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Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer walk out onto the ground - AAP Image/Jenny Evans
For many years, the first line that French school-children were to taught to recite at school was: “Our ancestors, the Gauls…” Children were taught that they, the modern French, were descended directly from the Gauls.
It was a splendid notion in every respect apart from one: it wasn’t really true. In fact, the Franks, a Germanic tribe, had much more influence on the formation of modern France than the Gauls. “Our ancestors, the Gauls…” was merely an invention of 19th century romanticism.
Now, every nation has its myths. Some are dangerous; some merely curious.
In the case of Australian sport, we have one of the best of the type – the myth of Australianism. Deep in the soul of every red-blooded Australian male lurks the belief that Australia’s splendid recent sporting record is testament to the unique virtues of his compatriots: mateship, resilience, and have-a-go bravado.
The bronzed Aussie warrior wins because he is tough and plays hard and sticks by his mates – and then, like any true Australian, he proves he is not only hard but also fair by going for a beer with his beaten foe after the game.
Now, one hates to be the shatterer of cherished myths, but I’m afraid these sentiments are the purest piffle. They might well satisfy the romantics amongst you, but they ought not for one moment to satisfy those of you possessed of more rigorous and inquiring minds.
The French eventually changed their text-books, and it is high time that Australians ditched their own sporting romanticism.
Let me elucidate.
Australia used to be rather rubbish at sport. Sure, you held your own in sports that were not widely played at the time, such as tennis and cricket. But this was vastly out-weighed by a litany of humiliations on the world stage: not a single gold medal at Montreal ’76; the Wallabies a complete irrelevance for much of their history; Kim Hughes bursting into tears in the 1980s; Craig Johnston preferring England ‘B’ to the Socceroos. Painful times.
But then a funny thing happened – suddenly Australia became rather good at sport. In fact, let’s be perfectly candid: you became very, very good indeed. Visiting Pommie cricketers were eaten up and spat out in the Tasman Sea, broken men. South African cricketers took refuge on the psychiatrist’s couch.
Athletes clad in green and gold stormed successive Olympics, easily beating much bigger and more powerful countries on the medal table.
For much of the 1990s, even the hitherto powderpuff Wallabies dished it out to the fearsome men in black. By 2000, and the Sydney Olympics, Australian athletes prowled the globe like Trojan warriors. In John Eales and Ian Thorpe and Steve Waugh, we had super men fit to give Hector himself a run for his money.
What on earth happened?
Had Australian sporting teams somehow rediscovered the virtues of mateship, resilience, and fierce will to win? Was there a collective Great Awakening of the dormant Aussie soul? Were the no-hopers of the 70s and 80s somehow un-Australian?
I think not. I think the real reasons are rather more prosaic. In truth, it’s perfectly easy to divine the root cause of Australia’s sporting transformation: you started to take sport awfully, awfully seriously. Indeed, Aussie sport became the Antipodean equivalent of the NASA space programme.
A vast, well-funded Institute of Sport was formed. This hothouse of sporting excellence took in promising young talents and, through the rigorous application of the latest sports science, turned them into lean, mean fighting machines. It churned out men like Justin Langer and Adam Gilchrist, sporting robots who combined superb technical proficiency in their chosen field with admirable levels of resilience and fortitude.
These sporting graduates at times came to resemble cult members – they would indulge in bizarre rituals such as the kissing of helmets on reaching a century, or the ostentatious refusal to wash their sweat-stained caps; one graduate, Mr Gilchrist, was so well programmed that even 20 years later, he was still proudly preaching the virtues of “Australianism”.
It was nothing less than a sporting revolution. Australia did to sport in the 1980s what England had done to industry in the 1780s. And the Australian public, like the Greeks after the sacking of Troy, lapped it up.
Soon it became possible for otherwise rational and intelligent human beings to ascribe the sporting success of their nation to “Australianism” – every medal, every trophy, every urn was seen to be yet another validation of Australia and its values. A collective madness set in.
By 2004, an exhausted rower was being denounced as “un-Australian” for collapsing during her race. By 2010, the head of the Australian IOC, was denouncing as “un-Australian” any suggestion that sporting funds be cut. And in the same year, Lucas Neill, the doughty captain of the Socceroos, was accused of being “un-Australian” when he dared to assert that – horror! – the three-times world cup winners Germany perhaps boasted better footballers than Australia.
Hubris had indeed set in – and after hubris, as any schoolboy knows, comes nemesis.
For the thing about revolutions is that they tend to be imitated. No sooner had England industrialised in the 1780s than half of Europe was in on the act. Men imitate what works for other men. Australia’s sports programme worked, and so the rest of the world, not least the English, set to work copying it.
Australian swimming coaches were imported lock, stock and barrel. Cricket coaches, likewise. Vast new laboratories of sport were built in the English shires to mould a new generation of sporting robots – these fellows possessed of pastier skin, but equally monomaniacal in their desire to win at games. The French, the Germans and even the Spanish followed suit.
For what the Australians took to be Australianism was in fact simply professionalism – and professionalism knows no national boundaries.
And remarkably enough, these nations found that chucking money at sport and taking it awfully seriously – in other words, professionalism – began to pay dividends on the field. By 2003, the English had won a rugby world cup.
By 2005, the Ashes were back in English hands. By 2008, Great Britain was dishing the Aussies at the Beijing Olympics and The Sun newspaper was driving a billboard van around Sydney emblazoned with the words “Is That All You’ve Got?” (Yes, truly, Orwell was right to say that sport was “war minus the shooting” – just rather more absurd) And by 2010, English golfers were flooding the upper echelons of the world game.
But all this paled in comparison to the Spanish, whose superb sporting academies had produced a breed of super athletes who made Australia’s earlier heroes look positively feeble.
World and European soccer champions; F1 champions; tennis champions; golfing champions: in 2010, it can justly be said that Spain is the sporting capital of the world.
Now, this newfound success has been too novel to have quite gone to English or Spanish heads just yet. Few Spaniards are yet proclaiming the superiority of “Spanishism”. It takes a while for popular sentiment to catch up with the facts on the ground. Likewise, and conversely, Australia’s recent sporting trough has been too novel to have quite dampened the Aussie enthusiasm for their self-flattering mythology.
Like Germans after the siege of Stalingrad, Australians wander through a fog of doubt, their intellects telling them that perpetual sporting dominance is no longer possible, but their hearts not quite believing it. Some Roarers, indeed, still hold by the Aussie Superman theory like it’s 1999.
So what does the future hold for Australianism?
Will it vanish, or will the Aussies sell it off to the English or Spanish?
Could it be that, in 2012, when Great Britain will almost certainly finish third or fourth on the Olympics medal table; when England might well have knocked the Australians out of the rugby world cup for the third time in succession; and when England might have won three of the last four Ashes series – could it be that the Fleet Street tabloids will ascribe their nation’s success not to money, organisation and rigorous planning – boring old professionalism – but rather to the cardinal English virtues of “the stiff upper lip, bulldog mentality and Blitz spirit”?
To, dare I say it, “Englishism”?
Funnier things have happened. After all, national self-flattery is by no means a solely Australian phenomenon.
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