Australia's Olympic effect
Invited to compose a programme note for the opening ceremony of his hometown Olympics, Clive James served up an absolute beauty: "Mount Olympus, meet Sydney harbour: you belong together."
Other than Greece itself, Australia claims to be the only country to have attended every modern summer Games, an assertion contested fiercely by Great Britain that presumably has fuelled the boast.
No other event, forum or theatre, whether military, diplomatic, commercial, cultural or sporting, has presented such an opportunity for the country to assert itself so unambiguously in terms of its own choosing.
In a sparsely populated and occasionally neglected country, with a sometimes fragile sense of self-esteem, few aspects of national life have delivered more uncomplicated joy than the sight every four years of a group of athletes heading abroad and returning with a haul of gold, silver and bronze - international sport's highest currency of success.
Yet for all this green and gold pride, the story of Australia's hosting of two Olympiads has left only a faint trace in Australia's history books. In a curious contravention of the per capita principle, a large national story has been reduced to something rather small.
With Sydney this week celebrating the 10th anniversary of the 2000 games, perhaps it is worth another look.
In Sydney, like Melbourne in 1956, Australia was confronted with a national test, and was racked with self-doubt that it would suffer stage-fright before a watching world. The 2000 games were preceded by months of knocking stories about Atlanta-style transportation stuff-ups, ticketing problems, divisions within the organising committee, SOCOG, and even cultural faux pas, such as the minting of medals which featured a Greek Goddess perched in front of a Roman colosseum ('I Still Call Australia Rome," chided one gleeful sub-editor).
On the Monday before the games, Sydney airport recorded its busiest ever day because of the stampede to leave town. Stunned by the city's nonchalance, Susan Orleans of the New Yorker reported that Australians had brought cynicism to new heights in their evident lack of enthusiasm, while a Canadian visitor observed that touching down in Sydney was a little like arriving for a party where the host was still in the bath.
Then came the mighty success of the games themselves, which was accompanied by an orgy of self-congratulation. "Take a bow Australia," trumpeted the once-sceptical Bulletin, which only a few weeks earlier had asked reproachfully, "Is Sydney Ready?"
Along with the confidence-building came the nation-building, for the 2000 games aroused and stirred the patriotic soul. Struck by the new-found prominence of flags and face-paint nationalism, the journalist Jennifer Hewett pithily observed that Australia's traditional "mute stoicism" had been replaced by an "open patriotic eagerness".
According to James Curran and Stuart Ward, the authors of an excellent new history, The Unknown Nation: Australia After Empire, Sydney suggested that Australians "had shelved their traditional suspicion of overt nationalistic behaviour by revelling in frantic flag-waving".
Then there was Sydney's fabulous opening ceremony that presented a unified history in a fun, spectacular, seamless and rancour-free way. Never before had the national story been presented with such lavish panache and so little pain.
Still more important was the social impact of the games, with both the 1956 and 2000 leaving an imprint in areas where Australian politicians were either fearful of treading, or deliberately chose not to do so. Melbourne, for instance, produced an early experiment in multiculturalism, as the city welcomed the most diverse melange of people that had ever assembled on Australian soil. Sydney arguably produced what at that time was its most intense burst of reconciliation.
It came, of course, courtesy of Cathy Freeman, whose famous "400 metres of reconciliation" was greeted with such joy across the country. At a time when the Howard government determinedly refused to apologise for past injustices, the Olympics allowed many Australians to partake in their own kind of communal reckoning.
Perhaps the simple fact that both the Melbourne and Sydney games took place during a period of extended conservative rule partly explains their punchy impact. For Olympism lent itself to national imaginings that were often beyond either Sir Robert Menzies or John Howard, even though both were ardent backers of the games. Indeed, in a country where politicians on both sides have often steered clear of "the vision thing," the planning of two mightily successful Olympiads provided it in spades.
Often, the Australian story has been a cautionary tale, but Australian Olympism offers a much more adventurous narrative. Not just gold, gold, gold - as the commentator Norman May came close to saying, as he described the 4x100 metres men's medley swimming success at the Moscow Olympics - but bold, bold, bold.
You can read about the 2012 London Olympics here
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