Chapter Nine

Lighting the Way

On 7 October the Russian ship Gruzia left Odessa, in Ukraine, on its way to Melbourne. On board was a stewardess called Nina Paranyuk. She was 34, single, and had no idea where the ship was going. All she knew was that she wanted to leave behind a peasant life of misery and hardship.

Paranyuk was born in the village of Hrushka, 200 kilometres north of Odessa. She had already endured two famines, the first of which claimed her father, while the second almost took her own life. Her two brothers were press-ganged into the Soviet army, and only one survived. Paranyuk’s mother and younger sister were still at home, but she hadn’t seen them in two years. She cherished the memory of her father telling her there must be better things in the world than their grim life in Hrushka. After years toiling on collective farms, Nina found a job at a new sugar refinery in Odessa. Then she became a receptionist and cloakroom attendant at a sanatorium for Communist Party officials. But grinding poverty dogged her steps — she worked six days a week, she did overtime without pay, and she had only two frocks (one for work, one for Sunday best), plus an old overcoat. ‘Many nights I have gone to bed hungry and crying,’ she later wrote. ‘Always I kept praying I might get away.’1

Ukraine was not Russian by temperament or history — the country had only come under Russian control in 1793. There was a brief period of independence after the Bolshevik Revolution, but following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the western part of Ukraine that had been part of Poland soon joined the Soviet Union. Stalin’s tyranny over the Ukrainians was total: he did all he could to extinguish their sense of identity and language. The Ukrainian distaste for Stalin and his regime was palpable and enduring.

Paranyuk applied to be a stewardess in East Germany but didn’t get the job. Undeterred, she volunteered to work as a stewardess and go ‘on overseas travel’ from Odessa. In September 1956 she was summoned to the Gruzia and told to be ready to sail. She soon realised that the crew had been vetted by the Communist Party: they were all ‘trusted people’. Before she could accept the job, she had to sign a document stating she had no relatives or friends in Australia. This was the moment when the anxiety of Paranyuk’s uncertain future collided with her bitter-sweet memories of the past in Odessa. She clung to the image of the village’s old stone church, where her family would go every week — until the priest was taken away, the church pulled down, and the stones used for Stalin’s collective farming. ‘Then … the Gruzia sailed,’ she recalled. ‘I knew that the escape to freedom I had hoped for for so many years was getting closer.’2

Two days later, the Australian High Commission in London received a visit from a representative of the Russian embassy, who had a request to make. Australia had cut off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union after the Petrov Affair in 1954, but this was a matter of some urgency. The High Commission sent a cablegram to Canberra explaining the request:

The Russian minister called today [and said that he] consider[ed] it desirable to send to Melbourne, for the time of the Olympic Games, two Soviet Consular representatives for maintaining contact with the Australian authorities with the purpose of rendering them necessary assistance in questions connected with the stay of the Soviet sportsman in Australia during the Olympic Games.3

The Australian diplomats sought extra guidance from the UK Foreign Office, whose officers concluded that, though ‘unusual’, the request ‘is not unreasonable and might be useful to us’.

Canberra agreed: ‘We too have felt on balance that there could be advantage in having Soviet consular officers in Melbourne during Games. Our view will be that there is no connection between this arrangement and any discussions for resumption of diplomatic relations.’

The director-general of ASIO, Brigadier Charles Spry, advised that if the Soviet officials did come, it should only be for the duration of the Games: ‘If such a Consular office were permitted to remain open indefinitely after the Games, it would defeat, to a large extent, the measures that have been planned regarding movement restrictions on Soviet Embassy officials when they return to Canberra.’4

Menzies considered the arguments and agreed that the USSR could resume diplomatic relations with Australia for the duration of the Olympic Games. The two officials would be given accommodation at the Savoy Hotel in Melbourne. It could only be two bedsit rooms because accommodation had become so tight. The Soviets agreed. The two men they sent were Dmitri Zaikin, 45, from Kiev, and Yuri Filimonov, 31, from Moscow. It is almost certain that Filimonov was a KGB agent. Zaikin was a seasoned diplomat who had been at a range of important Soviet posts, including New York during World War II, then Havana, before arriving in Melbourne.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation did its homework on each of them. Zaikin was ‘[of] typical Russian build … short and stocky … full face, sallow complexion, receding hairline and short closely cut dark hair, starting to turn grey. Widely spaced light blue eyes nose slightly hooked wide thin lips gently receding chin.’ Filimonov presented a stark physical contrast: ‘[M]edium height, slim build, was a clerk at the Soviet Embassy in London and was also at Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.’5

By the time the Gruzia arrived in Melbourne, the two Soviet diplomats had checked in at the Savoy.

*

The torch convoy team held a meeting on 10 October at the University Amateur Sports Club to get to know each other. Marcus Marsden had received some bad news during the day: the time of the torch’s arrival in Cairns on 9 November had changed from 9.41 am to 1.09 pm. The three-and-a-half-hour difference threw every piece of scheduling Marsden had done out the window. It meant he had to significantly revise what he called his ‘time and distance’ charts — and he had only 30 days before the relay started.

Marsden’s consolation was that he had already been in contact by letter with the four main state-based organisations — in northern Queensland, southern Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria — and each had started selecting and training their torchbearers, and planning their civic receptions and local transport, with support from local police and ambulance. It would largely devolve to these state-based athletic associations to organise the relay in each state, but local councils, especially in northern Queensland, were integral hubs for community cooperation.

Darwin would be the Olympic torch’s landing spot in Australia, after a journey of 13,672 kilometres — and 33 hours in the air — from Greece. The torch would then be flown to Cairns, where the running relay was to start. Cairns was therefore central to the plan. It was from here that the torch relay in north Queensland would be coordinated, including stages through Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton, and Bundaberg.

Cairns had special requirements because of its remoteness and the conditions. In November the town is warm, often humid, and has a kind of tropical hum that is part of the build-up to the wet season. There can be downpours followed by warm and brilliant sunshine. It is verdant, rich country, but it can be challenging for anyone who isn’t a seasoned runner.

In Far North Queensland Thelma Kahl and her husband, Ray, were busy raising a family of three children, all of them under five. Ray was a canecutter. He went to work early, and started cutting at 6 am. The cutters would knock off for lunch and have a break as the heat reached its peak, then resume later in the afternoon, and finish at 5 pm. Ray would come straight home: there wasn’t enough money for a beer at the pub. There were friends nearby but no extended family to call on when things were difficult. Thelma didn’t have a driver’s licence and so went everywhere on foot or took the bus. It wasn’t until 1957 that Cairns had a supermarket. Until then, Thelma got her provisions from the corner store, or ordered her fruit and vegetables to be delivered. The family had a fridge but no hot water.

Ray and Thelma had grown up in Far North Queensland. They’d worked for the same company for a while and finished up meeting properly on a blind date. Thelma had always wanted to be a primary school teacher but life intervened. ‘It just wasn’t possible,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know anybody who had done that.’ The three kids were given their Sunday School teaching in a nearby house because there was no church close to the family home. Ray had a car, but it didn’t get much use, except on some weekends when the family would go to a nearby beach and Ray would teach the kids to fish.

Ray had been cutting cane around Cairns for four years, mostly in a gang of two with a mate. They’d sign on in June and keep going until November, before the wet came. Cyclones would play havoc with the cane, and make it regrow crooked. The knowledge and skill the job required was slowly being lost. In Queensland in 1956 there were 8,700 canecutters like Ray and only 400 machine workers. Twelve years later, there would be 4,600 machine workers in the Queensland canefields and only 2,800 canecutters.6 The work was hard, the temperatures hot, and Ray would come home to Thelma and the kids exhausted and dirty at the end of the day.

He was cutting cane at Enmore Estate, in west Cairns, for Jack Warner, an accountant in the town, when Warner’s son John appeared on site. Ray had been thinking about the Olympic Games, knowing there would be no way he would be able to get down to Melbourne to see them because the cane still needed to be cut. Then John turned up with an offer. Did Ray and his mate want to be part of the Olympic torch relay? Too right, Ray said.

But as fit and trim as Ray was after spending all day in the canefields, he knew it might not be enough to run a mile carrying a torch. Ray got some information about the size and weight of the torch. He did some rough calculations: it turned out that the torch was around the same dimensions as a bottle of beer. Ray filled an empty longneck with water, measured out a mile in his car, and then, after work, in the dark, ran the distance on a gravel road holding the beer bottle. The dogs barked and Ray’s neighbours came out see what all the fuss was about while Ray did two laps around the block, every night. After a few weeks of training, he reckoned he was ready to carry the torch.

*

The Australian Olympic track and field team was due to be named on Sunday 21 October. There were a number of events, though, that would determine the team’s final make-up. There was an Olympic squad competition at Moore Park, in Sydney, and then the final trials over two weekends in Melbourne.

Marlene Mathews believed her hamstring issue was behind her, but now she had a new problem, and her name was Betty Cuthbert. It was a small circle of excellence that was all too familiar to Mathews. Cuthbert’s coach was June Ferguson, who as June Maston was one of the Fort Street Olympians who had inspired Mathews. Maston and Mathews had been at the Western Suburbs Athletics Club together before Maston left to set up a club in Cumberland, which Cuthbert made her athletics home. In 1954 Maston had predicted that Cuthbert would actually beat the great Marjorie Jackson’s sprint records, a kind of heresy at the time. Cuthbert, at just 18, was doing her level best to prove her coach’s forecast correct, and was building momentum ahead of the Games.

At Moore Park on the first weekend in October Mathews and Cuthbert both recorded 11.2 seconds for the 100 metres to break Shirley Strickland’s record, but Cuthbert crossed the line first. In Melbourne the following weekend Cuthbert stitched up the sprint double, beating Mathews in both races.

The two sprinters combined several days later, at Lidcombe Oval, for a special invitational meeting, when they were part of an attempt on the world record for the 880 yards and the 800 metres relay. Mathews, Cuthbert, and Fleur Mellor were part of the original team, but Nancy Fogarty, a promising sprinter, pulled out before the race with a leg injury. Hurdler Sylvia Mitchell replaced her and ran the first leg. She was uncertain with the baton and struggled with the handover to Mathews for the second leg. Normally such moments are accepted as risks of a relay race. But this incident, with the Olympics looming, perhaps seemed to hold greater importance. Mathews, Mellor, and Cuthbert motored through the last 600 metres and fell 0.3 seconds short of Great Britain’s world record.

Mathews once again confronted Cuthbert in a 100-yard invitational, and won in an impressive 10.7 seconds. It was the first time she had beaten Cuthbert since her leg injury. Mathews told reporters that she felt in perfect condition, and the win had restored her confidence.7 Both women were announced in the Australian athletics team for Melbourne, where they would resume their rivalry. This time, the prize would be gold.

*

Despite Eisenhower’s intervention scuppering Menzies’ Suez negotiations, Colonel Nasser was continuing to keep his options open. He sounded out the Soviets: would they provide ‘volunteers and submarines’, should Egypt come under attack? At the same time, he sent two envoys to start discussions with the CIA about the United States protecting Egypt from British military incursions and Soviet penetration.8

Menzies was perplexed at Eisenhower’s intervention. ‘It is all very well for people to denounce the idea of force, but in negotiations of this kind, it is good sense to keep the other man guessing,’ he said.

The intervention also emboldened Nasser, who consolidated his hold on the Suez Canal.9 Menzies flew back to London, briefed Eden, and then flew out to the United States, where he met Eisenhower and Dulles. The meeting with Eisenhower was strained, and the president gave Menzies little satisfaction about why he had publicly criticised the option to use force in the canal.

Menzies returned to Australia after 16 weeks abroad, and soon after delivered a 70-minute speech to parliament outlining the Suez predicament and denouncing Nasser’s rejection of the proposal Menzies had put on the table. Users of the canal should not only reserve the right to impose economic sanctions on Egypt, he said, but should also use force, if necessary, to restore international control of the canal.10 But events were already moving beyond Menzies’ role in the crisis.

The diplomatic niceties disguised a far more dangerous strategy. On 22 October representatives of the French, English, and Israeli governments met in secret at a villa outside Paris to plan what would become known as Operation Musketeer. The details were agreed two days later. The Israelis would attack the Egyptian army near the Suez Canal. It would effectively be a pretext for an Anglo-French invasion.

Although Israel hadn’t been one of the key nations taking part in the diplomatic negotiations over Suez, it had legitimate grounds for seeking redress. After the Jewish state was established in 1948, Egypt had refused passage through the canal to any Israeli-flagged ships or any ships bound for Israel.

After the Israelis invaded the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula to move towards the canal, Anthony Eden told the UK parliament that there was an Anglo-French ultimatum to demand both nations withdrew from the conflict. A joint Anglo-French force would be sent to Egypt to separate the two combatants and ensure there was no problem for shipping using the canal. If Nasser didn’t agree to these terms, Eden told parliament, the Anglo-French forces would go in to ensure compliance.

It was a dumb plan, based on a secretive piece of collusion. Not only that, but it was predicated on the false premise that Nasser was the one behaving badly by using his troops to defend his country from a foreign invasion. Not surprisingly, Nasser rejected Eden’s ‘offer’, so Eden sent in the troops. It was a bizarre and ill-fated expedition. After the RAF practically destroyed its Egyptian counterpart, the Anglo-French campaign was halted after eight days, looking ham-fisted and counter-productive.

Menzies knew nothing about the plans for the military operation, and received no information from Eden other than urgings for him to publicly support what Britain was doing. Menzies obliged. ‘You must never entertain any doubts about the British quality of this country,’ he told Eden.11 Menzies was happy to back that up with Australian military support if required. He had already told the British Commonwealth Relations secretary, Lord Home, that if force had to be applied, ‘Australia would certainly be in this’. Menzies suggested it could take the form of air and naval support but no troops, because Australian soldiers were already committed overseas.12

The main concern was the extent of Australia’s interests in the region, and whether Menzies’ actions were actually aiding those interests. There was no doubt Menzies believed that by supporting Eden, he was also representing Australian interests. But the Suez Canal was less important to Australian trade than to British, and it was increasingly clear that Eden’s desperate strategy was flawed and dangerous. Even so, Menzies’ support for Britain never wavered.

Central to the West’s anxiety about Nasser was his apparent willingness to deal with the Soviet Union. If anyone had any doubts about the Soviets’ intentions within its own backyard, they were quickly confirmed when an uprising broke out in Budapest on 23 October. The Hungarian capital was in the grip of rising anti-Soviet feeling, driven by a suspicion that Moscow was ripping it off, especially on the bargain prices it was paying for the country’s uranium. In the countryside hardship was increasing, from a poor harvest and shortages of fuel, driving discontent and disillusionment. The presence of Soviet troops was a constant reminder to Hungarians of Russian oppression. In neighbouring Poland a new leader, Władysław Gomułka, had emerged with the promise of distancing the country from Soviet control. Some Hungarians hoped their nation would take a similar path.

Students gathered in Budapest and endorsed a 16-point plan that demanded major economic reforms, restored the freedom of the press and of speech, free multi-party elections, total equality in relations between Hungary and the USSR, and the removal of all Soviet troops. More than 200,000 protestors marched on the parliament, and later in the evening toppled the huge bronze statue of Stalin that had been erected in 1951.

An attempt by the insurgents to capture the radio station so that it would broadcast the 16 points turned ugly, and as night became dawn, a battle between the secret police and the revolutionaries left 21 people dead. The government fell, and a new administration under the liberal Imre Nagy emerged. There were several days of comparative calm, and initial agreement in Moscow for this new regime to exist within the Soviet orbit, but reality was about to show otherwise.

Some members of the Hungarian Olympic team in Budapest were alarmed and profoundly moved by what had happened. The uprising’s practical consequences for the Olympic team was that the two French planes chartered to take them to Australia could not land at the Soviet-controlled airfield in the capital. The planes went to Prague instead, and the team members had to find their way there. The Hungarians climbed aboard five buses that took them to Bratislava; from there they took a train to Nymburk, not far from Prague.

Once there, they held a team meeting to discuss what they should do. Some of the athletes thought the revolutionaries had finally seen off the Soviet troops, and they should go to Melbourne under the new Hungarian flag which the students had carried in Budapest. There was no doubt, the team decided after a vote, that they should continue on to Melbourne. But in the five days it took the two French planes to get to Melbourne, the situation in Budapest deteriorated. By the time the Hungarian Olympic team arrived in Australia, the Soviet army had re-established bloody control of the city.13

In Egypt Nasser was encouraged to see that the international reaction was increasingly on his side. Eden desperately cabled Menzies and asked him to express his public support. In parliament Menzies described the Anglo-French action as proper. Eden cabled back: ‘Dear Bob, I cannot tell you how much your message has heartened me.’14

Eden needed all the help he could get. Many parts of Africa and Asia made it clear they didn’t support the action. Indonesia even denied Britain’s BOAC airliners refuelling rights at Jakarta airport. New Zealand was conflicted about the situation because it was supportive of the United Nations playing a role, while Canada’s prime minister, Louis St Laurent, told Eden he regretted that the British prime minister had found it necessary to follow such a course of action. US president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was in the final week of his re-election campaign, was even more direct: ‘Those who began this operation should be left … to boil in their own oil.’15

Richard Casey was shocked at the breakdown in relations between the United States and the United Kingdom. ‘The almost physical cleavage … was one of the most distressing things I have ever experienced,’ he wrote.16 Menzies’ support appeared to have been given with a degree of sorrow, bordering on remorse. He was reluctant, even in private, to question Eden’s determination to show that Britain was still an international power. Eden’s problems were largely of his own making; a thin-skinned egotist with a yearning for the Empire’s past glories was not the man Britain needed at this time of significant social and economic change. Eden’s actions in Suez confirmed just how far the British Empire had declined.

The Suez Crisis was a chastening experience for Menzies, and one that subtly underlined the risk associated with retaining his devotion to a nation that was being overtaken by other countries and a more complex diplomatic order. Years later, Menzies explained why he had taken on the role Eden and Dulles had offered him: ‘When your friends are in great difficulty and ask for help, you don’t let them down.’17 For all Menzies’ pragmatic appreciation of the need for Australia to be friends with the United States, his acknowledgement of the importance of embracing Asia and Australia’s near neighbours, and his wisdom in seeing that the Commonwealth was inevitably a changed organisation post-Empire, his heart belonged to Blighty. He could not escape his deep faith in Britain’s pre-eminence, or his nostalgia for its moral and intellectual leadership. To Eden’s successor as prime minister, Harold Macmillan, Menzies wrote:

[D]eeply as I respect the Americans and realistically as I understand their immense power and significance, I have for a long time felt that they are not yet ripe for the intellectual and spiritual leadership which many people have assumed they can give. Great Britain still has the major resources in this field.18

On Suez, though, Menzies found himself on the wrong side of history.

The United Nations brokered a ceasefire in Suez, but by then Nasser had scuppered 47 ships in the canal and blocked the waterway. Eden’s folly emboldened the Soviets, adding a new layer of instability to a notoriously complicated region. Colonel Nasser conflated the Suez Crisis with the looming Games: ‘Nations guilty of cowardly aggression should be expelled from the Games.’ IOC president Avery Brundage, unsurprisingly, was having nothing of it: ‘We are dead against any country using the Games for political purposes, whether right or wrong. The Olympics are a contest between individuals not nations.’19

It was not the first instance, and certainly would not be the last, of an Olympic executive adopting a studied indifference to political reality. Nasser decided to withdrew Egypt from the Games. Lebanon followed.

*

On the calm waters of Ballarat’s Lake Wendouree Merv Wood and Murray Riley cruised to a convincing win in the Olympic trial for the double sculls, easing their way to the finish line three and a half lengths ahead of their competitors. The win ensured that Wood, at the venerable (sporting) age of 39, qualified for his fourth Olympics. It would be Riley’s second Games. Since teaming up in 1949, the pair had been beaten only once, when they were stuck in a poor quality shell and got swamped in the Parramatta River. This time the word was out that the Europeans, including the Russians, were coming to the Olympics with narrow, sleek double scull shells with a cutaway stern. They promised to be lighter and quicker. Even so, Wood and Riley had experience on their side. The Australian press thought the pair could do it.

Melbourne was starting to come alive with anticipation, putting the negative stories behind it as the final elements of the Olympic party were put in place. A 20-metre-high replica of the Olympic torch was hoisted into place at the corner of Swanston and Flinders streets, and seven other city intersections were decorated with Australian-themed images. This burst of activity meant that Andor Mészáros was in demand again.

The State Electricity Commission architect Bill Gower had the job of decorating the corner of Russell and Bourke streets in the city. Gower and his deputy, Bill Eales, went to see Mészáros to talk about what they were planning, but Mészáros wasn’t impressed by their designs. He offered them something else, a design that managed to transform images from an Indigenous wall painting into something that gave the impression the Indigenous women were running. ‘These beautiful runners had a fairy quality, a lightness and grace rarely accomplished,’ Mészáros said.20

Mészáros assembled the required materials — the steel cables for the truss that framed and supported the figures, aluminium tubing for the figures themselves, and the plastic ribbons that wound around them, all of it anchored by the Olympic rings, which hung in the middle of the decoration. Mészáros, Gower, and Eales worked over several nights at the SEC architects’ office to ensure the new design worked. The decoration was tied to one corner and tightened at the diagonal corner, giving the large Indigenous Australian figures — which were 4 to 5 metres high — an imposing yet stylish presence. ‘It was certainly the decoration of the Games,’ Mészáros declared proudly.

When the time came to add a plaque identifying the work’s creators, Gower, according to Mészáros, listed it as ‘W.G. Gower and Associates’. Mészáros’ contribution remained anonymous. Perhaps Gower’s ownership was merited by hair-raising work one evening during the Games when a ribbon on the decoration came loose. Gower borrowed a 20-metre ladder from the fire brigade so he could climb up and re-tie the ribbon. Mészáros called it a ‘fantastic feat’.21

Bruce Howard’s boss thought it was high time the young man went over to the MCG to scout for the best position from which to photograph the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. He also had to work out how to get the image back to The Herald. The MCG was only a ten-minute stroll to The Herald and Weekly Times’ offices, in Flinders Street, but this job was all about time — a leisurely walk wouldn’t cut it. Speed mattered.

As it was an afternoon broadsheet, all of The Herald’s main editions would be on the street by the time the cauldron was set alight late in the afternoon. The paper’s executives decided to hold the presses in the midst of their final edition to ensure Howard could get a picture into the paper. But it would need to be a different picture to what everyone else had, and it would have to be delivered within minutes of the torch being lit.

Howard thought The Herald had made a good decision in not relying on an official image, which would have arrived much too late for the paper’s deadline, but it put the pressure on him to deliver a crisp, evocative, and unique photo, on the tightest of deadlines.

‘I needed to find somewhere I could take the picture unimpeded,’ he recalled. ‘So the top deck of the new Olympic Stand looked down on the cauldron. There was a gap between the [row] of seats and the grandstand, in no one’s way and close to the stairs,’ he said.22 That would be where he would set up for the shot. Then he had to work out how he was going to get it back to The Herald. The stairs were his only way out, and he counted every one of them — 98 steps to the ground.

What would he do after that? And just who would be carrying the torch? That was always one of the Olympics’ best-kept secrets. It was two weeks to the opening ceremony. Howard went back to the office to ponder his options.

*

It was 24 October and the torch relay convoy was finally ready to leave Melbourne. It had grown to ten vehicles. Marcus Marsden not only had his Holden vehicles, but the Army had also stumped up two three-ton trucks, a utility vehicle and officer, four other ranks, and relief drivers in each state, plus accommodation at Army camps as required on the journey. The Beaurepaire Olympic Tyre & Rubber Company was resolute in its involvement, even after Sir Frank’s death, and provided tyres with gold lettering and a list of 20 outlets in three states that would provide replacement tyres.

By 2.30 pm, Marsden and his deputy, Peter Hoobin, eased their Holden sedan into traffic on the first part of the journey. Friends farewelled them, some even pointing out that it had only been a short distance away in Royal Park that the explorers Burke and Wills had started their own journey years earlier.23

*

Nothing seemed to be more Australian than Ned Kelly. The bushranger’s story reflected the history of the nation’s white founders: from their convict migrant past, downtrodden and angry, striking back against authority. To some, Ned Kelly’s outlaw ways made him a hero. To others, he was a thief who killed honest policemen. Either way, Kelly’s story stood at the centre of the nation’s imagination — myth, legend, and fact conspired to shape the idea of who and what Kelly was.

The distinguished poet Douglas Stewart had written a play about Kelly that was first performed in 1942. Now, in the build-up to the Olympics, the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust decided to make the play its contribution to the Games. Sidney Nolan, whose extraordinary series of Kelly paintings captured some of the complexity at the heart of the Kelly story, was engaged to help with the design. Former Sydney actor Leo McKern, who was making a name for himself in London theatre, was hired to return home and play Ned. Fresh from his success with Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, John Sumner would direct. The play would open at the trust’s Newtown theatre, in Sydney, before moving to Melbourne in time for the Games.

Sumner had his initial doubts about the combination of verse and prose in Stewart’s play, and after he spent time with Stewart, the play was cut back and a new ending written. The playwright would later call it the ‘ending to end all endings’.24 Sumner was more optimistic after the rewrite. The positive build-up to opening night was only enhanced when photographer Helmut Newton flew up from Melbourne to take the pre-production images.

McKern was deeply absorbed in the role. He was 36, and stockier and shorter than Kelly was believed to be (he wore special heels for the role), and he started growing a beard soon after he returned to Sydney. McKern’s research led him to adopt a strong view about Kelly:

His enemies regarded him as a brute, a murderer, a wicked pig and a real criminal. I don’t see him that way. I believe those remarks come from propertied classes of the time whom he opposed. But I do not see him according to the nonsensical modern legend which hails him a great hero, a nineteenth century Robin Hood. The truth, I feel, lies somewhere between. Kelly was no uneducated bushman. You have only to see his handwriting and read some of his amazing speeches he made during his trial.25

The opening night, on 3 October, went well. The reviews were generous. But the bookings didn’t follow. The show lost £1,000 a week.26 Sumner concluded: ‘If the subject does not appeal, people will not come. The attempt to make a folk hero of Ned Kelly, and the poetical treatment, was anathema to most.’27 The play’s commercial failure became the perfect reason for the Olympic organising committee to get cold feet.

A view emerged that it was the Melbourne arts establishment — deeply conservative and highly sensitive to public judgement — who decided that a dramatic depiction of a bushranger’s life and times was not the kind of fare the rest of the world was ready to see, especially during the Olympics. The show was ‘banned’ from Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne after being scheduled to open on 4 December. ‘This was a dreadful blow to the cast and all the professionals in the [Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust],’ Sumner said. McKern explained several weeks later that the show was a success in every way, except financially. Nonetheless, he thought the play should have come to Melbourne.28 Instead, the trust brought The Doll back for a return season, from 3 December.

If Australians didn’t want to watch a story about their most famous bushranger, what would they go to see? An international opera? Well, they might have, but not in Melbourne, and not during the Olympics. In September representatives of the Chinese Classical Opera Company turned up in Melbourne to get their first look at the Princess Theatre. The opera company was booked to perform for 19 days, from 21 November. The 85-person company had already been booked to stay at Ormond College and Janet Clarke Hall at the University of Melbourne. It all appeared to be set to become a fine addition to the city’s cultural fare — before it wasn’t.

The official reason was that Olympic officials had contacted the federal government and suggested that the Chinese appearance in Melbourne during the Games could cause international embarrassment. Yet journalists contacted a range of local Olympic officials, all of whom denied any knowledge of such a rationale. Government representatives asked the company’s Australian agent to reschedule, and the company said it was happy to perform elsewhere during the Games. There was a suggestion that theatrical agents had actually moved the original Melbourne performance from September to coincide with the Games, but no one could be sure.

Perhaps the real reason for the sudden decision was to do with a Queensland Liberal Party member who had written to her local MP to protest about the appearance of the Chinese company in Australia. Mrs Gladys Edwards, of Windsor in Brisbane, was dismayed at what her government was doing:

I hang my head in shame when I realise that a Party I support is granting visa’s [sic] to Red Spies to enter this country, as to any thinking individual this is clear. Has any move been made by any Member of the Government, to object to this serious state of affairs?

Mrs Edwards continued in her neat typewritten letter:

One could expect these moves from the Opposition maybe — but its [sic] a real and wounding shock to realise Red Spies have friends in the Government also … but you, being my representative in the Federal House, I do request you to raise your voice in protest of any more visits from ‘Reds’ under any disguise, to this fair land.29

The letter was sent from the local MP to Richard Casey, who passed it on to Harold Holt, who was the minister for labour (and immigration) at the time. The matter was then raised in cabinet on 16 October, when the decision was made to postpone the opera company’s visit.

Condemnation came swiftly. Theatre agents with the company in New Zealand when the announcement became known were ‘mystified’. The Victorian government admitted that no one in Canberra had consulted them before making the decision. Peter Russo, a seasoned and highly respected writer on foreign affairs, condemned the move, pointing out that going ahead with the performances would have been an example of Australia’s growing cultural awareness:

We could perhaps get away with this sulky, spiteful behaviour in our colonial infancy or even our Dominion days, but if we now want to move about among the big boys of international society, we shall have to show considerably more poise and less priggishness. The embarrassing international implication of this Chinese opera ban is that it will appear abroad as such a little man’s gesture.30

A former Olympian turned sports journalist, Judy Joy Davies, took a slightly different but equally critical perspective:

At the Olympic Games nobody cares what country a competitor, performer or entertainer comes from, nor do they worry about their politics. So would somebody please explain to me why the appearance of a Chinese opera company in Melbourne during the Games would cause ‘inevitable controversy’ or why it would be ‘undesirable’ [sic].31

Even the churches got in on it, with an Anglican priest in Prahran adding his voice to the condemnation, and affirming his faith in the power of the Games to bring some peace to the world. ‘In the ancient Olympic Games, the spirit of the Games was sufficient to stop wars that were in progress,’ he wrote. ‘Surely the spirit of the Games will be sufficient to stop the cold war in Melbourne.’32

Menzies explained to parliament several days later: ‘It would be more in accord with the spirit of the Olympic Games, we believe, if controversy was kept in the healthy rivalry of the arena, and that we should avoid anything that would cause differences or acrimonious dispute outside the arena at that time.’

Labor leader Doc Evatt got closer to the nub of it than he had for some time when he rounded on the government for bringing the nation’s international reputation into question. ‘It brings Australia, first of all in its cultural and international relations with the world, and as host country to all nations of this great Olympic Games, into ridicule and contempt and the Government ought to be ashamed of itself,’ he responded.33

So this was what the Cold War looked like.

*

Little ripples found their way into the Olympic debate. After years of tub-thumping, arguments, dramas, big egos, and clashes of ideas and finance, there was an eruption of spotfires in the final few weeks before the Games began.

Why was Tasmania not shown on the map of Australia that adorned our athletes’ official clothing, some observers asked. Well, if Tasmania was put on the map, there would need to be Heard Island, Flinders Island, Norfolk Island, even Mud Island too, according to an Olympic official. And it had always been like that — apparently, there just wasn’t sufficient room for the sixth state of the Commonwealth to be included on the official Olympic clothing. ‘Tasmania has not been left off with any intention,’ the Australian Olympic Federation’s Edgar Tanner explained. ‘[If it was included] we would have an atlas on the clothing instead of what has always been the badge of Australia in the Olympics.’34

Here was a nation which couldn’t acknowledge its past, which wasn’t sure how to engage with its neighbours, and which wasn’t even convinced of its own geography. And it was about to hold the biggest international event in its history. Was Australia ready?