Peter Dutton’s declaration that he will not stand next to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags turns the arc of Australian history off the path it seemed to be on thirty years ago.
Then, in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph Mirror, conservative columnist Piers Akerman declared: “In the future, young Australians… will not look upon the Aboriginal flag as a symbol of divisions within our society but as a mark of the many bridges which unite Australians.”
He was writing about an incident at the Commonwealth Games in Victoria, Canada, after Australia’s Cathy Freeman won the Women’s 400 metres. Heading straight to a friend in the stands, the young woman from Mackay in Queensland collected the Aboriginal flag she had brought to Canada in her luggage and held it up, triumphant, in front of the stadium crowd and an estimated TV audience of 300 million.
Soon after, she was handed an Australian flag as well and carried both on a victory lap. “I knew there was going to be someone with an Australian flag,” she told journalists.
The action attracted wide support and Freeman did it again after she won the 200 metres. Lionel Rose, world bantamweight boxing champion in the late 1960s and the first Indigenous person chosen as Australian of the Year, called it “the greatest thing that’s ever happened” to Aboriginal people. On the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, John Huxley wrote “There can have been few more symbolic moments in Australian sport” than Freeman’s display of the Aboriginal flag, except the moment soon after when she held both flags together, adding to the original statement “the hope of reconciliation.”
Victoria, Canada, was not the end of it. In 1996, Freeman took silver in the 400 metres at the Atlanta Olympics, then in Sydney in 2000 she won gold. Watched by 110,000 spectators and a truly global TV audience, she repeated her ceremony, gathering the two flags around her shoulders as the anthem of those Games, Vanessa Amorosi’s Absolutely Everybody, danced across the crowd and the country.
Support for Cathy Freeman’s gesture with the flags in Canada was not universal. Akerman’s was built on the reassurance that she was not “an ersatz activist with an Afro hairstyle from an inner city squat with a brain stuffed full of antiquated and invalidated Marxist junk philosophy.”
Prime minister Paul Keating and the leaders of the Coalition parties, Alexander Downer and Tim Fischer, supported Freeman, but the Coalition declined to vote on Australian Democrats Senator Meg Lees’s motion “commending” her actions when it came before the parliament: they could “understand” but not “commend.” The Victorian branch president of the Returned Servicemen’s League Bruce Ruxton said “Australia has one flag only ― the Aboriginal flag means nothing to me.”
Over in Canada, the manager of the Australian team, Arthur Tunstall, was another critic. He issued a statement the day after Freeman’s 400 metres win indicating that the Australian Commonwealth Games Association acknowledged her heritage but “the Australian team is competing… under the Australian flag.” He asked athletics team manager Margaret Mahony to advise athletes not to carry flags other than Australia’s official one. She said she would not tell Freeman what flag to fly and refused to bring her to meetings with Tunstall.
The public and the media were overwhelmingly on Freeman’s side. “Cop that, Arthur!” headlined Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph when the athlete carried the Aboriginal flag in defiance of Tunstall’s directive after the 200 metres.
“Onward New Australia” declared a headline in Sydney’s Sun-Herald above a column by journalist Peter Robinson lamenting the “fussy yet obviously sincere anachronism” who was serving as Australia’s team manager: “The Australian people overwhelmingly demonstrated the tolerant and self-confident community that is emerging from the millennia of human existence on this ancient land and the 200 years or so of European settlement… A vast majority… saw quite clearly that the era of Tunstallism is over.”
The Aboriginal flag had made it into the main stadium at the Commonwealth Games twelve years earlier in very different circumstances. It was 1982, and Brisbane was the host city.
One of the emotional highlights of the Brisbane Games was always going to be the final of the Women’s 400 metres. Raelene Boyle, a veteran of three Olympics and many Commonwealth Games, was expected to run her final individual race. She had never achieved Olympic gold but won two silver medals in Munich in the 100 and 200 metres behind an East German who later admitted to illegal doping. For Brisbane, her final major games, she stepped up to the 400 metres and was one of the favourites.
A year earlier, a tour of New Zealand by the Springbok rugby team from apartheid South Africa had attracted major demonstrations. Some speculated that African and Caribbean nations would boycott Brisbane’s Games if New Zealand participated. Anticipating unrest, the Queensland parliament passed a Commonwealth Games Act creating new offences and giving the police minister new powers.
On the day of the opening ceremony, 150–300 people attempted to march from Garden City Shopping Centre to the stadium. Thirty-nine were arrested when they sat down on the road after police instructed them to disperse. The police commander for the Games called the marchers “a group of drunken, southern, black trouble-makers.”
On the Monday of the Women’s 400 metres final, outside the stadium, more than a hundred people were arrested and charged under the Commonwealth Games Act with having, in a “notified area,” “done an act which may have disrupted the peaceable and orderly conduct of an event.”
Inside the stadium, about twenty people who had used tickets for entry regrouped and draped banners and flags over the trackside railing. Removing their jackets, they revealed land rights t-shirts. Police surrounded them but took no action.
In some footage, as the finalists in the Women’s 400 metres ran down the back-straight, an Aboriginal flag is visible, hanging from the railing at the front of the grandstand, just outside the arena. It is the emblem that Cathy Freeman would wear as a victory cloak after the same race in Canada twelve years later.
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Another kind of political statement tried to sneak into QE II stadium that afternoon as well.
Raelene Boyle won gold, bringing the full house down, and sending Australia’s official flag up at the medal ceremony. This was not the highlight of her career as many wanted her to say, but victory in front of nearly 60,000 Australians was a nice way to go out.
Just after the race, beyond the finish line, the elated Boyle found she had unexpected company. The prime minister, Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser, had shuffled awkwardly onto the arena to congratulate her.
Fraser had experienced a difficult political moment a few days earlier, confronted by 200 protestors as he arrived for a function at the Greek Club in South Brisbane. This was across the road from Musgrave Park, the headquarters of Indigenous protests during the Games. Activists could not believe their luck.
It was just seven years since this towering man had acted as ruthlessly as any leader in Australian political history when chance beckoned in November 1975. Ahead lay half a lifetime of atonement.
That afternoon in Brisbane, trackside, Malcolm Fraser’s unease was palpable. It was a few months before the election that would blow his Coalition Government out of Canberra. Power he still had, somewhere, but it was ebbing away. Standing beside an athletics track was not his natural home. Someone must have told him it was a good idea. This was a big crowd. The tall man needed to share a stage with a winner, but in this moment, he was unsure where to stand.
In 2032, fifty years after those Commonwealth Games, Brisbane will set an even bigger stage, for the XXXVth Olympiad and Paralympics.
Political signifiers will be everywhere, as always at major sporting events. Leaders will have choices to make ― what to say, where to stand, which winners to celebrate, whose flags to fly.
One of Malcolm Fraser’s successors as federal Liberal leader, Peter Dutton, has effectively made a choice already. He will not be standing beside Indigenous flags. That might make for some difficult decisions as he tries to work out how to congratulate particular Australian winners without embracing their emblems.
After the 1982 Commonwealth Games, Lilla Watson wrote that the most significant gain from the Indigenous protests was “the national consciousness which emerged and developed among the Aboriginal participants, and spread by being taken home with them… Solidarity was also achieved with many non-Aboriginal participants, supporters and observers.”
The arc of history bent a little. It bent a bit more in 1994 in Victoria, Canada, and in Sydney in 2000, but it has twisted lately. The world will be watching Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, in just eight years. There is not much time. •
This piece draws on Jock Given’s article, “Red, Black, Gold to Australia: Cathy Freeman and the Flags”, published in Media International Australia, No 75, February 1995.
