Mr John Clarke

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.

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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.

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We had a fantastic response to our last quiz and we thank everyone who entered. The winner was A. Scotvale of Ascot Vale. Congratulations and well done.

1. True. The term 'Pup Marriage Shock' indicates that the wedding of the Australian cricket captain was a matter for the parties involved.

2. False. Wayne Swan's budget is not a palindrome. A palindrome reads the same backwards as it does forwards. Mr Swan's budget was written with the main point, the surplus, at the end, and then worked its way back to the beginning of the document, concluding with 'Good evening.' The budget is a model of its kind.

3. True. Bill Heffernan is an elected member of the Australian parliament.

4. False. There is no relationship between the Embattled Health Services Union, Embattled Speaker Peter Slipper, Embattled Wicket-keeper Brad Haddin, Embattled Media Supremo Rupert Murdoch, the Embattled Demons and Embattled Quality Journalism.

5. True. The Victorian budget is expected to be released from hospital on Thursday.

6. False. Bob Carr is not famous for being on 'The Voice'. He is the Australian Minister for Resonance.

7. True. Bill Shorten's twitter bio says 'Statements not yet made by the Prime Minister are entirely my own views'.

8. Jeff Brumby. Following a ten-year education programme teaching the community to use less water, he lifted water restrictions. Jeff Baillieu has carried on this valuable work.

9. True. If there had been a federal election last weekend, Channel 7's live coverage of AFL matches would have lost its seat.

10. True. The term 'First Lady' is used in international matters of state to denote a WAG. This is not discriminatory as it includes all women regardless of colour, race or creed.

11. False. The picture shows Peter Costello, a retired member of parliament. A sulky is a two-wheeled cart, often drawn by a horse.

12. True. Someone attempting to discredit prostitutes has attempted to link them with Craig Thomson by alleging that his credit card was used to purchase sex. Even Mr Thomson has now admitted that no such sex took place.

13. False. Angela Merkel is not planning to replace the Euro with the Michaelkroger. 'We're in enough trouble already' said a spokesman.

14. True. Campbell Newman has cancelled the Queensland Premier's Literarian Rewards or whatever the hell they are.

15. False. Julie Bishop is not leaving politics to become a Wiggle.

16. False. Rebekah Brookes and David Cameron are not in The Wiggles either. Wriggles has an R in it.

17. True. AFL team songs, as performed by winning sides in the dressing room afterwards, have no actual notes.

18. The picture shows the Greek economy (actual size). The eBay auction finishes on Thursday.

19. False. The fact that 'Britain's Got Talent' was won by a small dog does not indicate that dogs are more talented than people. Britain is going through a difficult patch at the moment.

20. True. Tony Abbott has announced a plan to increase the teaching of languages other than English. Martin Ferguson and Barnaby Joyce are both believed to have cancelled all their other appointments.

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We had a fantastic response to the Easter quiz and we thank everyone who entered. The winner was Donna Buang, of Donna Buang. A fine effort Donna. Well done. For the record, the answers were as follows:

1. False. Anna Meares has never been the Premier of Queensland. If ever they turn it into a sprint event, however, stand well back.

2. True. The picture shows Bogman, who was trapped in a bog in northern Europe for over a thousand years. Craig Thompson just doesn’t get out much at the moment.

3. False. It is not illegal in Victoria to generate electricity using solar technology. The burning of fossil fuels is simply considered by the government to be better for the environment.

4. False. The Australian open water swimming champs are not held annually during the Oxford Cambridge boat race. There was a clash of dates this year but organizers are confident they can sort it out.

5. True. This has already been leaked so there can be no harm in announcing it. The 2012 Brownlow Medal has been won by Hamish Blake.

6. False. They did not elect a new Pope in Altona on Tuesday. A chemical store went up. The fire was attended by two appliances and has been contained.

7. The picture shows an avocado, a pumpkin, a sherrin and Paul Howes (right)

8. True. There is a dispute going on in the football pages although technically The Malthouse Theatre is a building in Sturt Street.

9. False. The government has never left The Grand Prix out on the nature strip over a long weekend in the hope that someone might take it. This wouldn’t work anyway. People aren’t idiots.

10. False. The U S Masters is not a baby contest. Bubba Watson is not actually an infant. He is a drate big man.

11. This was a trick question. It was a debate in the sense that Richard Dawkins was debating George Pell but not in the sense that George Pell was debating Richard Dawkins.

12. True. Barnaby Joyce is looking for a lower house seat, the better to expound his vision for Australia.

13. False. The photograph shows Campbell Newman. Alfred E Newman is a cartoon character.

14. True. The government has managed to secure the Logies for Victoria, for 5 years. There will be 5 live broadcasts and, as with this year’s, each will last a year.

15. False. At no stage has the Collingwood Football Club ever come into contact with an iceberg while crossing the Atlantic.

16. True. The Victorian government has commissioned a secret report on where it has put its anti-corruption inquiry.

17. True. Clive Palmer’s company performed very poorly last year, declaring a loss and paying no tax whatever. Somehow Clive managed to retain his role as manager.

18. The embattled Health Services Union is not the EHSU. It is the embattled HSU.

19. True. Robert Doyle is standing for a second term as Lord Mayor of Melbourne. Let joy be unconfined.

20. True. The federal government has a majority of one and is united by a lack of confidence in either of its leaders. The opposition also has two leaders and similarly one of them deposed the other. All share, as their first and abiding priority, a burning desire to serve you.

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