Thursday, August 09, 2012

Pilger: How the Chosen Ones ended Australia’s sporting prowess and revealed its secret past...

The ferries that ply the river west of Sydney Harbour bear the names of Australia’s world champion sportswomen. They include the Olympic swimming gold medallists Dawn Fraser and Shane Gould and the runners Betty Cuthbert and Marjorie Jackson. As you board, there’s a photo of the athlete in her prime, and a record of her achievements.

This is vintage Australia. Often shy and never rich, sporting heroes were nourished by a society that, long before most other countries, won victories for ordinary people: the first 35-hour working week, comprehensive child benefits and pensions, secret ballots and the vote for women. By the 1960s, Australians had the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. In modern-day corporate Australia, this is long forgotten. “We are the chosen ones,” sang a choir promoting the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

One of the ferries is named after Evonne Goolagong, the tennis star who won Wimbledon. She is Aboriginal, like Cathy Freeman, who won a gold medal in the 400 metres at Sydney. For all their talent, both fit into a carefully constructed façade, behind which Australia’s secret indigenous history is suppressed and denied.

The late Charlie Perkins, an Aboriginal leader who played First Division football in England, told me: “There’s an ambivalence that consumes many of us. I was so pleased to be back home, seeing that wonderful light, hearing the birds, seeing my mates, but I felt the racism more than ever. For one thing, no white person ever invited me home for a meal, for anything. Blacks weren’t even allowed in the grandstands, not even in the blacks-only sections.” In the 1960s, Charlie led “freedom rides” into the north-west of New South Wales, where “nigger hunts” were still not uncommon. Abused and spat at, he stood at the turnstiles of swimming pools and sports fields and demanded that the race bar be lifted. “In South Africa, at least you knew where you stood,” he said. “In Australia, you can have a friend and an enemy all in one person, especially if you’re like me, of mixed blood. Someone will call you his mate one minute, then before you know it, you feel an indifference, a coldness you can’t explain. It’s what drove my brother to kill himself.” Full story...

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