to Melbourne after the Games and transport any ‘Asiatic’ cooks home at the lowest tourist fare. Air India was about to start a regular service to Australia and might be able to send 18 Pakistani and Indian cooks to Melbourne. Yet neither option guaranteed a solution.

By the end of August, the situation was getting desperate. Air India announced it couldn’t help, so negotiations were opened with the British Phosphate Company: could they spare any of the Indian cooks working on their ships, which traded between Australia and Nauru? Similar approaches were made to the Dutch Royal International Ocean Line, which offered to select suitable Indian and Malaysian cooks and bring them to Australia at nominal cost.33

If all of this seemed to be happening at the eleventh hour, it had nothing on the Olympic torch relay. This had been one of the innovations of the 1936 Games in Berlin, and was the perfect way for the host nation to engage a sizeable portion of its population in the excitement of the Games. On Wednesday 13 June 1956 an academic in the University of Melbourne’s geology department, Marcus Marsden, was summoned to a meeting with the University Sports Union’s secretary, Bill Tickner. Tickner had been told by Olympic technical boss Bill Holt: ‘It’s about time we did something about the relay.’

The university — the only one in Victoria — was being used as a venue for Olympic training and accommodation. It was also providing a good number of volunteers for important Olympic roles. Marsden had, until then, had no exposure to the Olympic movement or the organisation of the Melbourne Games. He was, in the most benign sense of the phrase, an Olympic novice.

Tickner asked Marsden to choose between two Olympic roles: to put his familiarity with the French language to use and become the liaison officer for the French Olympic team, or to take charge of the torch relay. On the face of it the liaison officer role would have been the less demanding job. The relay seemed like a task that could go spectacularly wrong at any moment. Marsden was a keen sportsman who played Australian Rules football and cricket, and he was also an administrator at his cricket and football clubs. His geology background also meant he was used to getting out and about, roughing it if need be. He later reckoned it was this combination of skills — sport and practical outdoor knowledge — that might have explained why he was being considered for the torch relay. Even so, it seemed a random choice — but ultimately it proved an inspired one. So what did Marsden think — would it be the French role or the relay? He’d do the relay, thanks very much.34

Marsden embarked on the task in his spare time and in the university holidays. He managed to captain the University Reds football team to the finals, and finished the season with the personal triumph of 101 goals, but sadly they didn’t win the flag. Then it was on with the relay. It was going to be some journey.

All Marsden knew when he took on the job was that he was pretty much going to invent it as he went along. Marsden knew the Olympic flame would be flown from Athens (via Darwin) to Cairns, in Far North Queensland. After that, it was Marsden’s role to get the flame from Cairns to Melbourne in time for the opening ceremony. That was a distance of 3,000 kilometres as the crow flew, but of course the relay route wouldn’t always follow the main highways. By the time the final route down the east coast of Australia was measured, it was calculated that the torch would travel almost 3,900 kilometres.

Some preparation had been done in New South Wales and Queensland, and Cairns as the starting point had shown admirable enthusiasm to organise itself. But there was still plenty of work to be done, especially in Victoria. An early itinerary for the route was actually based on the petrol company Shell’s road maps. On the evidence of the lack of early planning the relay was a poor cousin to the Olympics, in organisational terms, and therefore as a priority. In the circumstances, it was no surprise that the torch design for Melbourne was not new but a close replica of the torch used at the London Olympics, where Bill Holt had also been technical director.

There were several basic rules that Marsden had to follow. The first was that no relay runner was to be a professional athlete. That made sense, given the amateur nature of the Olympics. There was no mention of the relay participants being prominent local citizens or former Olympians. Each participant was expected to run a mile, and do it in seven and a half minutes. There would be official receptions at some towns along the way, where the torch would come to rest, but otherwise it would travel day and night for about 16 days. Each runner would receive a commemorative medal.35 And there was one other rule: no women runners.

The torch relay gender restriction was just one example of the way in which the Olympic movement treated women. Six years before the Games, the Victorian Women’s Amateur Sports Council lobbied to become part of the Olympic Games Organising Committee to ensure that women’s sports were adequately represented. Their argument was that the men sitting around the table often forgot about female athletes, and therefore female sports had no say in the raising of funds for overseas competition. An attempt by women sports administrators to join the Olympic committee in 1949 was fobbed off with the line that women would be catered for; if necessary, a special subcommittee would be set up.36 Similar approaches were rebuffed in 1950 and in 1953, when women tried to join the Victorian Olympic Council.

One journalist wondered why women would bother trying to join what was, in practice, a men’s club. ‘No self-respecting woman would step inside the meeting room door. The language at last Thursday night’s meeting would have had the most seasoned bullocky running up the trunk of the nearest mulga tree from sheer fright,’ he wrote.37

Two women were eventually given roles within the Melbourne Olympic organisation: Dorothy Carter, director of the Women’s Royal Australian Air Force and a former Olympian, and Sybil Taggart, an architect, former hockey international, and president of the Victorian Women’s Amateur Sports Council. Both were appointed to the Olympic Games Organizing Committee in what was thought to be the first time any woman was appointed to such a committee. When the announcement was made, the head of the AOF made it clear that the women would have nothing to do with the sport; they would, instead, help with the general organisation of the Games.38 That turned out to mean advising on ‘amenities for women athletes and catering arrangements’.39

*

Prime Minister Menzies flew to London for the Suez conference, arriving on 9 August. Casey arrived soon after. The conference, to be opened by the US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, began at Lancaster House three days later.

Casey visited Menzies at the Savoy and urged him to dissuade Eden from any thoughts of using force. The minister for external affairs recorded in his diary:

I pointed out the difficulties (from my own knowledge of the area) which this sort of thing would present — apart from the fact that it would put us completely in the wrong with public opinion in practically every part of the world. I recommended that he should seek to get an appreciation from the UK of the military side, of which we were entirely in the dark. I said I failed to see what could be achieved by action of this sort.40

The advice seemed to have no effect on Menzies. The conference finished with 18 nations, including Australia, backing a US proposal for the Suez Canal to be run by an international body associated with the United Nations. Five nations opposed the proposal: the USSR, India, Ceylon, Indonesia, and Spain. The agreement included a decision for a group of five representatives of those nations which had supported the US motion to travel to Egypt and discuss it with President Nasser. The toughest decision was to work out who would lead the mission.