The Story of Danny Dunn (75 page)

Tony Blackmore stood, unmoving, a short distance away, holding Danny's shoes, and when Danny eventually approached him, he handed them over without a word. For the most part they were silent as they returned to the group, but just before they arrived, Danny turned and offered the military attaché his hand. ‘Thanks, mate, I truly appreciate what you've done for me,' he said quietly.

‘For my family too, Danny; for my brother Jack,' Tony replied.

It was not until New Year's Eve, when Helen and Danny once again sat on the upstairs verandah cracking the traditional bottle of Bollinger, that he told Helen the story of the final hours of the life of the one-time Colonel Mori. He couldn't bring himself to tell her the first part of what he'd said to the dying monk – they were words from the camp, and later he'd regretted using them. He simply told her that he had whispered to the dying man, ‘We are bound together for all time, Mori. May my spirit, and the spirits of those you harmed, haunt you for eternity!' But in retrospect, even this gave him no sense of triumph or of a mission accomplished.

Nevertheless, Helen was appalled and said so. ‘Danny, I don't know whether I believe in God, least of all a forgiving and merciful one, but I do believe in the human spirit, and you have sullied yours by saying what you said to Mori, and you immediately became a lesser man for it.' It was the closest he'd ever heard Helen come to making a moral judgment that left no room for appeal.

‘Yes,' Danny said quietly. ‘Yes, I know.'

1966 was the year of the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica. While Dawn Fraser, still at the height of her swimming career, would have been expected to return from Jamaica with four gold medals, a sanctimonious Amateur Swimming Union of Australia, flexing its muscles about the flag incident at the Tokyo Olympics, had banned her from competitive swimming for ten years, effectively terminating her career.

All of Balmain and most of sporting Australia were immediately up in arms, and Danny, as both a lawyer and the Independent member for the area, went in to bat for her reinstatement. He was to learn a salutary lesson: that dealing with fanatical amateurs who hold to what they believe is the moral high ground is not the same thing as working with professional and fair-minded people looking for a just and equitable solution to a problem.

As a lawyer, he could present a case that, if strong enough, could be expected to earn a not-guilty verdict or be dismissed. Similarly, in parliament, both sides were able to question and debate issues, and although deals were made from time to time, if they were clandestine or overtly unfair, the deal-makers risked exposure by the Opposition or the media.

His efforts to have the Balmain harbour-front rezoned as residential land was a case in point. Well argued on the floor of the house as beneficial not only to the immediate community but also to the city of Sydney and to the state, it met with the approval of all who had no special agenda. Most saw it as long overdue, a correction to blatant Labor Government corruption and inertia. However, none of these rules or traditions applied to the Amateur Swimming Union or the bodies controlling Australia's entrants in the Commonwealth Games or the Olympics.

Danny was more than a little surprised to discover a bias within the Swimming Union against so-called lower- or working-class swimmers, not dissimilar to the nonsense spouted by Hitler about racial purity that was supposedly supported by the ‘science' of eugenics. Hitler had hoped to demonstrate the superiority of the German people at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, but despite Jesse Owens proving him disastrously wrong, he and the Nazis went on to murder six million Jews, Gypsies and other people they considered inferior.

The Swimming Union, using a high-minded and fanatically policed code of amateurism, tried to restrict the number of working-class Australian swimmers representing their country. In fairness, this concept originated from the International Olympic Committee, whose chief, Avery Brundage, was a notorious bully and Nazi sympathiser. Here in Australia, money was the weapon employed by the ranks of swimming officialdom to keep the sport socially pure and effectively only available to those with parents who could afford to sponsor their children's training and travel expenses. As the state or federal government made no contribution to the development of Australian athletes, this effectively kept the hoi polloi out of contention.

Danny's sense of fair play was immediately aroused. Dawn had been involved in the flag-stealing incident with a number of other Australian Olympians and hadn't instigated the prank herself, but despite that, she was the only participant to be punished with a career-ending sentence. This was especially galling because Dawn Fraser, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks, had the potential to become the greatest swimmer and possibly the greatest athlete in Australian history.

There had always been only one way for an impecunious swimmer to compete, and this was by accepting a life of severe financial hardship and hard work. Dawn had been permitted to compete in the first place because she had undergone this test and proved the depth of her character and her determination to compete, but now she had been deemed fundamentally unsound and disqualified from international competition. The sentiment in coaching circles was that the only one ever to beat Dawn Fraser was the Amateur Swimming Union of Australia.

Danny had tried everything in his power to have this decision reversed, including applying pressure from the state government and finally the media, but the Swimming Union proved to be a law unto themselves. This despotic and recalcitrant attitude of the swimming body, taking its cue from the all-powerful Avery Brundage, became known in swimming circles as ‘Brundage's Bondage' and proved too strong for anyone to undo.

The word ‘amateur' meant ‘self-supporting', but without any sponsorship at all. As an example, if a local hairdressing salon gave a swimmer from a poor working-class family the money for a rail ticket to compete at a swimming meet, the swimmer was disqualified from ever competing for Australia. Money was seen as tarnishing the noble image of Olympic sport, and, it seemed, the image of the British Empire and Commonwealth Games.

Despite being warned at the outset that he would be punished for interfering, Danny had gone ahead on behalf of Balmain's beloved Dawnie. He could see little difference between this and the case of Paul Jones, the little Welshman who had been denied a military medal because there had been no officer present to attest to his quiet heroism. Danny had fought his entire life for a just system and he wasn't going to be easily scared off.

When the swimmers were selected to compete in Jamaica, Sam's name was not included on the list. In fairness, her times were not as good as they had been, but she was still consistently recording the fastest 100- and 200-metre times among Australian female swimmers.

This drop in her performance was a mystery to her coach but was put down to several bouts of bursitis and other injuries collectively known as ‘swimmer's shoulder', and blamed on overtraining.

Sam, despite the occasional nagging injuries, the distances swum and the long hours, loved the training routine and the camaraderie of the other swimmers. She happily sacrificed the social life that Gabby was just beginning to lead – going out several times a week to perform at folk clubs with her guitar, or in the youth orchestra with her beloved violin. Having been put up a grade, both girls mixed with friends at least a year older than they were, and, like their classmates, they were now preparing for their Higher School Certificate the following year – a new final-year exam that would be introduced in 1967. It was a big load for both girls, neither of whom had yet turned fifteen, but they seemed to relish it.

Gabby had appeared several times on Brian Henderson's
Bandstand
on Channel Nine, singing folk songs from America, Britain, and occasionally Australia, and was frequently recognised and stopped by young people in the street. On one occasion on a Saturday morning she had been almost mobbed by the eager young crowd outside Erin Walsh's Brokendown shop. Photojournalists, present for a fashion show and prepared to capture Sam modelling the latest miniskirts, jostled to snap pictures of the popular young folk-singer twin, who was also a serious student at the Sydney Conservatorium. Gabby's talent for working the crowd, first demonstrated at primary school when she recounted the Saturday matinee movie, was standing her in good stead. She was very pretty, and modelled herself on American folk singers such as Joan Baez, whose music Dallas sent her regularly. Sam, hitherto the centre of attention, was not in the least concerned that she was being overshadowed by her musical twin. In fact, she shared in and enjoyed Gabby's success, knowing her own ambitions lay elsewhere.

Sam had lots of boy swimmers to amuse her, and she'd been grabbed and kissed and asked out by boys so often that she knew herself to be an object of desire and by far the prettiest swimmer in New South Wales. In fact, Sam was so attractive that both Danny and Helen had warned her about unwanted attention from men. Massages were routine after a training session, but in Sam's case they were always performed by Ursula Carlile out in the open. She was warned never to accept a massage from a male coach, an assistant or any other man. If she was away at a country or interstate swimming meet and Mrs Carlile couldn't be present, Sam was only to accept a massage in the open with other adults present. Sam knew from the other girls that sometimes a massage had nothing to do with curing sore muscles, and that some of them had been touched in inappropriate places by local coaches, assistants or helpers.

Sam's world consisted of pace clocks, goggles, the sharp slap of a rubber swimming cap over her ears, the constant smell of chlorine, bouts of ringworm, ear infections, sore eyes, rashes, dry skin and chlorine-induced asthma. Occasionally there would be a whack in the face or a split lip from a wooden paddle caused by a careless turn as one of the male swimmers in the next lane worked on his strength training. But through it all there was the constant urging and repeated reprimands of a fanatical father.

Rising at 4.30 a.m., Sam and Danny would head out in the dark for the Drummoyne pool, where she would swim four and a half miles in two hours. Australia had shifted to decimal currency in February, and metrification would follow in a few years, but for now Sam and Danny still used inches, feet, yards and miles. The distances were set at 200, 400 and 800 yards. In the afternoons Sam swam for another two hours, covering about three miles, mainly short distance stuff, such as fifty or a hundred yards.

Ever since Danny's entry into state parliament, she had been coached by Forbes and Ursula Carlile, as well as by assistant coach Tom Green when the Carliles were in Europe coaching the Dutch team. Karen Moras, three years younger than Sam and a working-class girl like Dawn Fraser, was another of the Carliles' ‘Golden Fish', the term used for swimmers who had the potential, in the eyes of their coaches, to achieve gold either in the British Empire and Commonwealth Games or the Olympic Games. Sam was an obvious choice for selection to go to Jamaica.

The media put two and two together and started to cry foul at Sam not being chosen. The Swimming Union denied any wrongdoing, giving Sam's slower times as the reason she was passed over. The media retaliated by saying that no swimmer in Britain or the Commonwealth had achieved her performance times in the pool in the past year, but the swimming officials simply stonewalled, refusing to discuss their decision.

Sam was devastated. The week before the team was announced she'd reached parity with her previous times in the trials for selection for Jamaica, and an ebullient Forbes Carlile said he believed she was at the point of moving beyond them. In an interview before the team was announced, Carlile claimed his ‘Golden Fish' was ready to take on the swimmers from Britain and the Commonwealth, and considered the Jamaica Games as the unofficial Australian trials for the Olympics in Mexico City in 1968.

But it was all to no avail: Danny was being punished for daring to challenge their decision to ban Dawnie, the working-class girl who threatened to be the greatest of all Australian swimmers. Poor Sam was caught between a rock and a hard place. Her loyalty to her father and the devastation she felt at the decision kept her in a constant state of turmoil. While, of course, she'd always denied it, she had been secretly confident that she would go to Jamaica – her times justified it and her consistent performances showed that, aside from unforeseen circumstances, she was a certainty for a gold in the 100- and 200-metres as well as a medal, if not a gold, as a member of the women's 4 × 100-metres medley. Sam wasn't vain or puffed up; she simply knew she was the best in her category and therefore expected to succeed. But there wasn't a swimmer or a coach in Australia who was under any illusions about why Danny's daughter was overlooked by the selectors – his attempts to have Dawn Fraser reinstated had been all over the media.

If Sam hadn't already known why she had been singled out for punishment, she soon did once she heard people refer to her as the ‘second Balmain victim'. She couldn't bear to be seen at training or in public, where her fellow swimmers would pity her or people would expostulate or sympathise with her over her victimisation. For the first week she refused to go to training, and going to school was agony. Danny had promised her that he would not rest until the Swimming Union members changed their minds, but when Sam woke one morning to find that Danny had left for work so early that she'd missed him, she knew at once why.