Chapter 2 : NATIONALISM

- Original charter ofAustralian Institute of Sport in 1981. Concern in the country that the sporting success which characterised Australians was declining prompted the establishment of the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra in 1981. The sporting image of Australia was greatly tarnished when its competitors failed to win a gold medal at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

We are adept at idolising, at putting sporting heroes on pedestals, at glorifying. It is part of our national psyche that we gain as a nation from the successes of our athletes. This is not in itself a trait peculiar to Australians. What is perhaps peculiar is our readiness to turn our backs on those same sporting heroes the moment they falter, our readiness to cut them off at the legs.

Athletes should be treated as whole people and not just as mechanisms for winning gold medals. With many competitive athletes, there's so much stress put on the result. The goal becomes the medal and not the personal achievement...

Sport is part of our psyche, irrespective of sex. And while sport should always be kept in perspective, it always has been, and always will be, treated with unusual passion.

- Journalist Brian Mossop in The Weekend Australian (March, 1992).

It [is] almost as if Australia developed a sports culture that demanded that the first rate and a work culture that accepted the second rate.

Australia has an outstanding reputation for producing some of the world's best sports people. It would be a tragedy if those with the ability and the talent to achieve greatness were denied their chance by lack of finances to make their dreams a reality.

High standards are demanded of Australian sportsmen and this emphasis on success rather than enjoyable participation percolates down to the level of the very young – those who should perhaps be “just playing.” The intuitive Australian cartoonist, Bruce Petty, often touches the conscience of the nation with his satirical sketches. He illustrates this preoccupation with success-in-sport-to-prove-Australian identity by correctly portraying Australia 's national sport as “winning.”

We can't honestly pretend that we enjoy our Davis Cup team taking a beating, but if we have to absorb it, we can't take it from better friends and nicer fellows than the Australians.

International contests are like that. Individuals play in them, and play with superb skill, but the overall contestant is the nation.

Let's show the world!

Or are we kidding ourselves about all this? Have we simply lost the drive and tenacity to be great once more? Have we become indolent; a nation so blessed with wealth, sunshine and a high standard of living that it doesn't really matter any more? History will reveal that.

Sport and science were the two measures in all 24 countries surveyed that had a significant impact on increasing the affection and emotional warmth people felt about their nation. … Most Australians grow up believing they are part of a sports nation. But are they merely deluding themselves?

And where national teams are concerned, sport plays the role of at least temporarily uniting Australians around a single desired objective, something they seldom enjoy in any other sphere of national life.

It was said of the Sydney Olympics that they would give Australia a nation-defining moment in its history. The extent to which that has proved to be true will be debated by historians and social commentators for years to come. What can be asserted now with a high degree of confidence is that the Olympics have prompted Australians to seek insights … [into] the character of their nation – and people have liked much of what they saw. Certainly, there are flaws to be seen, but also much of that is admirable.

We came late to nationalism. Given the terms in which national feeling was being argued elsewhere, in blood and soil notions of ethnic exclusivism or mystical notions of brotherhood and death, it was both original and far-sighted of us to settle so early for sport, which was to become 100 years later one of the world's universal religions, as a way of defining ourselves and channelling national feeling. To this extent the Sydney Olympics really was the apotheosis of Australia 's national achievement and the revelation, to ourselves as much as to others, of an achieved national style. That was, in may ways, our real celebration of Federation.

Sport was the first form of Australian foreign policy. Until the British got into some wars to which the Australians could send volunteers, it was the only way in which Australians could prove they were best.

In fact, Australia pretty generally beats most people at most things. Truly never has there been a more sporting nation. At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, to take just one random but illustrative example, Australia, the fifty-second largest nation in the world, brought home more medals than all but four [sic ‘six'] other countries, all of them much larger … Measured by population, its performance was streets ahead of anyone else. Australians won 3.78 medals per million of population, a rate more than two and a half times better than the next best performer, Germany, and almost five times the rate of the United States . Moreover, Australia 's medal-winning tally was distributed across a range of sports, fourteen, matched by only one other nation, the United States. Hardly a sport exists at which the Australians do not excel. Do you know, there are even forty Australians playing baseball at the professional level in the United States, including five in the Major Leagues – and Australians don't even play baseball, at least in any devoted manner. They do all this on the world stage and play their own games as well, notably a very popular form of loosely contained mayhem called Australian Rules Football …

The knowledge, or lack of it, of the Australian national anthem is an embarrassment to the nation, especially when athletes collecting medals at sporting games are shown obviously mouthing the national anthem Advance Australia Fair.

I loved tennis so much and I loved playing for my nation.

Let slip the brute dogs of nationalism, the Olympics are upon us! Australians love the Games because we're good at sport. And the Olympics reassure us that, though far from the world's big population centres, we can compete. That we belong, we matter. It all stems from our intangible anxieties about our convict beginnings, and our future identity. The Games, as does no other celebration, meld our polygot multi-culture into...a team. Once our priority was greatness through sport. Now perhaps, it is enough to be respected as good sports.

Defeat, excessive emotion, bad tempers, verbal abuse and racist outbursts do not a sporting nation make. We pride ourselves on being a country whose national psyche is inextricably intertwined with sport. … But we are a selective sporting nation – we only want the good, forget the bad and the ugly.

Failure hurts Australians particularly hard because they take sport so seriously. To Australians, sport is not just something they play in their spare time, but it is the medium through which they have to prove themselves to the rest of the world

… national teams carry more than their fair share of Australian emotional investment. A win is terrific, and everybody can join in the celebrations, but a loss reflects badly not only on the team or athlete concerned, but on the nation as a whole.

And it's perhaps because of this fact that Australians can be so unforgiving when their national teams falter. A loss, in these circumstances, isn't just a sporting life, it's a national betrayal. It's like treason.

Sport is one of the few “social glues” present in contemporary Australian society. It's a force that transcends class, gender, background, even language and where national teams are concerned, sport plays the role of at least temporarily uniting Australians around a single desired objective, something they seldom enjoy in any other sphere of national life.

The irony of the weekend warrior is that he or she is part of a great Australian myth. The image might be of bronzed Aussies leaving the world behind on the sporting field, but that sort of waffle is long gone, if it was ever true. As we prepare to work ourselves into a lather over the Sydney 2000 Olympics, the majority of us will do so in front of the television. We are more a nation of watchers than doers and, as already shown, when we try to get physical, too many of us end up injured. It's a bit like Gallipoli and Anzac day - we've turned a debacle into a matter of national celebration.

While there is a belief in the sport's centrality in defining the Australian character, active involvement is a myth.

- Professor John Daly (2001).

Obsession with sport myth.

… the academic debate has gradually adopted a more critical edge, initially supporting, then qualifying, questioning and gradually rejecting this notion of a national ‘obsession'. Challenging these myths has certainly been difficult, yet through the careful analysis of sport participation, attendance, coverage and rituals, a series of authors have carefully deconstructed these widely held beliefs.

Whilst this debate is interesting. It is time to move on and focus on what actually constitutes the national sporting cultures. We discuss sport in terms of ‘cultures' to highlight that sport may be interpreted in contrasting ways by different sections of Australian society.

- Sports historians Murray Phillips and Tara Magdalinski (2003).

Australians like to think of themselves as a superbly fit race of sun-tanned giants forever riding the surf or undertaking other spectacular sporting feats like the gods of mythology. The truth is somewhat less, of course, and any casual observer will quickly note that, far from being a nation of doers where sport is concerned, we are very much a nation of watchers. And if the chill winds blow outside we tend to stay home huddled in front of the telly to watch our favourite sport. Perhaps it is this lack of physical involvement in sport that makes so many Australians so stridently vocal and so partisan in the controversies that surround national and international sporting events.

Australians are going back to being a nation of "Norms", the beer-swilling couch potato anti-hero of the Life Be In It campaign.

Only 35 percent of men and 23 percent of women take part in organised sport.

Most popular sports for men to take part in are golf, cricket, basketball, AFL, tennis, bowls, indoor cricket, squash, rugby league and rugby union. For women the top sports are netball, tennis, golf, basketball, bowls, squash, hockey, indoor cricket, cricket and AFL.

The long held view of sports mad Aussies has been shattered by a survey showing we would rather go to a library or museum than the footy or cricket. The figures … fly in the face of how much we thought we loved sport, either playing it or watching it on television.

We're a nation of home bodies ... Home sweet home has never looked so good. We're spending more time at home, watching television, reading and chatting on the telephone and less time going out … When we do venture beyond the front door, one of the main reasons is to exercise ... the amount of time we spend socialising outside the home dropped, averaging 80 minutes a day in 1992 to about 15 minutes a day in 1997.

I don't like sport. Australians are addicted to sport, which usually means they slump in a chair watching telly, or get sore rumps on hard seats watching a mob of yobbos mauling their opponents in pre-historic, cave-man fashion. Sensible exercise (in whatever form) is healthy, but sitting watching, yelling and screeching does nothing for one's health. Wake up Australia.

Sport is amongst the most boring and unhealthy of all Australian preoccupations. It is an excuse for chattering mindlessly, avoiding exercise and reading acres of journalism which have absolutely nothing of interest to say on any subject.

I just don't think the human condition is assisted one iota by idiots running down a track or horses chasing each other and people having betting tickets on it and kicking a ball between two posts - its just mindless.

- Jan Murray, Public Relations Consultant (1988). Her husband, John Brown, was a former Federal Minister for Sport who had been quoted as saying, “Sport cuts across race, age, sex and class and is deeply ingrained in the fabric of our society.”

I'm disturbed at the prominence of sport and the way it is taking over our national life to the degree that it is. It's fair enough, but it has almost come to the stage where you can't switch on television without being clobbered with sport. It's so ridiculous, I get sick of it. We have to wake up to ourselves.

Many children are turned off physical activity for life by negative experiences in team sports where a win-at-all-costs mentality and public ridicule by coaches, parents and teammates have been observed. How many can recall the feeling of letting the team down, of not feeling competent and avoiding these activities? Individuals who don't fit the traditional mould should not be discriminated against by one-eyed views of physical activity that see only the benefits of team sport. Choice, skill development and access to a wide range of physical activity opportunities will be more successful in decreasing sedentary behaviour.

When will people wake up that ANZ and Suncorp stadiums are toxic waste sites? A TV closeup of a player returning from scoring a try clearly illustrates the danger to players and officials. His efforts in clearing air passages are no less robust than when he scores the try. At best, we have coughing, hawking, spitting and the occasional bucket of blood. At worst, we have the awesome spectacle of the nose-blower. In turn each nostril is cleared, the product capable of retreading a car tyre. Is this a ritual blow for manhood, a snort of contempt for the opposition or an expression of thoughts on armchair critics?

I felt my great balloon head was a huge obstacle in football, and although I was a strong and rather big obstacle in football, and although I was a strong and rather big kid for my age, I really was much happier sitting down in the quince orchards at Eltham High School trying to read books. But at most of the schools I attended this was deemed to suggest homosexuality, and so one was always thrust into sport. That meant you were lined up and the current school heroes would pick the teams, and I was always the last kid picked … or me and another boy called Johnny Straggler were always the shags on the rocks, the leftovers. I've always detested compulsory sport for that reason. I think that people forget that while it allows certain young men to soar high above their fellows, there are the also-rans who are pilloried. So many a day I've spent tossing quoits in a woe-begone fashion, while the other heroes rushed around kicking their footies.

Today, the sight of thugs writhing in the mud and bashing the hell out of one another in the name of sport has become part of our national ‘coltcher'...

I've never seen the sense in sport, myself. Sport detracts from thought, which is far, far more entertaining. I'm here to tell you that tossing ideas around beats tossing a discus, a javelin, a football or a Frisbee.

In schools, sport is used extensively to socialize the masses to be participants in the recreational society. Sport is intrinsically adolescent: It is what you do when you are young, fit, and healthy. After age 25, it is downhill until the end but if one stays in sport as a coach or administrator one can be cocooned in adolescent sports culture forever. All status in the schools goes to sport and very little, or none, to the arts and scholarship. Sports days are the main focus of the school, which are built up to by an endless succession of school outings, carnivals, camps, and mindless activities designed to create the impression that nothing in life is more important than fun, sport, fun, parties, fun, weekends, fun, and surfing. A huge proportion of Australia's youth, therefore, expend the bulk of their time and energy in the crucial age range of fifteen to thirty on sport and not educational, artistic, professional, or intellectual achievement; surely, this is dysfunctional in the global economy that requires a future generation of men and women socialized and trained for the high-tech and research-oriented cerebral world of the twenty-first century.

Everything in sports culture is childlike: the hats, the shouting, the jokes, the pranks, the routines, the TV shows about sport, the mindless followers of low intelligence—all is geared to ages five to nineteen. I do not dislike sport, indeed I was a keen participant in football (gridiron in Australia) … but the culture of sport is always embarrassingly childlike. The cognitive processes required for following sports are simple, repetitive, and stereotypical: the key characteristics of low intelligence and childlike behaviour. Sport is so popular because it is so simple and undemanding that literally anyone can do it.

Melbourne, because it has no climate and no sea and no surf and no swimming, tends to over-value sport. I hate Australian Rules, it's a stupid fucking game. All that dancing on their toes or whatever it is that they do. Melbourne overdoes everything … they're more left than the left, more right than the right, more religious than the religious, more sportsminded than the sportsminded, more drunk than the alcoholics. They're just awful people. It's because they don't have a climate. Melbourne is full of people who chose to go there, or their grandparents did. Think about that. What kind of masochists are they? They did a poll that showed that 87 per cent of people who live in Melbourne wanted to live somewhere else. Think about that. Mind you, I don't follow Rugby League at all.