Finale

The post-mortems started immediately. One of the most telling assessments, from Maurice Nathan and Don Chipp’s civics committee, also contained a specific challenge: ‘The Games were successful but is this fact a signal to rest on our Olympic laurels or is it a glorious opportunity to merely commence the tremendous task of raising our city, state and nation into a position commanding world prestige and acknowledgement?’1 Putting aside the rhetorical flourish, the question was pertinent: how could Melbourne and Australia convert the Olympic success into something lasting?

There was no obvious answer. What echoed back from the various columns of reflection in the nation’s press was how important the Games were to Melbourne’s sense of itself. ‘It is now clear that what the world may gain from adjusting itself to Melbourne is nothing compared with Melbourne’s gains from adjusting itself to the world,’ a Herald columnist observed.2

Perhaps one reason for this was that the Melbourne message had not been communicated overseas as effectively as many in the city would have liked. The Games’ press and publicity committee blamed international tensions and ‘other reasons’ for fewer journalists turning up. One consequence was unused accommodation, rooms that had been booked — and secured by a £5 deposit — by journalists who were intending to be in Melbourne but then hadn’t made the journey. Some journalists who did cover the Games also found other accommodation. The end result was that ‘many hotels were left with unoccupied rooms, which they claim would not have occurred had the Committee not entered the field,’ the committee noted. The point was moot: media organisations needed a central contact point rather than trying to organise accommodation with individual hotels. But the committee’s involvement might well have restricted choice and tariff flexibility.

The committee took it upon itself to cover the hotels’ revenue shortfall, and it also retained the deposits from booked but unattended rooms. That amounted to £905, which suggested 181 journalists hadn’t used the hotel rooms they had been allocated.3 About 600 overseas journalists, photographers, and broadcasters did attend the Melbourne Olympics, but it’s clear that was nowhere near as many as originally expected. The withdrawal of teams certainly hadn’t helped.

Tourist numbers were down too. ‘Many Melbourne people held somewhat extravagant ideas about the potential number of overseas visitors who could be attracted to the Games,’ the committee said in the wash-up. ‘A comparatively modest estimate by the organising committee of 10,000 to 15,000 [overseas tourists] proved ultimately to be fairly accurate. The record-breaking crowds … were mostly Australians and New Zealanders.’4

The bid team’s pitch to its doubters in Rome seven years earlier that faster jet travel to the faraway capital in the Southern Hemisphere would reduce Australia’s remoteness had proved overly optimistic. When part of the world was in disarray, air travel seemed perilous. And as several observers had noted, the Americans had stayed away from London and Helsinki, so they were never going to turn up in big numbers to Australia, which was even further away. The press and publicity committee had identified that issue sufficiently early to avoid committing big money to an overseas publicity and advertising campaign about Melbourne, the Games, and Australia, which would, by all indications, have been wasted.

*

On 18 January 1957 there was a knock on the door of Nina Paranyuk’s safe house in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. It was Detective Sergeant James Rosengren and two other police. Paranyuk was reassured by the people sheltering her that the police were friendly.

‘Instead of the bullying types I saw in the police force in the Ukraine, they treated me like a lady. They were smiling as they opened the door of the police car,’ she said.5 ‘I got in to the car, and I knew I had done the best thing in my life when I fled from the Gruzia.’

She promised she would lose herself in Australia, change her name, and make a different life for herself. ‘As the spotlight fades, I will be able to live normally … If I stay as Nina, I will live in fear always. And the members of the society who gave me freedom would soon become known.’

Detective Sergeant Rosengren took Nina to the Russell Street police headquarters, and from there to the immigration department in Elizabeth Street. No charges were laid against her.

Later that day, Paranyuk applied to become a permanent resident in Australia. Her application was accompanied by a short note, that read: ‘I joined the vessel [the Gruzia] with the intention of leaving Russia and residing in another country. I therefore apply to remain in Australia and become an Australian citizen in the future.’6

She didn’t have long to wait. On 25 February 1957 a Commonwealth migration officer wrote her a letter: ‘I refer to your application for permission to remain permanently in Australia, and I desire to advise that the application has been approved.’7 To all intents and purposes, Nina was now free and a legal citizen of Australia. But although the police and immigration department knew where she was staying, no one else did.

The newspapers had been trying to find Paranyuk too. Journalist Lionel Hogg had been on a Queensland holiday when she had gone missing, but when he came back to the Flinders Street offices of The Herald, he told his editor he reckoned he could track her down. Hogg knew his way around police headquarters and rang Rosengren, who was reluctant to help. But when Hogg said he didn’t need to know where Paranyuk lived, but only to talk to her, Rosengren relented.

Three days later, Hogg took a telephone call from someone speaking in a thick accent: ‘You want to see Nina? Maybe we can arrange that.’ There were conditions to the interview — no photographs without permission, and even then, Paranyuk would not be captured in any portrait shots. Hogg was not to follow the two Ukrainians who accompanied her, who were part of the network of people who had sheltered her.

After an initial meeting with the Ukrainians, Hogg made his first contact with Paranyuk — at the Melbourne Zoo, ironically enough. A photograph was taken of her standing outside; she could have been anyone. Hogg was surprised to find that she had put on weight, her clothes were modern, and her hair had been cut short. She looked like a local.

For the next four nights, Paranyuk and her two Ukrainian companions visited Hogg at his home in suburban Windsor, where she told her story, from her impoverished life in Ukraine to the day she fled the Gruzia.8 The four-part series in The Herald won Hogg the first Walkley Award for Australia’s best news story. Paranyuk’s tale was an artefact of the Cold War. It played to preconceptions of the Soviet Union and the West, of communism and democracy, of oppression and liberty. And it was a story that happened in Australia at a time when the rest of the world had actually turned up on Melbourne’s doorstep.

The story even seemed to have the ultimate happy ending. Just six days after the government told Paranyuk she could stay, she was married. Her husband was a 36-year-old engineer, Wasyl Kuzyk. He was one of 12 men who had sent her a marriage proposal after she came out of hiding. He sent her his photo, and the couple, working through the Ukrainian network that had sheltered her, arranged a meeting. After that, they spent every night of the week together, and Paranyuk told friends she was engaged. ‘It was love at first sight,’ she said.

She and Kuzyk organised a quiet wedding at St Mark’s Anglican church in Fitzroy, with a Polish priest officiating. But word of the ceremony got out and more than a hundred Ukrainians flocked to the church. Paranyuk, still nervous after her ordeal, waited in a black taxi for 25 minutes, hoping the crowd would disperse, before she realised she had to get to the church.9 A private reception was held at one of her former safe houses, with about a dozen guests.10 There was no discussion that day about where their marital home would be; there were still some secrets she wanted to keep.

That was just as well. In July 1957 the KGB in Moscow included Nina on its list of Soviet people who were political enemies of the state. The KGB had sentenced her to death.11

*

Colin Bednall stuck to his promise: his would be the last of the television stations to launch. It meant he had more time to get it right, and more time to see what his competitors were doing. It was fine to be second, Sir Arthur Warner told his general manager. Sir Arthur’s attitude gave Bednall the scope to make his own way and build his own station.12

On 18 January GTV-9 formally launched onto the airwaves from its £1 million studios. Bednall had worked assiduously to ensure that he built a headquarters that had room to grow — that translated into a 32-metre-long studio that was the biggest outside the United States. There was scope for live performances, not just quiz and game shows. No wonder the old Heinz factory was dubbed ‘Studio City’, giving a fair indication of Bednall’s distinct vision for television in Australia. The renovation had included another studio that was suitable for cooking demonstrations and retained the old Heinz staff canteen, updated, for the GTV-9 staff.

Bednall had faith that television would grow, and struck out boldly where many of his competitors were conservative and measured. A large part of Bednall’s confidence in television was based on what he had seen overseas. He had now been a convert to the medium for years, but he also had the programming skills to make it work in Australia. The station Bednall created was fit for a particular purpose: to show off local product. That was why he had a large studio for live performances. It was why he spent a great deal of time trying to identify and promote local talent. There was still a need for overseas content, though, to lure viewers to the station and provide the programming around the local product.

Bednall and his programming manager, Norm Spencer, had gone overseas to source programs, and returned with a selection designed for family viewing, from comedians Burns and Allen, to crime show Dragnet, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and new British shows The Buccaneers and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot.13 Bednall made sure he made the right noises: ‘GTV Channel 9 will offer every day of the week, programmes of outstanding Australian productions and the cream of American and British programming,’ he said on the eve of the opening.14 But his priority was to find local stars, and for viewers to feel they were watching themselves, or people and places they knew.

As a former newspaper man, Bednall had also invested heavily in news coverage. In the early days he would insist that his small executive team read the morning newspapers before their weekly Monday meeting. ‘We need to know what’s going on in Melbourne,’ he told them.15 That translated into his approach to news. The publicity blurb, as outlined in one of GTV-9’s newsprint partners, The Argus, showed some old-fashioned brio:

GTV 9’s flying squad of newsreel cameramen will rove Melbourne continuously providing coverage of all outstanding events. On the spot film coverage will give a new dramatic power to the news, supplementing the printed word and radio. As soon as the cameramen shoot their film it will be rushed to Richmond for processing … in addition to regular news bulletins, news breaks occurring during the day will be flashed to viewers.16

If viewers had any doubt about how this entertainment and information offering might work, Bednall could point not only to the Olympic Games coverage but also to the network’s running of the film of the Australian Davis Cup victory, and also the Christmas carols, which were to become a GTV-9 staple.

All the pomp and promise would be revealed on the opening night, when Victorian governor Sir Dallas Brooks was to drive into the studio in a chauffeured limousine. Bednall wanted to show off the expanse of his studio, and had a team of white ponies lined up for one of the acts. He had sourced coir matting from the Myer’s department store to ensure the horses could get traction on the shiny studio floor. Ten minutes before the governor arrived, Bednall was cleaning up after the horses’ accidents all over the new floor. He was never afraid to get his hands dirty.

There were celebrity interviews, a variety show featuring singer Toni Lamond and her husband, Frank Sheldon — both just back from overseas — ventriloquist Ron Blaskett, a children’s choir, Indigenous singer Harold Blair, Lou Toppano’s 23-piece orchestra, and Bob and Dolly Dyer, who were about to migrate their successful radio show, Pick a Box, to television.17 There were 400 people in the audience, all of them agog at the new technology, the buzz, the bright lights, and the noise.

Viewers in lounge rooms and those gazing into shop windows were amazed. The new switchboard at the old soup factory lit up for two hours after the show, with happy viewers from rural and regional Victoria gushing about the quality of the vision they had received that night. Five unnamed countries cabled their congratulations to Bednall and his executive team.18 Even allowing for the boosterism that came from The Age and The Argus, there was no doubting the opening night was a success. Bednall’s television career was up and running.

*

In February the 25-year-old Rupert Murdoch flew to Giles, and Robert Macaulay once again found himself chauffeuring a newcomer around. Murdoch’s interest in the area was piqued by Bill Grayden’s committee findings and the films, not by Maralinga.

Murdoch had taken over The Adelaide News on his father’s death, and with two others he chartered a twin-engine Aero 45 and flew up from Adelaide to Alice Springs, then across the hinterland, stopping at mission stations along the way to find out just how badly Indigenous Australians were faring. Not too bad at all, Murdoch concluded. ‘No Aborigines in the Central Australian reserves are dying of thirst or starvation — or disease,’ he noted. ‘The great nationwide concern over these people has not been necessary.’ He went on to warn, however, about the need to ‘protect these prime but totally unprepared people’ from the incursions of international mining companies.19 Murdoch’s priority might have been to debunk Grayden’s claims, but the broader debate about Indigenous Australians’ imminent safety was still pertinent because there were another three atomic tests at Maralinga to come in 1957.

Grayden’s report had been a slow burn in the eastern states, only becoming newsworthy after the 1957 New Year. It was then that Murdoch decided to jump on the topic. He was at the same time negotiating to buy the ailing Argus newspaper in Melbourne from Cecil King. On 16 January The Argus ran an impassioned piece from a journalist with a long exposure to Indigenous Australians and northern Australia. Gordon Williams wrote partly in response to the Grayden revelations and partly about the impact of the Maralinga tests:

These people have been driven from their hunting grounds by the White Man’s Progress — such progress as is represented by the Maralinga atomic testing ground and by searches for minerals that will help to stabilise our economy, but won’t give the dispossessed one witchetty grub or a single goanna to help him along his dusty road to death. Well, I suppose it is good that the Parliamentarians HAVE discovered these things, and that, discovering, they have shocked a nation. But what shocks me — and everybody to whom for many, many years the tragedy of the Aborigine has been a tale too plainly written — is that these disclosures and ‘revelations’ should reach us now, in 1957, with all the impact of one of Maralinga’s A-grade explosions. What they record has been going for a long, miserable time.20

It was a modern and compassionate response, but its capacity to influence opinion was limited. And The Argus couldn’t spend any resources or send staff to explore the issue — it was financially bereft. Three days later, after Murdoch bought the paper, he fulfilled the condition of sale by closing The Argus after 111 years.21

*

In March 1957 the Democratic Labor Party formally came into existence, ending the short-lived Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), which Les Coleman had led. The national party brought together the anti-communist elements in the state Labor parties and gave them a single platform. The strength of the new organisation was the two states where the split had been so debilitating for Labor: Victoria and Queensland.

The DLP’s arrival gave Coleman an opportunity to weigh into the public debate again. His energies in the latter part of 1956 were consumed by his Olympic role, and he didn’t appear to miss the state responsibilities that had come from his bruising time as transport minister. But in 1957 he did have a message to impart about ‘Australia’s appalling weakness before the growing might of Chinese Communism and the growth of Communist subversion in Australian trade unions’.22

Coleman’s deeply held aversion to communism had emerged as a key determinant in the final stages of his political career. And his brawling with the union movement over the One-Man Bus dispute had convinced him of the trade union movement’s fundamental opposition to what Coleman considered efficiency and progress.

He was elected state president of the DLP in March 1958, and considered himself a good candidate for Senate preselection four months later. Despite presenting a strong case and clearly having the experience to do the job, Coleman was overlooked for a non-Catholic, Jack Little. Although Little was 20 years younger than Coleman, it appeared that Bob Santamaria wanted to ensure the party was not seen as a Catholics-only organisation. Coleman resigned from the party soon after, and then announced he would not be recontesting his seat on the Melbourne City Council. With those two decisions, Les Coleman drew a veil over his political career.

The DLP became the electoral bane of the Australian Labor Party, whittling important preference votes off Labor that locked it out of government. Gough Whitlam’s surge to power in 1972 effectively neutralised the DLP bogey, but it wasn’t until after the double-dissolution election of 1974 that it was marginalised. It limped along for several years before slipping off the electoral landscape, then emerged like a curio from another time to have a Victorian senator in 2010.

Les Coleman wouldn’t live to see the end of the party he had been integral to establishing; he died on 6 October 1974.

*

Only six Hungarian Olympic team members stayed in Melbourne after the Games, including steeplechase silver medallist Sándor Rozsnyói, wrestler Bálint Galántai, kayaker Zoltán Szigeti, and sprinter Géza Varasdi.

Although Andor Mészáros had little money to offer the new refugees, he did what he could. Varasdi needed to do three years’ additional study in Australia for his medical degree to be of use, so Mészáros got him working on the pick and shovel to help build the house attached to Mészáros’ Kew studio while he studied.

Mészáros remained a proud and homesick Hungarian, and understood how important it was to help newcomers adjust to the Australian way of life. Such support became increasingly important after the federal government increased its initial intake of Hungarian refugees to 14,000. The reputation of previous Hungarian immigrants, such as Mészáros, and the broad sympathy for what had happened to the refugees made adaptation and engagement with Australians somewhat easier than it had been for those of Mészáros’ generation.23

Varasdi became a GP, lived in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, and retained a clear view of why he decided to stay in Melbourne:

[W]hen we were competing in Western countries, our families were at gunpoint. If you don’t go back — bang — you know? … Sport was part of the propaganda. We were taken out while the family were at gunpoint and we were there to look happy, so people made the conclusion: ‘After all, Communism can’t be so bad.’ But of course, we looked like that, because how can I send my family to a concentration camp or God knows where?24

Mészáros, too, had been won over to Australia, after confronting what he called ‘the cultural desert’ when he arrived. There were issues with his clients, many of whom he gave short shrift because of their lack of sophistication and cultural vulgarity when it came to dealing with artists. But Mészáros saw that he could, in effect, paint his own canvas, and he became Australia’s first and best portrait medallion maker. His son Michael understood that his father came to see the opportunities in Australia, the distance from the scenes of international conflict, and the relaxed approach to life as an inviting contrast to the highly competitive and regimented life he had led in Hungary.25

By the time he died in 1972, Mészáros’ work in stone and bronze was at Brisbane’s Shrine of Remembrance, Darwin’s Supreme Court, Sydney’s international airport terminal, the King George V Hospital in Sydney, as well as in the trophy cabinet, sock drawer, or pool room of everyone who had played a role in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.

*

On 21 August 1956 someone had finally noticed that The Catcher in the Rye was banned in Australia. Seven months later, the Australian agents for the book’s British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, wrote to customs officials to appeal the decision. Part of the argument was that the US edition had been banned in Australia, but the English edition was perhaps more palatable. Certainly, the Hamish Hamilton Catcher had been on sale in Australia since 1951. ‘We might mention that the sales of the book in Australia have been negligible, and it came as a great surprise to learn that this action had been taken,’ the letter read.26

Of course, how popular the book was or otherwise wasn’t the issue. But when the federal parliamentary library had its copy of the book seized, the issue became news. It was, the press said, a national embarrassment, and the censorship system needed an urgent overhaul. The book was released the following month and a review of the censorship system announced.

*

After hearing the ‘Rock Around the Clock’ record and seeing the film, the next thing was actually seeing it live. And in January 1957 Bill Haley and the Comets obliged, making their first tour to Australia. Haley did two concerts a night, and the reactions to the band mirrored the film’s wild-eyed physical enthusiasm. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Couples leapt from their seats and danced in the aisles … Young people with glassy looks in their eyes swayed in their seats as the bands played … two girls in the front row wearing matador pants and loose-fitting shirts leapt up and began jiving in the aisle.’27

Something had stirred, and Australia would soon get its own rock’n’roll stars: in 1958 a young tearaway from Sydney, Johnny O’Keefe, would have a number one hit song with ‘The Wild One’.

*

GTV-9 soon became the powerhouse of Melbourne television. The secret of its success was Colin Bednall’s desire to find local talent and use it to best effect. Graham Kennedy was working at radio station 3UZ when Bednall and his programming manager, Norm Spencer, spotted him. They got Kennedy to come in to Bendigo Street for a test.

Bednall was sitting in the radio control room with Spencer when the camera zoomed in on Kennedy’s face. The pair were transfixed. ‘When a full face of Kennedy alone came on the monitors, Spencer and I turned to one another without exchanging a word and shook hands,’ Bednall said. But he would always deny he ‘discovered’ the man who would go on to be called ‘the King of Australian television’. ‘A man with a performer’s genius as Kennedy possessed, projected himself,’ Bednall wrote in his unpublished autobiography. ‘I merely saved him from dismissal five times a year for seven years.’28

That became a pressing issue when Sir Arthur Warner sold GTV-9 to the Sydney Channel 9, which was owned by Sir Frank Packer, in 1960. Packer was homophobic and constantly harangued Bednall about getting Kennedy off the air. Bednall always resisted. And Kennedy thrived.

Bednall left it all behind in 1965 (operational costs once again got the better of him), and his working life then became a series of stops and starts. He went from working for the United Nations on space communications to managing an English-Chinese TV station in Hong Kong, stood unsuccessfully as a Labor candidate in the 1972 and 1974 federal elections, worked briefly for Gough Whitlam, and then wrote a media column for The Age.

Not only had Bednall’s political views changed from the days when he’d cultivated Sir Robert Menzies, so had his views about television. With the flawless judgement of hindsight, he admitted: ‘Tragically, when applications [for TV licences] were invited, the only ones worth considering, apart from a consortium embracing Sir Arthur Warner, were those of newspaper, radio and cinema interests.’ The upshot of that newspaper involvement was that television began ‘sliding down into mediocrity the moment a newspaper proprietor … insisted on making management decisions’.29 He died on 26 April 1976.

*

Marlene Mathews married Barry Willard in March 1957. For the next 18 months, she was in rare form, free of the expectation of being Australia’s number one female sprinter, and relatively injury-free too. At the Empire Games in Cardiff in 1958 she won the sprint double, and it would have been three golds but for another problem with the relay team, this time with the baton change rather than team selection. At the end of 1958, at the national championships in Sydney, Mathews broke Marjorie Jackson’s world record for the 100 metres by 0.1 second. The next night she set a new world mark in the 200 metres. These were two days she would never forget.30

But Mathews suffered another leg injury in the build-up to the 1960 Rome Olympics, which meant she was not at her best. Australia’s only track and field gold came when Herb Elliott smoothly and comprehensively won the 1500 metres title. Rome was hot, uncomfortable, and out of season for the Australians, and the competition was fierce. Although Mathews managed to finish second to the great US sprinter Wilma Rudolph in the post-Olympics meeting, she understood why the Australians could not match their performance from Melbourne. ‘The rest of the world was catching up,’ Mathews explained.31

Mathews never fulfilled her goal of becoming a physical education teacher, but she came pretty close, helping coordinate athletics coaching and promoting athletics through the Rothmans National Sport Foundation. She coached at club level, in schools, and across states. Mathews was appointed to the NSW Women’s Advisory Council, and earned numerous honours for her athletic achievements. In January 2018 bronze statutes of Marlene and the recently deceased Betty Cuthbert were unveiled at the Sydney Cricket Ground. The pair were, in Mathews’ words, ‘polite rivals’ who became friends.

*

There were three more ‘major’ nuclear bomb trials held in Maralinga in 1957, and a further five trials up to April 1963. In 1985 the Australian Labor government established a royal commission, under former Labor senator and judge Jim McClelland, to investigate the nuclear tests. The final report was a fierce denunciation of Australia’s subservience to the British demands, and levelled uncompromising criticism against Beale and others in the Menzies government and the British scientific establishment for their utter lack of honesty and care for the Indigenous communities in and around the test zone.

Walter MacDougall continued to patrol the area, although his main work became the recording of Aboriginal sites. He retired to Victoria, but after his death in 1976 his ashes were returned to the Ernabella mission. Robert Macaulay married Jean in Sydney in October 1958, and after his initial posting at Giles spent seven years at Woomera. After that, he joined the department of immigration and continued his working life a long way from Woomera, Giles, or Maralinga.

*

Bruce Howard became a senior photographer at The Herald, and wrote a popular book on the 1956 Olympics, which featured many of his photographs. The Herald remained Australia’s biggest-selling afternoon paper until the 1980s, when circulation started to fall. Rupert Murdoch bought his father’s old paper (and the rest of The Herald and Weekly Times stable) in 1987, and three years later merged The Herald with its morning stablemate, The Sun, to create the nation’s biggest-selling daily newspaper.

*

The double scullers Mervyn Wood and Murray Riley went their separate ways in graphic contrast to each other. Wood ultimately became the NSW police commissioner, and Riley a convicted drug trafficker.

Riley had left the police force in 1962. The Moffit royal commission into alleged organised crime connections to licensed clubs found in 1974 that he had gone into business with Raymond Smith sometime after he had become Smith’s bodyguard. ‘[Smith] was apparently engaged with Riley in doubtful or criminal conduct in the financing of poker machines,’ the commission reported.32 Riley went into hiding while Justice Athol Moffit held the hearings for the inquiry, and then turned up a day after the report was tabled in the NSW parliament.33

The poker machine business proved to be a huge boon to licensed clubs in New South Wales. In 1967 there were 1,419 clubs in the state, with a total of 19,617 machines, almost four times as many machines as there had been a decade earlier. The other beneficiary was the state government: in the first two years of legalised poker machines, the government raised an extra £1.5 million in tax revenue.34

*

Nina Kuzyk declared in 1968 that she ‘wasn’t frightened any more’. ‘They can’t touch me. I’m in a free country,’ she said.

She had decided in the 12 years since she’d arrived to keep a low profile. She and Wasyl had a son, Wally, who went to Pascoe Vale North Primary School and helped his mother learn English. Wasyl had a job as a crane operator in Melbourne. On 27 November 1967 Nina had been naturalised in Broadmeadows. The picture of the family published in The Herald showed a normal, shy, and happy group. Nina admitted that her elderly mother, married sister, and brother were still in the USSR. ‘I haven’t seen them since 1954. I hope they’re all right. But I know they haven’t got in to trouble because of me,’ she said.35 It is hard to know how Nina could be so certain, unless she was in communication with them.

The family were regular attendants at the North Melbourne Ukrainian church, and they had a network of Ukrainians around them. Nina became unwell and, after a time in hospital, left Melbourne. Wasyl and Wally were left behind. Nina went to the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. She appears to have changed her name — as she had always promised. No one has revealed what happened to her. Nina Paranyuk had disappeared for the final time.

*

Seven months after the Games, the Victorian Historical Society hosted an address from Ted Doyle, who had chaired the Melbourne press and publicity committee. It was, on the face of it, an odd forum in which to reflect on the Games, but it suggested Melbourne was already seeing the Games as a moment in a time. Doyle’s address gave words to feelings that had swirled around the MCG and the city during the Games, about the advantage of being so far from international turmoil:

Curiously, Melbourne’s very remoteness which had been envisaged as the worst handicap Melbourne faced as the host city for the Games became in this extremity her saving grace. Many of the athletes, their official and supporters, were already here, others arrived in the midst of the tumult to find that in the long sight the shattering events of the other hemisphere slipped in to a new perspective, took on more correct proportions as proximity faded in to middle distance, middle distance in to the far away.36

While there was some truth in the observation about Melbourne’s distance, the idea that an athlete took a healthier perspective on the threat to his or her family from Soviet tanks by competing in Melbourne tests credibility.

Doyle was on stronger ground when it came to reflecting on what it took to get Melbourne up and ready for the Olympics:

We might have lost the Games. Be it said to the everlasting credit of Australian sportsmanship, Australian national sentiment and Australian teamwork — in the treasury as well as one the track — and the civic pride of a great city, we neither defaulted nor, once the honour was ours, did we fail in our determination.37

The ultimate consequence of that, Doyle said, was immeasurable. There were stadiums, buildings, visits from VIPs, tourism, publicity, commerce, and the goodwill of thousands of locals in supporting the Games, but no one could know what that all amounted to:

[No] … Olympic city stood to gain so much as Melbourne … from the experience of housing and catering, accommodation and transport which the Games thrust upon its citizens and services, an ordeal intensified by the rapid changes and improvisations created by the alarums and excursions of the international aspect.38

This was the official view of the men who had delivered the Games. They were justifiably proud of their achievement.

Earlier in the year, Avery Brundage thanked the city for making the Games a success in a message he sent to Lord Mayor Sir Frank Selleck. ‘Everyone in Melbourne, under your leadership, seemed to have captured the Olympic spirit. In this respect the Games were probably the most successful ever staged,’ Brundage wrote. ‘I am sure Australia has gained thousands of friends as a result.’39 Brundage’s approval was hard-won, and his endorsement had value to those who had endured his bullying and bluster.

There were easy ways to measure the nation’s success through individual gold medallists — in the swimming pool, Dawn Fraser, David Theile, Lorraine Crapp, Murray Rose, and Jon Henricks, in addition to Cuthbert and Strickland on the track — and standout Australian performances in a range of disciplines. The Rome Olympics in 1960 was a far harder challenge: many Australian competitors felt that the world had caught up to and gone past Australia by then.

*

In time, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll would be regarded as the cornerstone of modern Australian drama. It won the Evening Standard award in London for the best play of 1957 after a stellar season in the West End. A New York season went well, but without the awards. Ray Lawler would write more plays, including two that became part of the Doll trilogy, but the original remained the best loved. Its capacity to tell us about ourselves at a particular time in our history became increasingly valuable. ‘[I]n the 1950s its complex reflection of the nation’s confused image of itself made it a central document of Australian culture,’ the experienced theatre critic John McCallum observed.40

Australia’s ‘confused image of itself’ is central to understanding the importance of 1956. The year ushered in a significant but subtle shift from the most odious of Australia’s distinguishing features — the White Australia policy. From July, non-European residents were for the first time allowed to apply for Australian citizenship. It was a pointer to further changes to come, which included the abolition of the dictation test in 1958, and the dismantling of most of the policy in 1966. The policy had signalled to Australia’s neighbours that it wasn’t interested in engaging with the region but continued to cast an adoring eye halfway around the world to a continent increasingly removed from its daily concerns.

By the end of 1956, Australia had hosted the world’s sports men and women, welcomed wartorn refugees, broken some of its cultural conventions, exposed some of its Indigenous communities to the risk of another nation’s atomic weapon, and, through its prime minister, been involved in the world’s worst crisis since World War II. Taken together, the events and outcomes paint a contradictory picture, capturing a nation in the throes of progress at one moment, and firmly stuck in its history at another. Yet there was no doubting that the international exposure, in all its colours, successes, and failures, had an impact on Australians.

The difficult preparations for the Games might have helped lower expectations among many Australians about Melbourne’s capacity to deliver the Olympics, but the end result defied all predictions. The practical manifestation of the Games — the stadiums, the pools, and the infrastructure — were permanent reminders of what had occurred, in case anyone thought it had been a kind of dream. The Games’ success became central to Melbourne’s conception of itself as the nation’s sporting capital, and it would parlay that reputation for generations to come.

A slower, more nuanced impact came from the Olympic chefs who decided to stay in Australia, some opening restaurants in Melbourne, others moving to Sydney. The style and quality of what they produced added another important element to the broadening cultural offerings of European migration. The Games meant Melbourne, and the nation, was exposed to nationalities it had never known from the security of its place in the Empire. It was the city’s enthusiasm to embrace the unfamiliar that made the Games a success. ‘By being allowed to play the host city we’ve grown up overnight from a spotty-faced adolescent to something approaching maturity,’ Herald columnist Douglas Wilkie concluded.41 Perhaps it was the civilising force of internationalism that had made the difference.

The rest of the nation could bask in the reflection of Melbourne’s new-found maturity — or, if you were in Sydney, you could do something about it. In February 1956 the premier of New South Wales, Joe Cahill, released details of a competition to design a national opera house on Sydney’s Bennelong Point. Eleven months later, he announced that the competition winner was Danish architect Jørn Utzon. One of the nation’s most famous landmarks, which would help define Sydney as an international city, was underway.

The ribbon that runs through Australia in 1956 is the collision of old and new attitudes, the desire for peace among war-weary generations, and the thirst for comfort and a different kind of security among younger Australians. It was a year when the empire of which Australia had been an integral part became less relevant to many Australians, and the United States emerged not only as the nation’s best ally but as a cultural touchstone too. Prime Minister Menzies had negotiated the 1950s with adept footwork, but in 1956 his missteps in the Suez Crisis became his biggest foreign policy failure, driven in large part by his trusting of old friends who had too much to lose. The Cold War was an ever-present threat, made more menacing by the secrecy that surrounded it, but for most Australians it became more remote after 1956. Across the nation, new kinds of entertainment emerged from the sedate days of radio serials and 78 rpms. Prosperity was desirable, and cars, fridges, and TV sets were the mark of a comfortable and successful life. Many Australians looked around and saw the emergence of a new world in 1956, and they wanted to be part of it. There would be no turning back.