Chapter Seven

With Open Arms

To cope with the influx of Olympic visitors to Melbourne, the plan was to ask suburban families to throw open the doors of their homes to strangers. The psychology behind this gesture involved winning over Victorian women to the idea. As early as July 1954, Melbourne’s lord mayor, Robert Solly, invited all the city’s women’s organisations to a special meeting at the Town Hall to discuss the idea. Representatives of the Country Women’s Association, the National Council of Women, the Girl Guides Association, the Housewives Association, and the Young Women’s Christian Association attended. Alongside them were representatives of business, union, and sporting organisations, united in the goal of finding ways to meet the accommodation shortfall. Premier Cain told the meeting that women would have the greatest responsibility for making visitors welcome and comfortable in their homes.1 (It seemed that Melbourne’s men were going to be too busy.) The result of the meeting was the establishment of the Olympic Civics Committee. Yet when the committee was convened under Maurice Nathan’s leadership, it contained no women. So much for that, then.

The implication at every step of the Games was that women should be willing and available to volunteer some kind of housekeeping role across the city. As the athletes’ village was nearing completion, organisers came up with another idea to involve women in what was billed as a ‘Housewives Brigade’ to help make beds and tidy the athletes’ rooms. ‘We will want them to come in for a few hours after Johnnie has gone off to school and breakfast dishes have been done at home,’ one of the village officials explained. ‘After earning money for Christmas shopping in the mornings they would be free to see the Games in the afternoons.’ The Housewives Brigade was to make 6,000 beds a day, and would start its duties a week before the athletes and officials arrived in Melbourne.2

If it wasn’t housekeeping, it was driving. More than 340 women from across the nation volunteered to become drivers for Olympic officials. Brundage had three drivers at his disposal, two of whom had driven in London and the United States. Car number 103 was Brundage’s black limousine, used to ferry him to Olympic functions and the Games. An Olympic pennant fluttered from the bonnet and five Olympic rings garlanded the registration plate. The other drivers had access to a fleet of 123 donated cars, including Holdens, DeSotos, Pontiacs, and Dodges, which had free daily maintenance and a night-time tyre check from Sir Frank Beaurepaire’s Olympic Tyre & Rubber Company. The drivers even had their own hunter-green uniform, topped off with a green beret.3

The household hospitality was a complex logistical task that fell to Nathan’s civics committee. A team of inspectors was appointed to assess properties, and potential hosts were asked questions about which nationalities they would prefer, what their family arrangements were, and what hobbies they had. A team of women attached to the committee would then match up the Melbourne families with visitors. More than 6,000 households said they’d be happy to take an overseas visitor. After some preliminary inquiries, 5,600 homes were assessed and given a grading.

There was no policy to positively discriminate one nationality over another, but Nathan’s committee was secretly delighted at the number of locals who ‘took Asian and dark-skinned people’.4 The importance of such community support was as much about saving money as it was about spreading the Games spirit. Essentially, the committee was seeking the donation of millions of pounds’ worth of services across Melbourne. Implicit in that support was a growing sense that the Games were galvanising the community, uniting city and suburbs, friends and families, in a shared purpose, often drawing on some surprising sources of inspiration.

A Melbourne couple who had previously offered classes in how to prepare for meeting Queen Elizabeth II during her 1954 tour provided a ‘finishing school’ for those who were going to have contact with international guests. Two years earlier, the papers called the anxiety about meeting the new Queen ‘tour terror’. The couple who were going to cure it were ‘a pair of monocled New Australians who themselves do automatically what they teach their pupils’.5 They were described as German aristocrats, who had emerged from the ‘grim, grey castles of their childhood’.

This description, redolent of something from Grimm’s fairytales, wasn’t quite accurate: Hans and Alice Meyer’s real incarceration had been in Australia, as they were both former internees, deprived of their liberty in Sydney when World War II started. They were not European aristocrats but Germans fleeing the Nazis. Hans was Jewish, on his mother’s side; Alice, because of Hans, was also in peril.

They were dance instructors with their own school in East Prussia but were expelled from the German Chamber of Culture in 1935. The only way the dance school could reopen was if Alice divorced her husband. The couple had escaped to England, and then, through the sponsorship of the Quakers, migrated to Sydney in February 1938. They became something of an exotic addition to Sydney society, but their growing profile spelt trouble when war broke out. They were interned in September 1939, and released five months later on the condition they not return to Sydney — but, after moving to Wagga Wagga, Hans was re-interned in June 1940.6

The Meyers were considered intelligent, sophisticated, and worldly — and, according to the suspicions of the time, well qualified to work for the enemy. A deep distrust ran through the security assessments of foreigners, little of it justified. ‘He made a very deep impression of unreliability and insincerity … this person … is a slippery and unreliable man,’ a security service officer concluded after interviewing Hans Meyer in 1942.7

The Meyers had some high-profile supporters from their time in Sydney, and the wife of Australia’s wartime governor-general, Lord Gowrie, was instrumental in helping to get them released in February 1944. Residual suspicions about Hans continued to dog him, though, and the security services successfully delayed his application for refugee alien status.8 Buoyed by Lady Gowrie’s encouragement, the Meyers set up a dance and deportment school in Melbourne, where, by 1953, they were ready to deal with all those Australians who were terrified of doing the wrong thing in front of Her Majesty.

In an inspired move, the Meyers decided to offer Australians guidance on how to deal with ‘continentals’ and all those other foreign tourists who were on their way to Australia for the Games. The offering covered elements of international etiquette, some geography, and some foreign languages too. The pupils were made up of Olympic officials, local councillors, the wives of diplomats, and families who were planning to host visitors. ‘It’s an important part of hospitality to receive other nationalities without showing surprise or confusion at their customs and mannerisms,’ Hans explained.9

There were some intriguing tips: a Portuguese visitor pulling their right ear and winking their right eye was a sign of approval at the meal they had just eaten; a Tibetan poking out his tongue was a polite form of greeting; ‘continental’ gentlemen would not kiss the hands of single girls because it was considered too forward, although married women could expect a hand kiss. Mrs Meyer was quite clear about the appropriate topic of conversation with a Frenchman:

[N]ever ask a Frenchman personal questions, such as where they were yesterday or what is their occupation. However, they don’t consider their opinions personal property — you can go ahead asking their opinions on anything at all. On the other hand, an Italian will take as a mark of friendship if you encourage him to discuss his family affairs with you.10

For Japanese visitors, the advice ran, always carry personal greeting cards with your details that could be exchanged. When dining with Chinese guests, expect to eat ten-year-old eggs, and anywhere between 40 and 50 courses, but never touch the final bowl of rice lest your Chinese hosts think your appetite has not been properly sated. And then, of course, there were local customs, of which many Australians were arguably unaware:

Never leave a room facing out of it, but gracefully back out. And many of us forget that it is one of the rules of etiquette to remove gloves before smoking. [And] that an Australian would not handle a male visitor’s coat or hat but let him put it down himself and that it is the woman’s place to first acknowledge the presence of the man.11

People from 76 nations were due to arrive in Melbourne in 1956.12 There had been no event in the nation’s modern history which had exposed it to so many countries at once. The pressure to deal with those different demands and expectations was starting to build.

What should have been simple often became complicated. The Australian Olympic uniform was an ideal opportunity for a local manufacturer to show off their designs, but that too became unexpectedly problematic. The uniforms were an important part of each national team: their colour scheme, fabric, and design were supposed to resonate with the nation’s sense of style. In Melbourne, Olympic organisers approached a Victorian-based manufacturer which had begun in Warrnambool and by the end of World War II was supplying 123 retailers in four states.

David Fletcher Jones’ clothing business was built on the federal government contract it won in 1941 to make trousers for the Australian Army. It gave the company a regular revenue stream, a creditable client, and a profile to match. Fletcher Jones’ trousers, in a hard-wearing ‘coverdine’ material, became a staple of the rural man. Queues formed for several city blocks when Fletcher Jones opened his first city shop, in Queen Street, Melbourne, in 1946. Fletcher Jones was an astute marketer before the term was invented, and he promoted his clothes with a sign: ‘Fletcher Jones of Warrnambool — nothing but trousers. 72 scientific sizes. No man is hard to fit.’13

Fletcher Jones only made men’s trousers: they were durable, practical, and reliable. That was their business — and it meant a problem for the Olympics, because they didn’t make womenswear. Fletcher Jones was reluctant to supply an Olympic team of men and women, when his company’s slogan — and its business — was all about men. The man himself stonewalled the Olympic committee, telling them he was too busy and that he was worried about how he would make a feminine pleat for the women’s skirts.14 The Games’ organisers persisted, and finally Fletcher Jones relented. For his business, a bonus was that the Olympic skirts became the forerunner of a new product line.

*

Menzies’ initial thinking was that US secretary of state John Foster Dulles would lead the expedition to present Nasser with the London conference’s resolution. No one from Britain could go because their nation was in direct dispute with Nasser. Menzies expected someone from the Commonwealth would accompany Dulles, but he didn’t believe it should be him. Once the conference was over, he went back to the Savoy to contemplate his long-awaited return to Australia.

At 2 am on 22 August Menzies was woken at the Savoy by a telephone call from the US ambassador to Britain, Winthrop Aldrich. The ambassador was meeting with Eden and Dulles about Nasser and they wanted to talk to Menzies immediately. Menzies was reluctant, but Aldrich insisted, promising a car would be sent to take Menzies to the ambassador’s residence in Regent’s Park. Menzies got dressed and set off in the middle of the night.

When he arrived, Eden told him that they wanted him to be part of the Egypt delegation. Dulles was more pointed. ‘No, Anthony, not a member, Chairman. We want him as our chief spokesman, because he knows how to put a case.’15

Menzies resisted and offered alternative names. But for Eden and Dulles, it was Menzies or the whole committee would have to be reconsidered.

Their insistence seemed to fly in the face of what was already known about Menzies’ lack of suitability for such a task. During World War II, British prime minister Winston Churchill asked Eden, who was then foreign minister, to help him identify an appropriate candidate to be minister of state in Cairo. The position was strategically important because of the war in North Africa, but the candidate did not have to be British. Menzies by this time had lost the prime ministership to John Curtin and was therefore able to be considered. But Casey got the job instead. Eden admitted later that Menzies had been rejected because ‘he probably would not get on with the people in the Middle East, being a somewhat difficult person’.16 Now Eden was about to send Menzies on a far more difficult assignment.

Eden’s original observation was perhaps borne out several years later when Menzies was in Cairo on a different mission. ‘These Gyppos are a dangerous lot of backward adolescents, full of self-importance and basic ignorance,’ Menzies wrote in his diary.17 The attitude, not uncommon at the time, extended beyond the Egyptians. A former Australian high commissioner to India, Indonesia, Italy, and Kenya, Sir Walter Crocker, noted in 1955: ‘Menzies is anti-Asian; particularly anti-Indian … he just can’t help it.’18

While race proved challenging for Menzies, perhaps the more confronting charge was his apparent lack of curiosity about other nations, his unshakeable faith in English superiority, and his lack of engagement with European languages. One of his contemporaries, Alick Downer, was mystified by it: ‘I fail to understand how he could have deprived himself of these fountains of our civilisation.’19

Casey counselled Menzies to ‘make every effort to try to get into personal and private discussion with Nasser alone — little as he [Menzies] might relish doing so’. Casey’s experience of the Middle East had taught him the importance of personal contact and the need for Menzies to gauge how committed Nasser was to his course of action. Casey’s advice was fulsome: ‘I explained the extreme fanaticism of the Egyptians, which I thought was far beyond that of any race I knew. The issues at stake were very great.’20

Indeed they were, but Menzies didn’t pack Casey’s advice with him. Menzies cabled Sir Arthur Fadden in Australia, outlining the pressure he had been put under to lead the mission and explaining that Eden and Dulles would send the reasons they wanted Menzies to go so that Australians could know that it was not a role ‘of my own seeking’. Dulles’ message was brief and grand. After some preliminary remarks, he told Fadden: ‘I trust you and your colleagues will acquiesce in your Prime Minister thus serving in this work which is so vital to the peace and well-being of so much of the world.’21

Fadden and the cabinet agreed that Menzies needed to go. ‘My colleagues were, as I now know, delighted. They regarded the appointment as a compliment to Australia, though they (and I) fully understood the immense risks, perhaps the certainty of failure,’ Menzies reflected.22 His position on Suez was in lock step with that of Eden and Dulles. He had appeared on BBC television to outline the dimensions of the crisis:

Colonel Nasser’s action in respect of the Suez Canal has created a crisis more grave than any since the ending of the Second World War. The leading trading nations of the world are vitally concerned. You in Great Britain are concerned, for a threat to the Suez Canal will, if not resisted, encourage further acts of lawlessness and so reduce the economic strength of your country, that the whole standard of living may be drastically reduced.23

Menzies believed that a strong response might be required to get Nasser to appreciate Britain’s point of view. Menzies was, in the public eye, the ‘Commonwealth man’. He had walked that stage, found a spot of obeisance near the Crown, and felt like a valued elder statesman within the Commonwealth club of nations. But this mission to Egypt propelled him into a new kind of universe, where the old verities no longer applied. He was about to embark on a delicate international mission of diplomacy, trying to negotiate with a new leader who was driven by forces Menzies could not fully comprehend, in a region about which he had little knowledge, or indeed interest. And whether he knew it or not, he was about to do it with one hand tied behind his back.

A few weeks after his television broadcast, Menzies was on his way to talk to Nasser, to convince him to accept the US proposal to put the canal’s operation under an international board. He arrived in Cairo at dusk on 2 September. Menzies stepped into a sea of cameras, bobbing around the stairs leading from the plane to the tarmac. In the gathering gloom, Menzies, accompanied only by his personal secretary and press secretary, struggled to find his way to the waiting car and the Australian minister to Egypt, Roden Cutler.

Menzies had worked assiduously in London to get command of the brief for his mission. He and four advisers had held nine meetings exploring the finances of the canal, and had spoken to the canal’s directors and even an engineer who was expert in the area.24 Yet there were no discussions about the social and personal elements he needed to understand: why the Suez Canal was so important to Egyptians, and why Nasser felt that now was the time to express his independence of thought and action.

The consequences of this short-sightedness became clear early on during Menzies’ meetings with Nasser. Menzies conducted the discussions like the barrister he once was, laying out the evidence, interrogating opinions, prosecuting a case, just as Secretary Dulles had expected him to do. Nasser, Menzies confided to his staff, was naive and uncertain. Menzies believed he could influence him.25 Menzies’ base view was far less hospitable. He told Eden that Nasser was ‘in some ways a likeable fellow but so far from being charming, he is rather gauche … I would say that he was a man of considerable but immature intelligence’. Menzies had more generalisations to make: ‘[L]ike many of these people in the Middle East (or even in India) whom I have met, his logic doesn’t travel very far; that is to say, he will produce a perfectly adequate minor premise, but his deduction will be astonishing.’26 Nasser had his own description of Menzies — he was ‘a mule’.

Menzies couldn’t understand why his carefully presented argument — that the proposed canal board would run the canal, keep the waterway open, maintain sound financial discipline, be apolitical, but be a tenant of Egypt — wasn’t persuasive. Nasser had dismissed the idea as ‘collective colonialism’. Menzies tried to clarify the point that tenancy did not diminish or compromise Egypt’s ownership of the canal. For Nasser, the reality was that international control was still on the table, and that meant Egyptian sovereignty was compromised.

Menzies struggled to see Nasser’s point. He believed that the proposal he brought to Cairo actually maintained Egypt’s sovereign rights. Nasser had an answer for that too: ‘The small nations are more touchy about sovereignty than great ones. Great Britain may find it not inconsistent with her sovereignty to have American bases established in Great Britain but that is only because Great Britain is a great nation and is not sensitive about sovereignty.’27

Perhaps it was just as well that, back in the United States, President Eisenhower stated that he would never support the use of force against Egypt in resolving the conflict, and if the talks broke down, other peaceful options would have to be considered. Eisenhower had eliminated the one sanction left to Britain and Menzies by taking force off the table. The talks broke down. It was 5 September 1956.

*

The Olympic Village in Heidelberg was ready for its first inspection. The Victorian government had originally earmarked the site for a housing commission development but offered it to the Games for the athletes’ village. On the first weekend of September journalists were invited there to have a look around.

One was Harry Gordon, a seasoned reporter on The Sun, a morning tabloid. Gordon had been only 24 when The Sun sent him to cover the Korean War. It was a bitterly cold winter and a challenging assignment, with every word he wrote supposed to go through the US censors. Gordon, though, was resourceful and dedicated. He wasn’t interested in sending home bland bulletins that came from some American censor’s pencil. Instead, he found a way to get his own copy back to Australia, via Japan, so that readers could find out what was really happening to the Diggers.

Gordon’s next big assignment was the Helsinki Olympics, a radically different reporting task that started his life-long affection for the Olympic movement. By the time the Olympics arrived in Gordon’s home town, he was ready and willing to immerse himself in everything related to the Games.

The tour around the athletes’ village was a pleasant diversion for most journalists, even if it didn’t produce a news story. Yet Gordon saw something no one else saw — something that disturbed him. He took to explaining his misgivings in The Sun:

Someone has made a very bad blunder in the naming of the streets at Melbourne’s Olympic Village … Most of the streets have been named after famous World War II battles in which Australia took part. In any other part of Melbourne, they would be thoroughly suitable — in fact, desirable. But the Olympic Village — the place where the finest athletes in the world live together in what all of us hope will be an atmosphere of sheer goodwill — they are completely out of character.28

Gordon’s point was a simple one: Olympic officials needed to be aware of international sensitivities. The German athletes, for example, would have to walk to their meals down Alamein Street, named after a World War II battle that had ended in a German defeat. The Japanese were not spared either — they would be reminded of their crushing losses in the first stage of the New Guinea campaign every time they walked down Buna Street.

Gordon’s column created a last-minute panic to fix the faux pas. It had originated, it turned out, when the street names were chosen for the housing commission development. Even so, no one had spotted the problem in the months leading up to the Games. What was this blindness to the rest of the world? Were there other issues lurking in the Olympic preparation that hadn’t been spotted yet? With red faces, the organisers acted quickly, and within two days the street names had been changed.

*

On 11 September 1956, some 12,000 miles away from the supposedly sedate Melbourne, the film Rock Around the Clock premiered at the London Trocadero. It soon became more than a film premiere: young filmgoers started to get excited, even agitated. Some newspapers said it was a ‘riot’. The police were called. The general public knew exactly what was to blame for this eruption of anti-social behaviour. ‘The hypnotic rhythm and the wild gestures have a maddening effect on a rhythm loving age group and the result of its impact is the relaxing of all self-control,’ a letter-writer to The Times said, demonstrating a superior understanding of the frailties of the youthful mind and body.29 One of London’s Harley Street psychiatrists was moved to observe: ‘This kind of music is excessively stimulating only to the maladjusted or to people of a primitive type.’30 Rock Around the Clock was soon banned in several cities in England.

When the film hit Australia, ‘wild dancing’ erupted in Sydney’s George Street, near the cinema, and then outside police headquarters. The gyrations were sufficiently lewd for the teenagers to be charged with offensive and indecent behaviour.31 There was a similar reaction in Brisbane, and in Perth, where teenagers emerged ‘jiving and singing’ after the movie and then blocked traffic. Eight youths and a young woman were charged with disorderly conduct.32 In Melbourne the reaction was only marginally more restrained. The film broke local box-office records after only six weeks, but only a firm hand from the theatre manager ensured the young rock’n’rollers in the audience were kept under control.33

The movie seemed innocent enough: the story centred on a small-time dance band manager who discovers a rock’n’roll band and decides that they are going to be the hottest new thing. It was the film that proved to be hot, making eight times its production costs at the box office. The film’s prelude was Bill Haley and the Comets’ single ‘(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock’, which had been released in 1954 and had sold 2 million copies worldwide. In Australia Festival Records had to run a special night shift to keep up with demand for the record. By September 1956 the record had sold 150,000 copies across the country, and was declared the fastest-earning song in Australian history.34

The record — and then the film — tapped into something that was emerging among teenagers, a post-war generation who had experienced a range of influences and experiences their parents had never known growing up. The motion picture industry, which had for years told the same stories, was starting to target a new audience, young people who had the money to pay for and the inclination to watch stories about themselves. In 1955 Blackboard Jungle was released, with its story of interracial tensions in the classroom and its rock’n’roll soundtrack (including ‘Rock Around the Clock’). Marlon Brando, in The Wild One, came next, wearing a white T-shirt, riding a motorbike, and exuding an air of brooding menace and rebellion. The movie was banned in the United Kingdom until 1967 because it presented a ‘spectacle of unbridled hooliganism’, but Australia, the country that had banned Catcher in the Rye, was, inexplicably, more tolerant of The Wild One. Brando and Blackboard Jungle struck an instant, jangling chord.

Then there was that young and dangerous American singer called Elvis Presley, and his hit ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, which entered the charts in 1956. Australian DJ Bob Rogers was so appalled that he refused to play it. Presley didn’t have 34-year-old Bill Haley’s cute curl on his forehead. He was 21, with loads of something that no one in polite society mentioned — sex appeal — and his hips swayed in ways that were, depending on your age, either completely intoxicating or utterly lascivious.

Australia was still trying to catch up with the rest of the world, particularly the United States, when it came to popular music. Johnnie Ray had a hit in 1951 with ‘Cry’, but his star had largely fallen by the time he made his first tour to Australia three years later. When he returned in 1955, there were near-riots in Brisbane and at Sydney airport. Ray was not so much a rock’n’roller as a singer whose body became part of the performance, a physical expression of emotion. It was uninhibited, wild, and new. Teenagers loved it. Others referred to him derisively as a ‘sob singer’.

Ray was an unlikely star — he wore a hearing aid as a result of a childhood accident, and physically resembled one side of a tuning fork. He was also a closeted gay man, which brought with it a degree of sadness that seemed intrinsic to his career. But he made a connection with his young audiences in ways that older Australians found mystifying and amusing. ‘Although his voice is pleasant enough to listen to, he packs such a wallop with his display of super-charged emotion, that the entire audience is swept away on a wave of hysteria,’ an older female reporter in Brisbane wrote. ‘I heard him last night at one of his sessions in the stadium and found it completely ridiculous to hear women in the audience screaming with delight.’35 Sydney DJ Alan Toohey didn’t much care for Ray’s music either, and broke ‘Cry’ over his microphone in protest.

When Ray returned to Australia for the third time, in March 1956, the result was even more harrowing. He was met by 4,000 screaming fans at Sydney Airport, and despite police warnings he waded into the crowd, with terrible results. Ray’s Shantung suit was ripped, his watch was taken from his wrist, and he was crushed against a wall and then dragged headlong into the crowd. A Sydney airport official called it ‘the most disgusting and hysterical exhibition we have ever seen here’. Six policemen picked Ray up and carried him to safety at the nearby terminal, before he composed himself and was driven to his hotel. Ray, in what perhaps was the first time such an endorsement was made, claimed that the loyalty of his Australian fans was ‘unequalled anywhere in the world’.36

The teenage rebellion that occurred across Australia in the 1950s became best known for a minority of colourful, sometimes criminal, but often harmless gangs known as bodgies and widgies. Young boys (bodgies) and girls (widgies), many of whom came from working-class families in inner-city suburbs, were the sharp end of a problem collectively referred to by their elders as ‘juvenile delinquency’. They were routinely demonised in the press, partly because there was something decidedly ‘un-Australian’ about the way the bodgies and widgies dressed and behaved, and the language they used. At one point, a magazine defined bodgie as ‘anyone pretending to be American’.37

The United States was indeed the cultural touchstone for so many teenagers — in part because of the lingering influence of the US troops in Australia during the war, who left behind elements of what they wore, how they spoke, and how they swaggered. Other teenagers embraced the new milieu because they could afford to be part of it, and access the imported consumer goods, including record players and records. The conflict between the establishment and the delinquents was sharp and, on occasion, violent. In February 1956 reports emerged in Brisbane of national servicemen assaulting anyone they suspected of being a bodgie.38

In Melbourne the ‘gangs’ were just one more problem that the city wanted to solve before the Olympics. Victoria Police established its own Bodgie Squad, a group of young coppers, fresh out of the academy, with the licence to dish out a bit of physical psychology on any errant teenager they found lurking in the city streets. The copper who set up the squad, Senior Sergeant Fred Galliver, saw its role as getting back control of the city. ‘There were numerous bashings and gang fights in the CBD,’ he said. ‘People were waylaid and accosted walking to Flinders St station and other places to use public transport. Theft of motor cars was prevalent and “shop stealing” … was out of control.’ In three and a half years the squad made 1,700 arrests; Galliver boasted that it pushed the bodgies and widgies out of the city and into the suburbs, where they lingered a little longer.39 Some bodgies gave the coppers a special name — the Purple People Beaters, because purple was Elvis’s favourite colour.40

Many of the kids congregated on the Flinders Street steps, where a primitive hierarchy was at work, denoting influence and importance. ‘It all depended how highly ranked you were in the mob — where you stood, where you were allowed to stand on the steps,’ said Pauline, a widgie. ‘Nobody from other mobs could go through that area — that was their turf … [but] they wouldn’t notice anybody else in the city … I mean they’d walk through the city like there was nobody else there. They just lived in their own world.’41

They identified with their tribe by the colourful and styled clothes they wore, a vivid contrast to the drabness of the uniforms of city workers — grey and white suits and skirts, hats, coats, and sensible shoes. While they borrowed some American slang, they found ways to adapt it to their circumstances. The popular stereotype was the widgies were ‘loose’; the evidence was one woman dubbed the Melbourne Queen of the Widgies, who had numerous consorting charges and a de facto husband.

The bodgies were thought of as tough, threatening, and sexually voracious. Yet many of them congregated around that pillar of suburban innocence, the milk bar. Some milk bars had jukeboxes, which meant there would always be music; the milk bar owners who wanted to avoid ‘trouble’ often got rid of the jukebox.

There were few attempts from the broader community to engage with the bodgies and widgies. Newspaper reports helped foster the idea that many of the teenagers were nascent criminals and threats to social stability. After spending three nights among the ‘juvenile delinquents’, two Melbourne reporters — one aged 25, the other 21 — concluded:

99 per cent of them mean no harm. But there is a vicious 1 per cent, a core of tough, Americanised milk bar Brando’s. A ‘core’ that could take over the milk bar ‘movement’ and make The Blackboard Jungle a Sunday school picnic. This core could turn the present happy, harmless, idle milk bar ‘cowboys’ into gangs of irresponsible young thugs.42

But the other part of the message — that teenagers were actually better behaved than at any time since World War II — was often lost amid the dramatic reporting. What was notable, though, was the curiosity about how different these teenagers were: they were a tribe apart, observed in the wild like a social science experiment. ‘[C]onversations we had with teenagers … [with] crew cut “cats” and “sharpies” who speak a weird “lingo” taken from American films … oddly-dressed, strangely-spoken lads sipping soda and replaying the current “craze” record Rock Around The Clock.’43

The Victorian government took the problem seriously enough to commission a special inquiry by Justice John Barry into juvenile delinquency. Barry’s report was released in July 1956, and made a sensible diagnosis of the issue, much to the chagrin of some of the city’s newspapers. ‘Serious though the problem is, we feel that occasionally it is presented in an alarmist and unnecessarily sensational fashion,’ the judge observed.44 Evidence supporting his view appeared a day later, when one newspaper represented one of Justice Barry’s recommendations as ‘banning the birch’ for children under 16.45 The other recommendations including requests for extending the school leaving age, initially to 15 and then to 16, and ensuring that only teachers with a state-accredited teaching qualification were allowed into the classroom. In the 103-page report there was only one mention of bodgies and widgies.

Before long, the community anxiety about ‘juvenile delinquents’ started to find a direct connection to the Olympics. Reports emerged of £1 million of damage to Olympic Park in August 1956. Les Coleman, as chair of the construction committee, was hard-line about the solution: to provide ‘a strong armed guard’ to protect the facility. ‘The committee is seriously concerned at the wilful and thoughtless damage,’ he said. ‘If the police are unable to give us added protection for which we are prepared to pay perhaps private enterprise can help.’46 Coleman’s tone suggested a sense that something, somewhere, was going wrong that was beyond the Games organisers’ remit. No one wanted to be caught unprepared.

Coleman’s singular focus could now afford to be on the Games, as his political career was effectively over. He had lost his seat in the Victorian Legislative Council in the 1955 election, and although he was still on the Melbourne City Council, the Labor Party split meant the alliances he needed to rely on to become lord mayor were compromised.47 The timing of his fall from political power was, in one way, fortuitous for the Olympics: it meant Coleman’s forensic eye could concentrate on the Games. The breakaway party that Coleman had been part of had delivered its electoral poison to the federal ALP at the 1955 election, just as it had for John Cain seven months earlier. Anti communist party preferences were integral to Evatt’s Labor losing ten seats in the 1955 federal poll. The split had not only torn Labor apart, it had eliminated much of its parliamentary talent, paralysing its capacity to regenerate.

*

On Sunday 9 September 1956 Betty Cuthbert set a new Australian record for the 200 metres when she ran 23.9 seconds. The meeting — the final Olympic trials — was on the cinder track at Sydney’s Moore Park. Marlene Mathews had hurt a hamstring in the warm-up and was advised not to race. She had a history of leg injuries dating back to the Empire Games in Vancouver in 1954, when she was carried from the training track with a suspected thigh muscle injury. Now she was confronting a hamstring niggle just two months out from the Olympics.

Six days later, the MCG faced its own trial when the VFL Grand Final between Melbourne and Collingwood was held on what was about to become the home of the Olympics. With the ground awaiting the final touches, it was about to be tested by what turned out to be a record crowd. The old grandstand was demolished after the Queen’s tour, and its replacement — called the Northern or Olympic Stand — started in June that year. It was to hold 41,000 spectators, 31,000 more than the stand it replaced. The ground had also been re-graded, 5,000 feet of drainage pipes had been installed, and the pitch where Sir Donald Bradman had thrilled thousands of spectators had been torn up. The Melbourne Football Club, whose home ground was the MCG, had spent most of the 1956 season at the nearby Olympic Park, and then at Albert Park, while the stand was being built.

Bruce Howard was there to photograph the Grand Final for The Herald, and it became one of the greatest spectacles he ever saw. The ground heaved with people, pushing to the edges of the boundary line, between the fence and the field of play. Fans scrambled to the top of the stairwells of the new Northern stand. Health department officials became so alarmed that they ordered the gates of the ground to be closed an hour before the match started. But those locked out became agitated; they knocked their way through the gates and found spots to sit or stand. Some perched in tree branches that overlooked the oval, and others used ladders to climb into the ground.48 Ambulance officers treated 157 people during the game. A further six fans were taken to hospital — one had had a heart attack, another had collapsed, and four others had broken limbs. One estimate put the number locked out at 25,000.49 The total attendance was 115,802. It was a massive, unpredictable crowd. And it forced the Olympic officials to wonder how they were going to cope in November.

The early diagnosis of the problem was that the old MCG stands were not the main issue — it was the new stand, where spectators had forced their way in to find a vantage point. Others recalled that the Olympic officials had promised everyone — locally and overseas — that the reconfigured ground could hold 120,000 people. On the evidence of the Grand Final, that was bunkum.

Sir William Bridgeford, who had taken over as CEO of the Melbourne organising committee in May 1953, interpreted the chaos as a warning of what could happen at the opening ceremony. ‘We are anticipating a crowd of 110,000 for the opening ceremony,’ he said. ‘If the crowds are going to behave as they did on Saturday, maybe we will have to picket the whole area.’ Fencing in an Olympic Games opening ceremony didn’t seem like a great idea. But what were the options?50 One Melbourne City councillor expressed the anxiety many other officials were feeling: ‘The big thing we have to think of is that we will be in the eyes of the world, and we can’t afford another episode like last Saturday.’51

Bruce Howard saw it differently: ‘It was the first big event at the stadium with the new grandstand … that was the curtain-raiser to the Olympics and the pictures that came out of there were: “Look at that stadium!” Or “That many people could get in!”’52

A meeting was called in the last week of September to discuss possible solutions. Booking seats for VFL Grand Finals would be considered, as would limiting the MCG’s capacity and investigating whether the building regulations needed to be changed to accommodate such large attendances. The meeting involved police, the Health Commission, and representatives of the MCG Trustees. No Olympic officials took part.53

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Marcus Marsden’s office for organising the Olympic torch relay turned out to be his cramped digs in the geology department at the University of Melbourne. It was there that he planned a relay route that had not been fully inspected by anyone, had not had any of the distances checked, or even an itinerary compiled. He had one piece of largesse on his side: General Motors Holden donated three sedans and a panel van, plus their service network, for the team to drive from Melbourne to Cairns, and during the actual relay on the return journey. It was just as well, because it soon emerged that Marsden’s task — to plan a 24-hour convoy that required a range of people to be involved at a range of locations down the east coast across several days — was an enormous organisational feat.

Marsden assembled his team, which consisted of his deputy (and University Athletic Club vice president), Peter Hoobin, and 16 student drivers. By mid-September the plans were in crisis. Marsden was unable to get confirmation from the Olympics’ organisers on key initiatives, ranging from uniforms for the relay personnel, support from the Army, funds for the convoy, departure dates, accommodation bookings, and the possibility of a trial run.

The one attempt at a trial was organised by the NSW Amateur Athletic Association in 1955. It went from Maitland to Sydney, a distance of about 212 kilometres. The trial showed that most runners didn’t require seven and a half minutes to complete their mile, but it also revealed the need for police support along the route (for traffic management and to ensure runner safety), and the value of having dedicated communication across the route. Police were engaged for the real relay, but Marsden was never given communications support — he would do it all without a walkie-talkie. One other recommendation emerged from the NSW trial: ‘all those competing should have a haircut and shave shortly before running’.54

The one important thing Marsden didn’t have to worry about was the torches. The approved number of 110 torches, made of a die-cast aluminium alloy, had arrived from England in July, along with 4,200 fuel canisters. The model had been trialled and worked efficiently during the Olympic equestrian competition that had been held in Stockholm during the European summer. Also included in the consignment were the ceremonial torch — to be used to light the flame at the MCG — and a spare.

Marsden was becoming more anxious, as a letter he wrote to his Olympic boss reveals:

With the end of the academic year approaching, and examinations consequently almost here, my teaching duties are multiplying daily. Students are demanding tutorials and personal tuition, which they are entitled to receive as the top priority. If I can spread this work over a period of four weeks it will be possible to do it, but if left much longer it will simply be impossible to accomplish everything!55

The letter was dated 25 September. Time was ticking on the torch relay.

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Bruce Howard was puzzled. He couldn’t believe there wasn’t more publicity about the fast-approaching Games. There had been plenty of news about the wrangling, the discord, the arguments, and the delays, but where were the stories about the athletes and their preparation? He summoned up the courage to suggest to his boss, The Herald’s picture editor, that he do a series on people across the city getting ready for the Games. His boss agreed, on the condition Howard didn’t neglect his other work.

Howard jumped into the project with youthful enthusiasm; no one else at the afternoon broadsheet had thought of it. Nor did anyone at Melbourne’s other two newspapers do anything similar.

Three years earlier, the critical tone of the Melbourne press reports about the preparations for the Games had been cited as partly explaining the IOC’s misgivings about the city’s ability to deliver the Games. Later, Brundage thanked the press for helping him drive home his message about the urgent need for Melbourne to get its act together. Perhaps now, Howard thought, the time had come for that to end.