Marjorie Jackson is about my mother's age and the people in photos of Marjorie when she was younger look like the people in my mother's photos. The photos are in black and white and a lot of them are taken at beaches and other places where young people met, looking good, possibly for mating purposes. A noticeable feature of these photos is that there's nobody obese or overweight in any of them.
In June of last year I met Marjorie at her daughter's house, where we'd arranged to discuss her remarkable sporting career for a documentary.
Marjorie was about to turn 80 and looked very fit. She was courteous, quick and lively, and her memory was excellent. In later years she was the Governor of South Australia and she served in many national and international roles, but it was in talking about the world she grew up in, that she located the values she has lived by all her life.
Her story is a famous one. She came from Lithgow and was the first Australian woman to win an Olympic gold medal on the track. When she was a schoolgirl champion, her father had got a local man, Mr Monaghan, to coach her. Mr Monaghan had been a runner and they trained in the evenings after they'd both finished work. When it got dark Mr Monaghan would park his car at the end of the track with the headlights on and sometimes, when it was foggy, Marjorie wasn't sure exactly where the car was while sprinting directly towards it.
'How I didn't break a leg or something I'll never know.'
Marjorie's father sent away for a pair of running shoes. They cost five guineas and were so precious he built her a pair of protective rubber soles into which she could sit the spikes, so she didn't damage them while walking around. A couple of times when we were talking about her childhood and these teenage years she looked away and shook her head slightly. 'We were so poor' she said. 'We really did have nothing.'
The big star of the 1948 London Olympics was the Dutch sprinter, Fanny Blankers-Koen, who won four gold medals. In 1949 Fanny came to Australia to run in some exhibition races against local opposition. Marjorie was seventeen and she travelled down to Sydney to compete in the first of the three races. To Fanny's very great surprise, Marjorie won the first race in a time that would have won her the gold medal in London.
When she arrived at the track for the second race, Marjorie was told she wasn't allowed to run. When her coach found out about this he insisted that she go back and run, so she returned to the start-line. At this point Fanny withdrew from the event. In the third and final race, Marjorie got away well and although she felt the Olympic champion on her shoulder at about the 60 metre mark, she won again without much trouble. Fanny said there'd been a pothole in the track but the journalists who went out and searched the track reported that they couldn't find one. After the race Marjorie realised she'd forgotten to remove the protective rubber soles from under her shoes. She'd been running without spikes.
Marjorie was getting pretty famous by this stage and when they heard that the Olympic Athletics track in Helsinki would be made of cinders, the people of Lithgow took up a collection and put in one lane of cinders at the local grass oval, for her to train on. When she went down to Sydney to compete in the NSW championships where she hoped to qualify for the Olympics, the car she was travelling in was hit by a truck and rolled over and Marjorie was taken to hospital. The women's sprint events at the NSW Championships were postponed that year because the other women refused to run until Marjorie was well enough to complete. Marjorie's voice went a bit soft when she was describing this, which she said was one of the greatest things that happened to her in sport.
The 1952 Australian Olympics team flew to Helsinki in a plane. The trip took a week. The first stop was in Darwin. After a couple of days team management said 'Get up and move around. Go for a walk. Change seats. Introduce yourselves to each other. You'll be sitting down for a while.' Marjorie found herself sitting next to a cyclist from South Australia. They got on very well and by the time they got to London, he'd asked her to marry him. 'I only knew his name' she smiled. 'Didn't know anything else about him. I thought, fancy waking up with this gorgeous hunk.' Team management were appalled and counseled caution but Peter Nelson and Marjorie Jackson were a match for life.
Marjorie won both the 100 metres and 200 metres in Helsinki, broke world records in both of them and set a new standard for Australian track athletes.
I'd watched both these races on YouTube and observed that she'd won them by a good margin.
'Really?' She said.
At this point our sound operator got his phone out and found the 1952 Helsinki Olympics Women's 100 metres final on YouTube. 'Here we go' he said.
An enduring memory of this wonderful day is watching a small group including Marjorie and her daughter, crowded around watching this great race on a very small screen. 'Oh yes', conceded Marjorie after the race had finished. 'I did win quite well.'
After we left, Marjorie asked her daughter if the 200 metres final would be on YouTube. It is, and they found it on the computer and watched it together. Marjorie won it by miles. She turned to her daughter Sandy and said 'Do you know why I ran so fast in Helsinki?'
'No Mum' said Sandy. 'Why did you?'
'Because I'd just met your father. And I knew he was there, in the crowd'.
When she returned to Australia, the aircraft flew low over Lithgow on its way to Sydney and when it banked Marjorie could see the people of the town lining the streets to greet her. She would not be there for many hours. The honour of making these people so proud was a considerable reward for Marjorie.
Also in Lithgow that day were her parents, of whom she spoke with admiration and gratitude. She misses them still. She wishes they'd lived to see more of the lives of their children.
Marjorie's mother never saw her run.