Chapter Twelve

The Worst of Times, the Best of Times

Four years earlier, at the Helsinki Olympics, the Australian women’s 4 x 100 metres relay team was in a good position to win gold when disaster struck. The team comprised gold medallists Shirley Strickland and Marjorie Jackson, as well as Verna Johnston and Winsome Cripps. In the heat they had set a new world record. Cripps, running the third leg, was in front when she prepared to hand the baton to Jackson, but they were too close, and as Cripps went to make the pass, her knee hit the baton. The baton spilt free and hit the ground. Jackson managed to pick it up and keep running. She regained some ground to finish fifth, but the US team took the gold. It felt like a gold medal lost. The incident was still being talked about four years later, before the women’s relay in Melbourne.

Australia named a relay team of six after the Olympic trials: Cuthbert, Mathews, Fleur Mellor, Shirley Strickland, Norma Croker, and Gloria Cooke. Later, Cooke was told her only event would be the 80 metres hurdles, which left five women competing for four spots. All five were still training up to the day before the first heat of the relay.

Strickland, at her third Olympics, was the most senior runner in the squad. The West Australian had won her first gold in the 80 metres hurdles in Helsinki, and her victory over the same distance in Melbourne meant she became the first woman in Olympic history to retain her title. At 31, Strickland wasn’t interested in playing games or soothing egos. She simply wanted the best Australian team out on the track, and told the relay coach, Nell Gould, that they needed to settle on the final team so they could have the order of runners established. Gould, who also coached 20-year-old Fleur Mellor, explained that not finalising the team was a tactic to confuse the press. Strickland replied that the only ones who were being confused were the girls in the relay squad.1 Strickland believed the way the final selection was being handled originated in New South Wales, Gould’s home state, and where the decision-making in athletics was centred.

The final of the 200 metres final was on Friday 30 November. The relay heats and final were the next day. After taking bronze in the 200 metres, Mathews was told she wouldn’t be part of the relay team. Mellor would take her place as the fourth runner. Mellor later acknowledged that she was lucky to be selected, but she also believed she should have been part of the original 100 metres selection. She was certainly a promising sprinter, ranked just below Cuthbert and Mathews in New South Wales. Like Mathews, she had given up her job — as a stenographer in Lithgow — to come to the Games. If she wasn’t in the sprints, then at least the relay gave her a chance at the gold.

Mathews tried to mask her disappointment. On the Friday night she and her fiancé, Barry Willard, went out to dinner together, and Mathews spoke about having 12 months off, before preparing for the Empire Games in 1958. The press was more explicit about her non-selection. The Age declared:

If Marlene Mathews had been chosen for the relay, Australia could be classified as a certain winner, but the selectors have left her on the sidelines — despite her bronze medal in the 100 metres. No other country would have the third fastest woman in the world looking over the fence.2

Strickland, too, was horrified, calling Mathews’ absence ‘totally unfair’. ‘In fact, it was a disgrace,’ she said.3 Norma Croker, who did make the team, years later called it ‘criminal’.

Mathews had no real inkling about what was behind the decision. ‘I’ve had no explanation, except for the fact possibly that they said I wasn’t reliable enough when changing the baton, but that was the only excuse they gave me,’ Mathews said later.4 But there was no evidence that Mathews was unreliable with the baton; Nell Gould, who had been the women’s athletics coach at the Empire Games in Vancouver two years earlier, had declared that she had not seen any female athletes ‘to touch’ the relay team, which at that stage included Mathews.5 Mathews then had to withdraw from the team after suffering leg cramps, leaving Jackson, Cripps, Gwen Wallace, and Nancy Fogarty to win the gold medal. Since then, Jackson had retired and Cuthbert emerged, but nothing else appeared to have changed. Strickland later debunked the idea that Mathews’ baton change was a problem, describing her as being ‘as good as anyone’.6

The Australian athletics team manager from the 1952 Helsinki Games, Keith Donald, wrote a short time after the event that Mathews’ omission ‘bewildered many’:

She was quite clearly the second fastest sprinter in the team. Why then was she omitted? Some had said she couldn’t run well around a turn. But she had won a bronze medal in the 200m and in any case could have run either the second or the fourth leg in the relay with no turn to negotiate. Some had said that her baton passing wasn’t reliable. But the Australians had not done any intensive baton practice and ‘reliability’ was therefore only a relative term. This argument was weak and could not be proved in any case. It meant Mathews had been omitted because of a weak supposition.7

Others speculated that it wasn’t so much about Mellor but Croker being a Queenslander — if Mathews replaced Croker, it would have given the team three NSW representatives. Mathews understood she was never going to run the last leg because of Cuthbert’s outstanding form, but any doubts about her capacity to run the bend could certainly have been overcome by giving her the second leg, along the back straight. Mathews believed Cuthbert thought her omission was the right decision, but Mathews was never sure why Cuthbert was so certain.

The other issue was baton technique. There were two schools of thought on the best method: the old-fashioned hand-on-hip receive, and the modern, but riskier, extended-arm take. The Australians had been trying the old way, but Strickland wasn’t at all happy about it, and, after some discussions and some covert training, she got her way. She later said:

I didn’t say no [to the old method], but I did a bit of arguing, and with the support of the girls, because I knew what relay changing was about. And I knew that if we were going to do the change that they were suggesting we were going to be laughed at, because all the European teams were doing a better change. So we managed to politically work our way around that one, and did the change we wanted to …8

There was no clear favourite for the gold medal, because the USSR, German, and British teams were all in excellent pre-Games form. Australia narrowly won its heat against Germany, while Great Britain had a similarly close victory ahead of the United States. The two heat winners inevitably became the main contenders in the final, with Australia and Britain in adjoining lanes.

Strickland started Australia off, and was level with Britain when she passed to Croker, who fell several steps behind. But Mellor, running a good leg on the bend, made up some of the distance and passed to Cuthbert with the Australians only about 30 centimetres behind Britain. Cuthbert, mouth open, arms pumping, took off, with Britain’s Heather Armitage in clear view. Cuthbert surged to the front but then felt Armitage come again and seize the lead halfway down the straight. Cuthbert made one last effort and powered past Armitage to regain the lead for long enough to cross the line, winning the gold medal in a world record time of 44.5 seconds.

In the grandstand Marlene Mathews sat and watched the Olympic gold medal that could have been hers disappear. She was in tears. It was the biggest disappointment of her career. That night, Betty Cuthbert, Shirley Strickland, Norma Croker, and Fleur Mellor went to Luna Park to celebrate. They remain the only Australian track sprint relay team to have won Olympic gold.

*

Nina Paranyuk had been taken in by members of the local Ukrainian society, one of whom owned the house that became her sanctuary. Their plan was for her to come out of hiding only after the Gruzia left Melbourne. The Ukrainians believed that it would be bad publicity for Australia if she gave herself up during the Games. It would also potentially affect the Australian relationship with the Soviet Union, and raise significant questions about Paranyuk’s status — was she a defector, a refugee, or something else?

The Ukrainians knew about the Navigation Act and told Paranyuk that she could be charged with desertion if she was found and taken back to the Gruzia. Laying low seemed the best option. But she was nearly discovered when police searching for her embarked on a doorknock of the houses in the street where she was staying. The next day Paranyuk was moved to a farm near Geelong, where for the first time she felt the freedom she craved. It wasn’t intended to be a long stay, but the Ukrainians heard that the Gruzia may turn back to Melbourne after it had left, so they had to be careful.

Paranyuk marvelled at the differences between the collective farm she knew and the bounty that surrounded her. ‘My friends on the Geelong farm know life in the Ukraine, and they know how lucky they are,’ she noted. ‘They are producing more than under the Russian collective farming system.’9 For the first time, for instance, she had water from a tap — not collected from a well.

She was constantly vigilant, never going out at nights, staying in her room when those who were hiding her had guests, and only spending a couple of minutes a day outside in case she was spotted. In the meantime, she made two dresses, two blouses, and two skirts. Her hosts translated the stories in the papers about her, which she found amusing: ‘Theories were advanced that I was in one district and then another — and even as far away as Adelaide — but all the time I was in one of two houses. I was amused by these theories and felt quite important.’10

The two Russian envoys didn’t find it so funny. Zaikin badgered Francis Stuart and Special Branch, trying to find out if there were any breakthroughs. No one knew anything.

*

The international tensions, which had all but disappeared amid the spirit of goodwill at the Games, finally erupted on Thursday 6 December in a water polo match between Hungary and the USSR. The match became the most memorable demonstration of Cold War tensions in the Games.

Few observers had thought it would become so willing. The timing was important: the match occurred only days after the Hungarian refugees had arrived in Australia. That event alone would have brought reminders of home, and increased the intensity of feeling among the Hungarians. The game itself was a spiteful and nasty contest, which Hungary — the defending Olympic champions — won by four goals to one. But it was the ‘blood in the water’ moment that gave the match a heightened sense of drama and intrigue.

A Hungarian player, Ervin Zádor, was punched off the ball by a Soviet opponent, and left the pool with blood streaming down his face. The Hungarians claimed the Soviets had made offensive remarks during the match, but the Hungarians denied they had been provocateurs. They claimed the instruction they had been given before the match was to avoid physical confrontation. ‘We were told we must win, but don’t fight, don’t box and don’t play rough,’ Hungarian captain Dezső Gyarmati said afterwards. The crowd at the Olympic pool quickly identified who they thought were the sinners and the sinned against, cheering the Hungarians and booing the Soviets when they left the pool at the end of the game.11

Those who weren’t at the pool but had access to a television would have been able to see for themselves what was going on. All three networks — the ABC, HSV-7, and GTV-9 — were there to record the match. But only Colin Bednall’s station had the compelling footage of what was happening under the water. ‘We had put all our cameras in the hands of our fledgling producers and one of the most enterprising of them discovered there were glass portholes on the sides of the Olympic swimming pool,’ Bednall explained. ‘We secretly put a camera lens to one of the portholes.’ The lens was in place for the water polo match, and it revealed just how hard the Hungarians worked on provoking their Soviet opponents. ‘Those parts of the body the Hungarians worked on were well below the surface of the water,’ Bednall revealed.12 Hungary went on to win the gold medal, and the team was roundly cheered at an emotional medal ceremony.

The crowd response at the pool was a rare instance of Melbourne spectators picking sides. At the fencing at St Kilda Town Hall, Soviet fencer Lev Kuznetsov was roundly booed during his bout with Hungarian Pál Kovács. The Russian was gracious in conceding the points he lost to Kovács, but he put his hand over his face in protest at the predominantly US jury that ruled on some of the hits. The booing was at its height just as Avery Brundage walked into the hall to present the medals. Kuznetsov won bronze, and even then there was a section of the crowd who were determined to drown out the boos with the sound of applause.13 While Vladimir Kuts’ extraordinary running had won over the local crowd, even he could not escape one eccentric protest. A woman managed to infiltrate Kuts’ press conference after his 5,000 metres gold medal, hissed, ‘Red rat!’ at him, and tipped eight red-painted rats on to the table between them.14

No matter how Australian crowds reacted, for the American and the Russian press, the final medal tally offered the best propaganda they could get from the Olympics. Brundage might hate it, but where the main Cold War combatants finished on the medal table was the real game in town.

*

Wilfrid Kent Hughes was not the sort of person who entered public life for reward or praise. It was a job to be done. No one could argue that his Olympic year had been easy: he’d been sacked from cabinet in January, and had then faced the extraordinary pressures the international situation brought to bear on the Games at the last minute. Kent Hughes could have been forgiven for basking in some of the glory that came with the Games’ sense of success.

‘Kent Hughes has applied his restless energy to such concentrated purpose that the Melbourne Games are achieving what even the United Nations cannot achieve. They are causing competitors to forget on the field and in recreation rooms the hatreds which some of their homelands feel for each other,’ Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph opined — before the water polo match.15

While this notion of international brotherhood wasn’t strictly true, there was sufficient goodwill for Kent Hughes to feel he had done all he could to make the Games function as an international event. The ideas of mutual tolerance, the soft diplomacy of sport, and the supposed civilising influence of amateurism was what Kent Hughes was all about. It made him receptive to an anonymous letter he received from a 17-year-old Chinese-Australian student in Melbourne, who had come up with a new way to present the Olympic closing ceremony.

John Ian Wing was the grandson of a Chinese migrant who had come to Victoria with the thousands of others during the gold rush and stayed. Wing’s mother had died when he was a baby, and he’d been raised in a Methodist children’s home, while his father worked at all hours of the day in his restaurant, the Kwong Tung, at the top end of Bourke Street. His father remarried, and while the rest of the family — a younger brother and sister — stayed with their mother in Balwyn, John, aged only eight, moved in above the restaurant. For years, he would look out of his window at the passing parade of people, watching, thinking, and wondering.

Three days before the end of the Games, Wing sat down at a table above his father’s restaurant and hastily composed a letter that would finish up in Kent Hughes’ hands. ‘Before the Games I thought everything would be in a muddle,’ Wing wrote, ‘however, I am quite wrong, it is the most successful Games ever staged. One of the reasons for its great success is the friendliness of Melbourne people. Overseas people would agree with me that Melbourne people are the most friendly people in the world.’16

Wing outlined his idea: that the teams should depart from the closing ceremony’s standard practice of marching in their national groups, and instead march as one, mingling with each other:

The march I have in mind is different than the one during the Opening Ceremony and will make these games even greater, during the march there will only be 1 NATION. War, politics and nationality will be all forgotten, what more could anyone want, if the whole world could be made as one nation. Well, you can do it in a small way … no team is to keep together and there should be no more than 2 team mates together, they must be spread out evenly, THEY MUST NOT MARCH but walk freely and wave to the public … It will show the whole world how friendly Australia is.17

There was something both naive and appealing about Wing’s idea. At its heart was an idealism that harked back to a gentler time, before the suspicion and hostility of the Cold War and even before the two world wars. Without knowing it, Wing had hit upon an idea that chimed with Brundage’s own desire for the Olympics to transcend nationalism and division.

Given how hard Melbourne had tried to stick to the Olympic rule book — and how regularly he had been reminded by Brundage about the conventions of being the host city — it was extraordinary that Kent Hughes embraced Wing’s idea. But he swiftly saw the appeal of the march, and found Brundage to be a willing ally.

What made Wing’s idea possible was the spirit that had infused the Games. A fractious and confronting two weeks would have made it almost impossible to schedule a closing ceremony that was a celebration of goodwill. Melbourne’s success was that it had created an environment in which athletes felt comfortable to swap their national loyalties for an innocent celebration of sport. Brundage’s endorsement of the plan came at a cost, when he was censured by the IOC executive for acting unilaterally. But his hold on the top job was so secure that such criticism was only a minor impediment. Once Brundage had approved it, Kent Hughes told his Friday-evening meeting with the chefs de mission about the plan.

When the closing ceremony arrived on 8 December, it set the precedent for every Games’ closing ceremony to come: athletes from all 67 nations mingled, waving to 102,000 spectators, farewelling what had become known as the Friendly Games. John Wing had not been able to afford any tickets to the Games, and so all he knew of the closing ceremony were the pictures he saw in the newspapers. It was, for some time, his secret. He didn’t even tell his parents. ‘When you are Chinese, being young you probably would get into trouble, he said years later. ‘And I didn’t tell my mates. They wouldn’t have believed me anyway.’18

The athletes found the new approach invigorating. ‘The intermingling of the athletes in the [closing] parade typified the brotherhood of sport which the Olympic Games had developed,’ Strickland wrote later.19 Australian sprint pioneer Marjorie Jackson was equally moved. ‘Perhaps the true Olympic spirit was more evident in the closing ceremony when all the competitors from various nations marched in to the arena in one group,’ she said.20

Wing had achieved something rare. In a time of war he had found a way to create a sense of unity. It was a strange, unpredicted, and compelling legacy for the Melbourne Games.

*

On the eve of the Gruzia’s departure the captain tried to shrug off Nina Paranyuk’s absence. ‘If she is not here when we sail tomorrow morning, never mind. We are not worrying about that,’ Captain Gogitidze told reporters. He had refused to make out a warrant for her arrest if she was found. He didn’t care that he would forgo a £100 bond if his employee didn’t rejoin the ship. But he promised Paranyuk that no harm would come to her if she did come back to the Gruzia. All she would lose was the pay she had been entitled to.

‘I have no bad feelings towards Nina,’ he said. ‘I am not worried by her disappearance. She is just a silly young woman who has made a rash decision.’21 Moscow wasn’t even worried about Nina’s disappearance. ‘If Nina chooses to stay, she is being foolish. But that is her decision and I wish her luck in Australia. We do not want ill feeling with Australians over her disappearance.’22

Paranyuk and her friends read this with an appropriate dose of scepticism. ‘The people sheltering me and I know better. I would have been branded as “an enemy of the people” and anything might have happened to me,’ she said.23

Captain Gogitidze wanted to make sure all the bridges of diplomacy were firmly in place before he left, regardless of his missing staff member. ‘I have been at sea 22 years and I have visited many countries, but this is the friendliest port I can remember,’ he said. Tucked away on board was Vladimir Kuts, now the owner of two Olympic gold medals. All the Soviet Union’s gold medallists had been promised an airline flight home, but Kuts, inexplicably, was put on the Gruzia. He spent the next three days getting drunk.24

On the same day that the Gruzia was preparing for its return to Vladivostok Dmitri Zaikin and Yuri Filimonov visited Francis Stuart for the final time. Zaikin had a letter that he asked Stuart to pass on to Richard Casey about Nina Paranyuk. Stuart told the two consuls that he still had no information about the woman’s whereabouts but that he would deliver the letter immediately. It outlined the Russians’ hopes that ‘all expedition will be used to do something about’ the missing Ukrainian.

For all of the bluster, there was a sense that the Soviets were going through the diplomatic motions. They seemed reconciled to the fact that Paranyuk would not be found while they were still in Australia.25 Menzies had only a few days earlier confirmed to Spry of ASIO that all approaches that purportedly came from Paranyuk should be ignored ‘until there is more substantial evidence of her whereabouts and intentions’.26 That wasn’t going to happen any time soon. The police didn’t suspect anything sinister had happened to Nina but appeared to have no clues to her whereabouts. And the government, just as it had shown with the Hungarian athletes, was in no hurry to offer her political asylum.

Once the Gruzia had left Melbourne, Paranyuk started to move about more freely. She left the farm and went back to a suburban house. She even went to the movies, with someone who could translate the dialogue for her. Paranyuk was amazed that there was no propaganda in the films she saw, but Rock Around the Clock puzzled her. ‘Some of the young people went almost mad during “Rock Around The Clock”,’ she said. ‘I was waiting for the police to throw them out. That’s what would have happened in Russia.’27

*

The Games’ success could be measured in many ways: how many medals Australia had won, how many spectators had attended, and what the response from overseas visitors and the world’s press had been. How everyone else saw the Olympic city and the host nation had been such a concern in the build-up to the Games that it threatened to turn Melbourne into an anodyne destination, and Australia into a bland, remote, and featureless island. The results, though, pointed in the other direction.

It was Australia’s most successful Olympics (surpassed only by the Sydney Games in 2000), collecting 13 gold medals and 35 medals in total, behind the United States and the USSR, and in front of Hungary.

Attendances had been high, across all venues, not just at the MCG, and reached a total of 2 million for the first time in the Games’ history. There was no doubt that the Games had galvanised the Melbourne and national audiences. In years to come stories would emerge among athletes of the next generation who had found their inspiration in being at the Games as children. Adults confessed to enjoying the excitement, colour, and buzz of the two weeks. It even seemed to move the notoriously hard-to-please Avery Brundage, who praised the commitment of local fans who had packed out the Games’ stadiums in record numbers.

Harold Abrahams, the 1924 Olympic 100 metres champion, lauded the spirit of Melbourne’s Games. ‘This was in no small degree due to the magnificent hospitality of our hosts, which set the right tone throughout,’ he observed. Abrahams didn’t believe the crowds were particularly knowledgeable about athletics in particular, ‘[b]ut the generous recognition of fine achievement by overseas athletes gave an example which one hopes will always be followed at future Games’.28

For some international visitors, what stood out was how familiar Melbourne was to where they had come from. Associated Press’s Murray Rose labelled Melbourne a ‘hustling, booming city’: ‘An American feels right at home here: American movies, American records almost predominate. Milk bars dot the streets as well as pubs. Fine, large department stores have full stocks of most items anyone can desire.’29 The suggestion was that Australia had already fallen into the embrace of the American way of culture and consumerism: if a visiting American felt it was like home, then perhaps Australia was already travelling swiftly away from the Empire and the Mother Country into the arms of someone else.

Television was perfectly placed to accelerate that trend. If there was one element that every visitor agreed upon, it was the nation’s love of sport. ‘This town is sports crazy,’ Rose said. Brundage declared Melbourne the world’s capital of sport. Red Smith took a more insightful approach:

Wherever you turn in Australia you see playgrounds … football fields, cricket grounds, race courses, surf beaches, footracing tracks, grass tennis courts and these [lawn] bowling lawns. The Australian’s enthusiasm for sport is a consuming passion and it gives him high marks for intelligence. He is smart enough to prefer playing to working: he is jealous of his leisure and he makes use of it.30

There were some observers, though, who were determined to present a different picture of Australia. The correspondent for French newspaper Le Figaro was pointed in his critique: ‘Australians suffer from a naive, jealous boastfulness, which is a national disease.’ What might have been a legitimate point of discussion about the national character became tenuously connected to fascism in the correspondent’s argument when he suggested that such boastfulness had its origin in the behaviour of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, when he invaded Abyssinia. Kent Hughes did his best not to engage, and responded: ‘It’s too silly to worry about.’31

Desmond Hackett (an appropriate moniker in the circumstances) wrote in London’s Daily Express about what he perceived to be the lack of Australian support for Britain:

No other Olympics has ever been so fiercely parochial. Australia has had a joyful cause to raise its voice to for her athletes and swimmers. Americans were almost in the idolised class. Russians were fawned and feted. Hungarians, Czechs and the rest were all highly commended. But no bravoes for Britain. In the most peaceful and probably the most tame Olympics ever, Britain was the only victim of political taint.32

If the Figaro observations were silly, Hackett’s seemed downright implausible. Of course, the Australian media rushed to find — without too much difficulty — alternative views to discount Hackett’s whinge. Or maybe Hackett was onto something — was he detecting a small shift in the Australian consciousness? Could it mean that the old apron strings were starting to loosen, just a little? Was the exposure to the rest of non-Empire world a little exciting after all?

Other criticisms of the Games were more practical. Some athletes identified issues with the MCG track, which shifted underfoot and posed particular problems for runners in lane five. Bruce Howard saw spectators scraping the cinders off the top of the track and putting them into their handbags at the end of competition. Harold Abrahams pointed out errors in timekeeping and problems with the quality and timeliness of some information provided to the press about events and athletes.

But Roger Bannister, the first man to run a sub-four-minute mile — and the great rival of Melbourne’s own John Landy — wrote in The Sunday Times that it had been the atmosphere of friendliness so successfully created by Australia that was one of the outstanding features of the Games.33 Friendliness became the shorthand for the Melbourne Games, two weeks of calm amid the international turbulence.

That might have been what many of the athletes and observers remembered, but by the end of the Games, 61 athletes and officials, including 48 Hungarians, refused to return home. Many of the Hungarians travelled to the United States on what was billed ‘the Freedom Tour’, underwritten by magazine Sports Illustrated, a publication owned by fervent anti-communist Henry Luce. A few stayed in Australia, while some found their way to other democracies, including Sweden, Canada, and Israel.

Brundage used the Games’ success as a basis for his own grander plans. Revealing that the limits of his ambitions were not confined to sport, Brundage suggested after Melbourne that the IOC should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. (In the event, there was no peace prize awarded in 1956.) Brundage’s belief in sport as an elixir of international harmony never really dimmed, nor his odd logic that sport could achieve this by remaining separate from international politics.

The reality showed just the opposite. The Press Association in Moscow carried reports about the Soviet press crowing about the Russian Olympic team capturing more medals than the United States. The Communist Party organ Pravda devoted a remarkable two columns to the Soviets’ Olympic victories. ‘It was a day of reckoning for Uncle Sam as medals and points were totalled up on the adding machine and, for the first time in history, we found ourselves in second place on two counts,’ one US journalist wrote. ‘The Reds had us beaten on our own scoring system — [counting points for placings, from first to last]. They also topped us in gold medals, 37–32.’34 The USSR also won more medals overall, 98 to the United States’ 74.

The athletic competition did not end in Melbourne. Betty Cuthbert, Marlene Mathews, and the rest of the runners moved to Sydney to take part in a one-off competition billed as the British Commonwealth vs the United States of America. Moore Park was crammed with 24,000 spectators, and the women’s relay team — Strickland, Croker, Mellor, and Cuthbert — set a new world record for the 4 x 110 yards relay, its second world record in five days. Once again, Cuthbert anchored the team and brought home the win. Mathews replaced Strickland in the 4 x 220 yards relay, which the Australians also won, in another world record.

Mathews had left Melbourne with a new attitude. The disappointments had provided her with some fresh insights into how to tackle her future.

Melbourne made me realise ‘Yes, if you can run fast, you can win’ but that there’s more to it than just running fast. I became more determined after that. I’d had a fair amount of success up to then and Melbourne put a brake on me. And I realised that I wasn’t going to remain a top athlete unless I changed my attitude — my attitude was good, but I realised you get out of it, what you put in to it.35

After Melbourne, Mathews set her own world records. In 1958 she defeated Cuthbert at the Cardiff Commonwealth Games to win both sprint gold medals.

*

Everyone was asked again if Nina Paranyuk had been found. The prime minister’s office had nothing to say. Premier Bolte said there had been no progress. His deputy premier, Arthur Rylah, who looked after the police, had no comment. The police still couldn’t shed any light on the situation. The next question wasn’t whether Paranyuk would be found but what her status would be when she was.

Special Branch’s Detective Sergeant Rosengren said Paranyuk would be detained ‘as being a person suspected of being a prohibited migrant’. But a government spokesman had a different view: ‘Nina will be allowed to stay here and will have exactly the same privileges and safeguards as the ordinary European migrant to Australia.’36 The statement sounded like a gesture of reassurance: the Gruzia had sailed, and it was time for the Ukrainian refugee to come in from the cold.

Paranyuk kept her own counsel and remained hidden.

*

On the other side of the country a document was tabled in the West Australian parliament that peeled back another layer around what had occurred less than three months earlier at Maralinga. The report was the work of a parliamentary select committee led by Liberal MP Bill Grayden, a World War II veteran and former federal MP. Only 27 when he entered state parliament in 1947, he later shifted to federal politics, and then returned to state parliament in 1956 as the member for South Perth. He had a rugged face, was pugnacious in style, and was known for his independence, crossing the floor on several occasions.

Grayden had a long-standing interest in Indigenous Australians’ welfare, and pushed hard for an inquiry into what had been happening around Maralinga. His campaign for an inquiry began with a series of pointed questions to the minister for native welfare, John Brady, five weeks before the first Maralinga test:

What I want to know from the Minister is this: What assurances have been given by the Commonwealth … that steps have been taken to see this particular danger zone [around Maralinga] has been cleared of natives and what steps to ensure after the test the area is not contaminated, and to see that the natives do not wander back to the area after the tests.37

No one officially associated with the nuclear tests had been adequately able to answer Grayden’s question, and Brady was not about to start now. He passed the question to the federal minister for supply, Howard Beale, whose response was tabled in the West Australian parliament after the One Tree explosion launched the Maralinga tests.

Beale once again maintained the fiction he deployed in every other instance when the issue of Indigenous safety was raised. He started with the usual line of doing nothing to jeopardise ‘the welfare and precarious living of the native’, and went on to state that ‘two or three mobile ground patrols’ were keeping a check on the location and movement of Indigenous Australians; scientific teams were also keeping an eye out for any Indigenous Australians in the area and alerting Robert Macaulay to their proximity; ‘low level aerial reconnaissance’ centred on Maralinga and ‘extending out about 200 miles from the firing area is made with meticulous care’.38 All of which was subsequently found to be, at best, open to question; at worst, it was a complete misrepresentation. Grayden politely acknowledged Brady’s and Beale’s responses, and pushed on with plans for his select committee.

Grayden knew the test location hinterland after spending time in the Rawlinson Ranges three years earlier, searching unsuccessfully for the remains of the ill-fated 1848 expedition of explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. He knew when he posed a rhetorical question — ‘What chance would a patrol have of contacting these people?’ — that the answer was: ‘Not much of a chance at all.’ Grayden was worried about the scientists’ faith that winds would blow the radioactive particles away from the so-called uninhabited areas. ‘But there are thousands of natives living in those parts,’ he pressed. ‘It is not possible to travel anywhere there without seeing the smoke from native fires on the horizon.’39 Grayden stressed he was in favour of the tests, but precautions needed to be taken to safeguard the local communities.

In November 1956 Grayden and three other MPs flew to Giles, where Robert Macaulay picked them up in the vehicle that had finally arrived for him. Grayden and his fellow MPs spoke to a range of people, including Indigenous Australian communities in the area. They didn’t appear to interview Macaulay or Walter MacDougall; neither man was mentioned in the committee’s 18-page final report, either. The oversight is hard to explain. Although Macaulay had only been in the area for just over two months, MacDougall was an experienced voice. There was a suspicion, however, that Grayden did spend some time talking to MacDougall on an off-the-record basis; the report’s final assessment of Giles’s negative impact on the local communities’ access to water and game mirrored MacDougall’s own reservations about the station.40

Grayden and his committee’s final report was a devastating critique of how abandoned, bereft, impoverished, and debilitated the Indigenous Australians of the area had become. Its conclusion was as devastating as it was concise:

The Committee has arrived at the conclusion that the plight of the aborigines [sic] in the Warburton-Laverton area is deplorable to the extreme. The natives lack even the most basic necessities of life. Malnutrition and blindness and disease, abortion and infanticide and burns and other injuries are commonplace. Game is extremely scarce on the reserve, water supplies for drinking precarious, and adequate medical attention far beyond the resources of the Warburton Mission. Employment opportunities for mission educated children are hopelessly insufficient and in the circumstances, education only serves to leave them more poorly fitted for fending for themselves when thrown back on their own resources at the completion of that education. Immediate food and medical aid are urgently necessary for these people and permanent provision for them a pressing obligation on the State.41

And as for Maralinga, the committee concluded: ‘The necessity for keeping the Maralinga Testing Ground free from natives has interfered with the normal way of life of the natives who frequented the area east and south of the Warburton Mission, inasmuch as a large area of their tribal grounds is now denied them.’42

It was a simple denunciation of the most basic impact of the nuclear tests on the local Indigenous Australians — yet again, in a new and disastrous way, their land had been taken away from them. The logical consequence was to ask just how safe the communities were from the nuclear tests, but that query wasn’t raised. Instead, Grayden’s priority was to focus on the general circumstances of Indigenous Australians in a specific area. He took a movie camera with him to record what he saw. Together with the report, he had made his own kind of explosive device. But it would be some weeks before it detonated.

*

On 6 December, two days before the Games closed, news had broken about Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov. Two months earlier, in a secret ceremony at the immigration department office in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, Australia’s two most famous Cold War defectors had become Australian citizens. The naturalisation offered some reassurance to the couple, who had become, in the months since their defection, hostage to their own anxieties and misgivings, wondering when the government would provide them with the comfort of being able to call Australia home.43

The Menzies cabinet had started discussions about the idea in July, and proceeded carefully to ensure there were no leaks. Cabinet’s deliberations captured the need for a nuanced approach to the Petrovs’ naturalisation, not just to ensure their needs were met but so as not to compromise potential trade deals between Australia and the Soviet Union. The cabinet submission stated:

As to the question of naturalization I suggest we have no alternative but to accord it to the Petrovs despite whatever mixed feelings there may be about their reasons for staying in Australia. It has been contemplated in various official pronouncements that they will become permanent residents of Australia and naturalization cannot be withheld indefinitely. Because of their past unhappy history they are entitled to whatever peace of mind such a decision will give them.44

The other consideration was residency. Five years’ residency in Australia was considered the basic qualification, but cabinet agreed that the Petrovs’ time in Australia working for the Soviet embassy would count. Even so, a decision was taken to delay the naturalisation for several months, in order to give the department of trade ‘an uncomplicated opportunity’ to extend trade talks with the USSR. ASIO boss Charles Spry supported the move because he believed naturalisation would confirm the Petrovs’ loyalty to their new home. It might also encourage them to go on providing service and information.45

On 17 October the couple were naturalised, and cabinet was informed six days later. By the end of November, the Petrovs had been moved out of one Queensland safe house and into another, in Caloundra, after Vladimir, an aggressive alcoholic, had been locked up for the night in the Southport cells following a run-in with some locals.46 It was one way to celebrate becoming an Australian citizen.

*

As the year drew to a close, stories emerged about Menzies’ health. On 20 December the prime minister turned 62, and he was quick to discount any suggestion of fatigue or illness. The truth was that it had been a challenging year: the shearers’ strike, the mini-budget, the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference (and his extended time overseas), the atomic tests, the Suez Crisis, and the Olympics. Such an agenda would have been taxing for any politician, let alone one such as Menzies, who so dominated his government.

He was not the picture of youthful energy and brio anymore. Menzies was a stout, white-haired, middle-aged man, the gentle parabola of his stomach suggesting a long exposure to official lunches and dinners. He walked at a stately pace and did little to indicate that anything was either urgent or exciting. Many found his stature and demeanour reassuring. He sailed on, the imperturbable ship of the Australian state.

The Suez Crisis had already undermined British prime minister Anthony Eden’s fragile health: he and his wife headed off to Jamaica towards the end of November, to a house called Golden Eye on the island’s north coast, for ‘rest, rest, rest’. He was there for three weeks. Menzies’ own holiday plans were far less global: some time in Adelaide watching the Davis Cup challenge round, and some time in Melbourne. But the year couldn’t end without one unexpected honour. The British tabloid newspaper, The Daily Sketch, announced Menzies as its ‘Man of the Year’.

The Sketch’s right to confer such a title on a political figure was tenuous. It was a tabloid ‘picture’ paper that was fast losing circulation to its rival The Daily Mirror. But its politics were firmly on Menzies’ side of the ledger, and it was ever keen to prosecute a conservative agenda to the masses. The paper could be easily shocked, and sometimes bent itself out of shape to make its point, or indeed to avoid making one. Most famously, the paper’s photograph of a prize-winning bull had the bull’s anatomy rendered invisible, by request of the newspaper owner’s wife. The decision caused great offence to the bull’s owner, who sued the paper for damages to the bull’s stud potential.47 These eccentric moments did little to deter the newspaper from trying to set out a distinct ideological cart that led it — not surprisingly, in the climate of the time — to Menzies and a hyperbolic rendition of his physical and political qualities. ‘He is a burly, vigorous man. Even the way his white hair floats in the wind is energetic,’ the paper said. It went on to discuss Menzies’ response to persistent rumours that he was resigning his post in Canberra and coming to London as Australia’s high commissioner.

If Menzies ever comes permanently to London it will not be as a spokesman for his own Dominion. It will be as a spokesman of the whole Commonwealth. There are qualities of supreme leadership in this man. He has everything it takes. His qualities were shown during the Suez crisis. From start to finish he was there at Britain’s side. Menzies has been violently attached in his political career in Australia and will no doubt be violently attacked again … Love him or hate him: nobody disregards him. He is a sticker.48

The Sketch’s take on Menzies was a nostalgic echo of a time when the Commonwealth was made up of Empire men who had Britain’s interests at heart. If the events of the year had revealed anything, it was that something seismic was occurring across the world. Politics, diplomacy, economics, and sport were in a state of flux. The Sketch would close just three years later, a victim of changing tastes in Britain. For the moment, though, the newspaper saw Menzies as a vital figure on the fast-revolving world stage. But it was a rear-vision view. The picture ahead was far more challenging.