Chapter 8 : ‘CONVENIENTLY OVERLOOKED’

-Wayne Goss, Premier of Queensland, after his election. He was referring to the fact that the government would run smoothly and people could focus on sport (1990s). In some respects the true Aussie sports fan glances at the front page but then turns straight to the back page for the sport. Some would argue that sport should be the front page – which it often is. Despite these comments sport and politics are often hard to separate.

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.

Australia 's Olympic challenge appears to be heading towards collapse as more competitors, officials and teams defect from the Moscow Games under mounting pressure from the Federal Government and public opinion, previously on the side of going, swinging dramatically against participation while Russian troops continue to occupy Afghanistan.

- Philip Grenard in ‘Stress brings a crumble in resolve' in The Bulletin (1980). Runner Raelene Boyle was quoted as saying, “I am not endorsing either side in the political argument.” Prime Minister Fraser on the issue said, “I can't give them my blessing to go but I can say that I hope that any athlete who does compete in Moscow makes damn sure that he or she beats everyone else in whatever the event may be.” Sport and politics have always had a role in international sport.

They look at sport as a wonderful time to show themselves, especially when there is an international match on and there are 40,000 people. As to the rest of it—how it is run, financed and managed—it doesn't matter. If they can get the crowd, they will go.

- Frank Stewart, former rugby league player and Federal Minister of Sport on the way his fellow politicians regard sport (1976). Politicians are often keen to be seen to actively support sport.

Until 1976, and the advent of the Confederation of Australian Sport, sport demanded little in return for political exploitation. It was, and still is to a large degree, a compliant election-tool. Sport is amiable, timid, a good bloke, a cold glass, a hale voter well-met. Sport is a political vehicle which has given politicians in many electorates a free ride to popularity. Now, belatedly, there are the faintest murmurings that sport is demanding its fare.

- Richard Cashman and Michael McKernan (eds.), Sport: Money, Morality and the Media (1979). Sports resent government interference in policies which might affect sport but often rely heavily on the government to provide facilities and grants.

The whingeing Aussies and their Premier Paul Keating were given a right royal bashing at the hands of Ian Botham yesterday. Beefy Botham proved British is best when he virtually thrashed the Australian cricketers single-handed. Then he commented: ‘I hope the Queen was watching'. Anti-British bigmouth Keating was lost for words as England stormed to an eight-wicket world cup victory. Only a few days ago he was claiming the poms ran out on the Aussies in world war two shortly after he cheekily put his arm around the Queen. But bleating Keating and thousands of pom-bashing ockers got their come-uppance at Sydney cricket ground.

- Comment to silver medallist Peter Norman by silver medallist American John Carlos, prior to the 200 metres Olympic final in Mexico City , 1968. The medal ceremony with its Black Power salutes by Carlos and gold medallist Green proved to be a very controversial event.

Darren loves people and he loves horses. He's always been one to say he couldn't do two things properly. He told me God wants him, and that's the way he's gone ... for people.

- Mentor and trainer Theo Green on champion jockey Darren Beadman's decision to quit racing for preaching. Beadman said, “I get more pleasure and thrill from seeing people give their hearts to the Lord than winning the Melbourne Cup.” He later returned to horseracing (1990s).

Melbourne has two deeply religious experiences which take place every year - one the football Grand Final, the other the Melbourne Cup. Take care, neither religious service should ever be mocked.

- Keith Dunstan in Sports (1970).

Indeed, Melbourne football had taken on something of the character of a primitive religion.

- Sports historian Ian Turner.

And this is the magic of the dressing shed. It's a religious place. Not just in sport, but anything that involves someone going into a room as one thing, coming out transformed and prepared to perform in the public arena. … Something happened in there.

They call it an act of terrorism, but if you can understand religion and our way of life it's not about terrorism. It's about fighting for God's laws, and America's brought it upon themselves (for) what they've done in the history of time.

- On Channel 9 boxer Anthony (‘The Man') Mundine, a Moslem, was asked about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York. It was a comment he would later sincerely regret and for which he received enormous criticism.

Yes, it's Grand Final time again, and once more we acknowledge the fact that football, in whatever form, is the central ritual of Australian life, taking on almost a sacramental significance as spectators devour meat pies and beer while chanting the set responses. This is not a frivolous comparison because, for many people, sport provides the same emotional and spiritual experience as religious celebrations used to do.

- Religion writer Alison Coates (2003).

I know we, the worshippers, are said by our accusers to be so depraved and corrupted by spectator sport that we would stay on at the Melbourne Cricket Ground till after the final siren even if we were told before half-time that a foreign power had invaded Australia, or that Christ was on trial again in the Supreme Court of Victoria.

Sport replaces religion in Australian society by providing the group cohesion and ritual that religion represents for most cultures. Most spiritual activities—festivals, group worship, singing, chanting, dancing—are simply social cohesion activities. Large-scale sport, especially cricket and Aussie rules, produce the feelings of togetherness. Large groups of people (up to 100,000 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground) chanting and singing in celebration of their group identity give Australians a tribal experience akin to religious festivals in Catholic Italy, Hindu Bali, or Buddhist Tibet.

Sport, more so than art or music, has been the passport to some respect from non-Aboriginal Australia. It has given Aborigines a sense of worth and pride. Success, however, has not lessened the harsh experience. The odds have been monumental: a different legal status, geographic isolation, severe administrative control, poverty, extreme prejudice, ill-health, low life expectancy, and almost absence of facilities B and the talents and training of their opponents. Sport has shown Aborigines that using and selling their bodies is still the only way they can compete on equal terms with an often hostile, certainly indifferent, mainstream society – but, this is the dreadful catch-22 of sport, only momentarily!

Do I endorse the concept of all-black teams? Yes, I do. Such teams give Aborigines a sense of identity and dignity, and are the opposite of apartheid because the players want to be separate. There's a world of difference between straight exclusion on white terms and voluntary separatism on black terms.

Tournaments with returning boomerangs, swimming, climbing, tracking, spear-throwing, spinning tops made of clay, throwing clubs at discs bowled along the ground, wrestling, hockey with sticks and stones and throwing the widji-widji, a toy which jumped over the ground like pebbles thrown across water, with umpires counting each thrower's number of jumps. The Wandi-wandi people played a ball game with a ball made of tightly-wound strips of skin inside a strongly-sewn possum-skin bag.

Boomerang throwing, swimming and a form of netball may have been the extent of the sporting pursuits of the Aborigines, but the arrival of the white man brought with it traditional English games such as boxing, wrestling and running, games which themselves could be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

- Neil Cadigan (et al.), in Blood, Sweat and Tears: Australians and Sport (1989) understating the vast number and variety of games and pastimes in traditional Indigenous societies.

Sport, however, has paved the way to earn the respect of white Australia; it has given Aborigines and Islanders a sense of worth and pride, especially since they have had to overcome the twin hurdles of racism and opposition on the field; it has shown black Australians that using their bodies is still the one and only way they can compete on equal terms with an often hostile, certainly indifferent, mainstream society.

As long as they conduct themselves like white people, everyone would admire them and respect them. When they conduct themselves like human beings – they'll be all right. That's the key, human beings.

- Allan McAllister, Collingwood President on Channel 9's Wide World of Sports on 25 April 1995 in commenting of the action of St. Kilda Australian Football player Nicky Winmar. Reeling from a barrage of racist taunts by spectators at Collingwood's Victoria Park ground, Winmar reacted by raising his guernsey and pointing to his black skin. The gesture was influential in the debate about racism in sport in Australia.

The universal philosophy of sport is that both competition and opportunities must be fair and equal for all. This hasn't applied to indigenous Australians—and still doesn't. Although sport has been the passport to respect for a few, the odds have been monumental. Genuine racial equality in Australian sport remains disturbingly out of reach.

It's a shame Australia has got this tall poppy syndrome. They don't like to see people excel or succeed, they like to see them oppressed, especially an Aboriginal outspoken man.

- Boxer Anthony Mundine (2001). There were reports that crowds in pubs and clubs in Australia cheered when he was knocked out by Germany 's Sven Ottke in a World IBF Title Fight.

On behalf of indigenous people around Australia, I would like to congratulate Anthony Mundine for his brilliant and inspirational performance last night which made him the first Aboriginal world boxing champion since Lionel Rose.

- Comment by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission acting chairman Lionel Quartermaine. In early September 2003 Anthony (‘The Man') Mundine outclassed American Antwun Echols to claim the vacant World Boxing Association super-middleweight world title. Mundine was proceeded into the ring by an Aboriginal flag and a group of Aboriginals in traditional dress. Mundine's victory helped to win over a great many people previously critical of him. “I can be as cocky as I like now ‘cos I'm going down in Australian folklore,” remarked Mundine.

- Aboriginal boxer Lionel Rose's homecoming as world bantamweight champion in 1968 attracted large crowds and showed his acceptance as a ‘special' person. Rose was to say, “If people are prejudiced I would rather see them say so openly. Let them call a spade a spade. There is nothing worse than someone patting you on the back because you are world champion, while you know quite well if you weren't they would be calling you a ‘black b –– ‘and have nothing to do with you.'”

- Queensland Aboriginal cricketer, Albert Henry, after being ‘no-balled' by Umpire Cossart in a club cricket match in Brisbane in 1904. The suggestion is that Henry was no-balled because he was an Aboriginal.

- Two time Wimbledon tennis champion Evonne Goolagong (Cawley). Critics accused Evonne of going ‘walkabout' and losing games. After many years in the United States Evonne returned to Australia in the 1990s and ‘re-discovered' her Aboriginal identity. She said, “I am very proud of what I've been able to achieve. I'm proud for myself, my people and for all Australians."

- Apparent remark by Don Bradman to Alec Marks on the bowling speed of Aboriginal cricketer Eddie Gilbert in the 1930s. In December, 1931 in Brisbane Gilbert had dismissed Bradman for no score.

- Louts would attack a down and out Aboriginal boxing legend Ron Richards after he ended his career in the 1940s. Peter Corris later wrote, “His hardest battle was for a full, dignified, human status within a prejudiced community.”

The noise was deafening, maybe the longest standing ovation in sports history, from the moment she stepped out for the race until the moment she disappeared afterward. But the only words she heard, she said, were her own.

The memory of the war-cry provokes anger in me even after all these years … Now we were being asked to remind British people of the miserable remnants of a race which they had dispossessed and we had maltreated or neglected. We were officially supposed to leap up in the air and make foolish gestures which somebody thought native Australians might have used in similar circumstances …

In the context of Australian sport itself the systematic nature of racism merely reflects the inequalities existing in Australian society as a whole. Claims that sport operates as a mechanism for the advancement and integration of all members of society, especially those groups who stand outside the mainstream, are largely unfounded.

The treatment of Aboriginal Australians by white Australians is generally little different to the treatment of the colonised by the colonisers anywhere in the world. Within sport, however, the picture is often held to be different, with sport being seen as providing a unique vehicle for upward social mobility for Aboriginal people. Once again sport is advanced as the great social leveller, transcending barriers of race and providing opportunities for success for all those who are prepared to make an effort.

- Libby Darlison, Australian Sports Commission review of equality in sport (1985). She also suggested that “In a society which is serious about creating equality of opportunity for its members, the plight of Aboriginal people demands immediate action.”

Her stupendous running was to herald a new era of race relations in Australia and journalists and commentators predicted reconciliation would be pushed back strongly along to end the historical antagonisms between black and white. So naive are many Australians about deep structural social conflict, and so hysterical are they about sport, that they seize on ephemeral sporting victories as a substitute for very difficult national policy formulation.

- Ex-patriot United States of America academic David Mosler in Australia, the Recreational Society (2002) in a comment about 2000 Sydney Olympics win of Cathy Freeman, the Aboriginal Australian 400 metre runner.

Everybody needs exercise, but if you're disabled you need it more. Sport enables you to set goals. There's great motivation value. The competition and camaradrie is addictive.

The greatest misconception is people who reckon it's for rehabilitation, but after you've done it for a year, you take it seriously. All you want to do is win or set a personal best.

- Karni Liddell, Paralympic swimmer (2002).

I'm training seven days a week, spending thousands of dollars a year. I'm not doing it because it's fun – I'm doing it because I want to win a bloody medal.

- Nick Morris, Australian Paralympic basketballer (1996).

Anyone who gets to the Paralympic Games as a competitor can lay claim to the title of champion before even one event is held – because each competitor represents a triumph over adversity. If the Paralympics have already shown that they have exceptional qualities of character simply by getting there. They have refused to allow their spirits to be crushed by disabilities that might appear to others to be insurmountable obstacles to sporting achievements. When they take to the various arenas at the Paralympics, they will display sporting abilities developed in the face of daunting handicaps. They deserve to be applauded for their abilities, instead of the focus being on their disabilities. And they should be valued for the inspiration they can provide for everyone who has ever been tempted to give in to life's difficulties.