In mid July last year I met the Olympic swimmer Murray Rose at the North Bondi Surf Club. Our small film crew was setting up to record an interview with him for a documentary about the importance of sport in Australia. Meeting at North Bondi was Murray's idea. He loved the place.
He remembered being a small boy, arrived from England and living near the Sydney beaches. One day he was playing on the shoreline when his small toy yacht drifted beyond his reach and began to bob further and further out to sea. A man in a rowboat saw this happening and rowed over to the little yacht, picked it up, brought it back in and handed it to the boy. 'Here you are son' he said. 'Can't you swim?' 'No' said Murray. It was at this point he decided to learn.
July 15th 2011 was a dirty day in Sydney, wild and squally. Rain drummed on the surf club windows and lanyards beat on flagpoles. When Murray arrived he showed me around the upstairs room where they keep the photographs of surf lifesavers going back 50 or 60 years. Murray knew who they all were and remembered what they'd done. Murray was one of the greatest swimmers in history but he wasn't just a pool swimmer. He loved the sea and these were his people.
I'd spoken to Murray a couple of times on the phone and we'd discussed what we might talk about in the interview. His areas of expertise ranged across the history of Australian swimming, the Olympic movement and its ideals, drugs, suits and technology, broadcasting, literature, other swimmers, coaching, psychology, the feeling of being in the water, strategy, bodysurfing, philosophy and self-reliance. His voice was soft, with a slight accent from his years in America. He saw the universal and the particular as Astaire and Rogers. His memories were well formed, his manner was relaxed and easy and his point was always clear. He knew what he thought and he wanted to get it right.
When he worked out that I came from Palmerston North, Murray recalled swimming there, at the Municipal Baths, in the late 1950s (I was there, with some other local squirts watching these tall, blond, actual Greek gods swimming in our pool). He explained how, in the relay they'd rustled up an Australian team by instructing the team manager to go and change and swim the first leg. (They won by so much it wouldn't have mattered if the manager had swum in a full dress tartan. We were so impressed we ate a lot of ice-cream).
Murray's favourite event was the 400 metres freestyle, which he won in Melbourne and again in Rome. It was tough and required sprinting speed but was long enough to be a tactical race, which he liked. His early hero was John Marshall, who broke 28 world records and was killed in a car accident in his 20s. Murray said he tried to swim like John Marshall until one day his coach asked him what he was doing. 'I'm swimming like John Marshall' said Murray. 'No you're not' said his coach. 'You'll never swim like John Marshall because he's unique. But so are you and if you swim your own stroke, one day you'll swim faster than John Marshall.' Be yourself. Know yourself.
Murray's father had grown up with rheumatic fever and had to be careful with his health. He found a vegetarian diet at one stage and started eating cereal and vegetables. Murray went along with this and quickly developed a reputation for having a very weird diet, which in some versions of the story consisted largely of kelp. By this stage Murray was a competitive swimmer and he let the story circulate because it helped other swimmers create a reason he might beat them.
Swimming has changed a lot. In 1956 there were no goggles and no tumble turns. Murray and Dawn Fraser shared the distinction of having their Olympic careers cut short by buffoons in admin. They both kept swimming of course and at the age of about 40, Murray started doing tumble turns and his times started coming down. He was swimming faster than he had in Rome. At 72 he swam the Hellespont and he wanted to do it again. When we met, he'd been reading Byron, a previous titleholder in the event. Murray still swam most days, often in the sea, at Bondi.
One of the significant examples of the value of the Olympic movement at its best is the story of Murray and the Japanese swimmer Tsuyoshi Yamanaka.
Here is Murray:
‘When I was growing up, when I was three or four, I was part of a propaganda campaign for the
Australian war effort. And the headline was something like 'Will the Japs Come Here With Their Big
Ships, Daddy?’ And it was a fairly intense campaign. Fast forward a few years and I’m swimming at the Olympic Games and my main rival and competitor is Tsuyoshi Yamanaka and we happened to
meet each other in every heat and every final. And by the time we got to the last swim we’d developed a pretty healthy respect and friendship. The last individual event at the Olympics in 1956 was the 1500. And then after we’d finished we embraced across the lane line and a photograph of that moment was taken and was picked up by newspapers all over the world. For one main reason. The date was the 7th December 1956; the 15th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. So it became symbolic of two kids who’d grown up on opposite sides of the war, had come together in the friendship of the Olympic arena.
Here are two more extracts from near the end of our conversation:
‘I’m still learning about swimming technique. Every time I go in the water I’m conscious of my
technique and I’m looking at new ways of relating to the water, and learning, as the elite
swimmers and elite coaches are today. They are still learning. We’re not done with this. You never
become a master, until you’re able to go out there on Bondi and watch and be a dolphin, which
we do sometimes.’‘We had an experience one day last year; there was a fairly big surf coming in and the sun was
shining, the wind was coming off shore and we were looking for waves. And then a rogue set
came up from the back, so we swam pretty hard to make sure we got over it. And half way up the
face of the first wave I knew that I was going to make it. So I just relaxed and streamlined, and the
power of the wave just shot me almost up to my ankles out of the water because it was a fairly
big wave. And the spray was being blown by the wind and it caught the sun and I was literally
flying in a rainbow.’
Murray Rose. 1939-2012.