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| ISBN-13: | 9780702259265 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Queensland Press |
| Publication date: | 07/26/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 424 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
THEY SPEAK WITH A SOCCER ACCENT
1950–1966
And it came to pass, that a small band of strangers who had journied from far-distant lands did play amongst themselves a strange game called Soc, which was unknown to the natives of Aus. And after a space of time, many who lived in Southlands, did also play Soc with great skill [...]
Now came one of great wisdom, beloved by the people, And they cried to him saying, 'What thinkest thou oh Fatchen?' And he replied saying, 'What manner of men are these of Soc? Are they stricken with plague, that they have not the strength to pick up the ball?'
After these words, many people spake saying, 'It is true, should the Game of Soc sweep through the land, the habits of our people will change. Is it the wish of our brethren that their children lose the use of their hands?'
And a great fear gripped the multitude lest their offspring eat with their feet.
'The Gospel According to Trevor Jones' Soccer Mirror, 1953
On a warm summer day in December 1949, four weeks after it set sail from Naples, the USAT General WM Black sailed purposefully into Sydney Harbour. It had been a comfortable trip for Andrew Dettre, a bright-eyed 23-year-old Hungarian refugee. He was all alone, thousands of kilometres from home, with no money and no idea what to expect from this new land. But he took comfort from the rolling green of the governor-general's lawn, the majesty of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and an inviting city skyline.
Dettre had left behind family and friends and a continent ravaged by war, political upheaval and acute poverty. He got out of Hungary in 1948 after the communists shut down Szegedi Nepszava, the newspaper he had worked for. His tearful father, also a writer, had begged him to stay, but his mother scolded her husband. 'We can't guarantee his safety in Hungary. Let him find his luck in the West.'
His father relented and handed Dettre a collection of precious belongings to exchange for money and food. A young journalist on the run, Dettre worked the land in Vienna and dreamed of the United States of America. In The Hague he had tried to find a place at university, but without papers or a passport he had been deported by the Dutch authorities to Germany. From there, he had gone from one refugee camp to another, thieving chickens and trading the fruit given to him by British soldiers for solid food.
'It was a ruined land,' he later remembered. 'You had to survive in that atmosphere, you didn't have any lofty ideas or plans. It was just the next meal.'
As Europe recovered from World War II, more than two million migrants would arrive in Australia between 1945 and 1965, christened as 'New Australians'. Wary of economic downturn and Australia's geographic vulnerability, the postwar Labor government packaged the mass immigration program as a means of survival, and as the nation committed to a steady increase in its population, migrants from all over Britain and continental Europe settled in the vast landmass. These were the golden years of Australia's immigration program.
Upon arrival, Dettre was interned at a migrant camp in Bathurst, 200 kilometres west of Sydney. He was one of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who came with hope in their hearts and with soccer in their souls. These people weren't interested in horseracing or cricket or Australian Rules football or rugby league, and just as their churches, social clubs and cafes became a link to the homeland, soccer was a bridge between the old world and the new. This golden age of Australian immigration laid the foundation for a golden age of soccer.
Across the country soccer clubs with exotic names sprouted without warning over social kickabouts. Hakoah was one of the first, born at Rushcutters Bay in Sydney in 1939. Juventus was established by the Italians in Melbourne in 1948, while Napredak, a club formed by Yugoslavs, recruited players from the mines of Broken Hill.
Dettre's team, Ferencvaros, named after the famous Hungarian club, was formed in the Bathurst migrant camp. 'It was here,' wrote Dettre, 'on the large, sunburned open spaces of this huge, desolate camp, that a few young migrants laid the foundations for what was soon to form the nucleus of Hungarian soccer in Australia.'
Ferencvaros would eventually migrate to the city, while Dettre worked in factories and as a cleaner in order to save enough money to get out. Nobody wanted to stay in Bathurst.
In Sydney Dettre found an Australian girlfriend whom he would later marry, and a job as an interpreter. Yet he wanted more. Like many other soccer-loving immigrants, he was continually baffled by Australia but determined that the game's acceptance in this strange land would precipitate his own.
While most of these men raised money, tended to the soccer fields and concreted the clubhouses, Dettre wrote. And he wrote beautifully. His reportage would show the influence of Evelyn Waugh's elegant prose and the dark, political literature of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Boris Pasternak. He was a soccer intellectual.
Yet as an immigrant Dettre had to be twice as good as the next journalist, and he had to take the jobs that nobody else wanted. He sent resumes to newspapers and magazines throughout the country, was granted just one interview, and was told that he would never make it.
Nursing an espresso and his disappointment, he spotted a small advertisement for a reporter at the Bathurst National Advocate. He rushed to the airport, hopped on a plane, flew back to Bathurst and secured the job. Under the editorial supervision of a wretched alcoholic, in a sleepy town not fit for an urbane young reporter, Dettre worked in what he would later describe as 'the worst English-language newspaper in the Southern Hemisphere'.
The 'New Australians', although they perhaps were not aware at the time, were settling on stolen country with a dark, hidden past. Bathurst was on Wiradjuri land and its Indigenous people had fought a long war of resistance against the white settlers, culminating in the Bathurst War of 1824 that had wiped out much of the Wiradjuri population.
Since the British invasion in 1788, these First Nations had been broken up and the Indigenous people massacred, wiped out by foreign diseases, herded onto repressive reserves called 'missions' and ordered to act white. The tribal laws and boundaries that had existed since time immemorial were disregarded and replaced by colonial institutions named after white settlers and British landmarks. This was the tyranny upon which Australia was founded.
The White Australia policy, which had been passed upon Federation in 1901, would fortify the disgrace for generations. White Australia rested upon twin pillars of exclusion and assimilation. Asian immigration was severely restricted, and just as the Indigenous people were ordered to stop speaking their native languages and practising their culture, the immigrants who arrived from Europe were on a program of rapid acculturation into the so-called Australian way of life.
It was soccer, the universal language, that would present the greatest threat to assimilation. The migrant soccer club, later to be called the ethnic club, would reimagine the way in which Australians organised themselves, ignoring the district and suburban lines of demarcation in favour of their own ancestral loyalties, cultural pride and community self-determination.
Since the late 1800s soccer had grown in the cities and in the bush, enjoyed by craggy coalminers and rugged factory workers and happy school children. By the early 1950s, however, the game was run by a monocultural, unimaginative and largely amateur group of men. There was no life in the game, no colour, and any ambition was betrayed by a lack of direction and professionalism. And when the new migrant clubs started to pop up, many saw them as a threat rather than as an opportunity.
'The whole question of these new Australians being allowed to form National clubs should be the subject of special investigation,' concluded the Sporting Globe in 1950, 'and although one does not advocate a boycott of these recent arrivals from the playing fields it certainly would be much better if they were assimilated into the ranks of teams mainly of British stock and thus become better "mixers" instead of keeping to themselves and in some cases endeavouring to settle political differences on the football field.'
Yet many of the established teams closed their ranks to the new immigrants, while many fans of other sports, particularly the native Australian Rules football, adopted an unofficial policy of containment.
'People who come to this country and accept all the advantages should support Australian Rules football instead of furthering their own code,' said one committeeman in 1951. 'There must be a united front from all Australian football clubs to halt the soccer movement,' said another.
In South Australia, after a small newspaper named Soccer Mirror was established in 1953 to 'help to hasten the onward march of soccer in South Australia', three Adelaide soccer grounds were vandalised. Amid the wreckage were large signs that proclaimed: 'Down with the soccer. Play Australian Rules you bastards.'
Soon after, a stone crashed through the window of Soccer Mirror's office. In the shattered glass, a note was found wrapped around the stone: 'Stop printing Soccer Mirror, or else ...'
The editor of the newspaper, a moustachioed Serbian immigrant named Dragisa J Braunovic, told his readers that the newspaper was 'At War with a Sadist' and labelled the attacks 'organised outrages'. Yet within weeks he had relented. The newspaper was rebadged as Sporting Mirror, and articles on Australian Rules football were included for the first time.
This was a proxy war for the soul of modern Australia. The fight was to lay claim over its land, its people and its institutions. In 1953, Australian Rules officials quietly prevented a Chinese soccer side from playing at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and in 1954 the Prahran Council leased Toorak Park to a local Australian Rules football club for a peppercorn rent of £25. Jugoslav United Soccer Team (JUST), which had offered the council £800, was told to play elsewhere.
The message was clear. Assimilation meant speaking English, anglicising the family name, getting a job, and dropping soccer for Australian Rules football, cricket or rugby league.
'Nothing can draw them away from their national games,' the Melbourne Argus once concluded. 'What they do has no effect upon Australian Rules. What does matter, however, is what their children do.'
*
The soccer revolution began in Sydney and spread like wildfire around the country. In 1954, Hakoah entered the NSW second division and finished second behind Dutch club Sydney Austral. Controversially, neither side was promoted, despite North Shore and Balgownie Rangers languishing at the bottom of the first division.
Everywhere else in the world, promotion and relegation was the lifeblood of soccer. Traditionally, at the end of every season there would be a reshuffling of the deck, allowing successful clubs to realise their ambitions while punishing the weaker teams. Not so in Australia.
Next season, the first division was expanded from ten to 12 teams, and Prague and Sydney Austral were promoted. But when Hakoah finished top of the second division in 1956 it was again denied a place in the top tier. As unhappy rumblings turned to conspiratorial rumours, the Hakoah president, Walter Sternberg, called a meeting of club executives to his home in Sydney's eastern suburbs.
The group took drastic action and broke away from the old, staid NSW Soccer Association to form the NSW Federation of Soccer Clubs. Their resolution, signed on 5 January 1957, was framed in the grandest terms, urging the 'immediate affiliation of all soccer bodies in NSW [...] in this democratic movement to establish soccer as a major football code in this State, and to be officially affiliated with all recognised interstate, national and international soccer organisations'.
This standoff between old and new would spread across the country, threatening the authority of the Australian Soccer Association and its state affiliates. The new federations were headed by men of different faiths and nationalities: Jews and Christians, Scots and Italians, Greeks and Hungarians and Australians.
One of the NSW federation's first initiatives was a knockout cup competition, held under floodlights at Lidcombe Oval in Sydney's inner west. The first Kennard Cup, named after its brainchild, William Kennard, was won by Hakoah in March 1957. 'Nearly 4500 people last night saw the Federation of Soccer clubs successfully present its first soccer matches,' reported the Sydney Morning Herald. 'The standard of the play and the presentation of the matches left little to be desired. Federation officials were delighted with the attendance and the gate was nearly £300.'
The director of the Ampol petroleum company, William Walkley, soon came on board as a major sponsor. 'Soccer,' said Walkley, 'is one way of bringing new Australians into our community life and making them feel at home.'
In the newspapers that chronicled the rise of soccer, there was proud and prolific use of the phrases 'our game' and 'our code'. Immigrants did not assimilate into soccer, as they did in rugby league, Australian Rules or cricket. They rebuilt the game in their own image and began to dictate its culture and its conversations.
'The old football clubs formed an integral part of the social and cultural life of their communities,' wrote Lex Marinos, the famous Greek-Australian actor, in his autobiography. 'They were also evidence of the great commitment the migrants had made to their new country; and they were places where people could relax, sing their songs, dance their dances and be treated with respect and dignity. A refuge from the other world.'
Into this milieu arrived Leopold Baumgartner, a striker for FK Austria. During the club's 1957 tour he marvelled at the beautiful scenery in Manly and lunched at a restaurant called Prague in Sydney. He took those memories back to Vienna and, over a meal with teammate Karl Jaros, hatched a plan to return to Australia. Their wives agreed, fascinated by the prospect of white-sand beaches. The pair were signed by Prague, one of the NSW federation's more glamorous migrant clubs, in 1958.
Prague did not pay FK Austria a transfer fee for either Baumgartner or Jaros, breaking the laws of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Instead Prague claimed they were immigrants, and as more unauthorised players followed from Malta, Austria and Holland, FIFA began to field complaints from European clubs.
Still, these internationally recognised players made Australian soccer seem stylish and its possibilities endless. Baumgartner's arrival was a harbinger for a new style of play. Blond and balletic, with neat footwork and an eye for goal, he was the gold standard to which future generations of Australian players were compared. Nicknamed the 'Little Professor', he moved the supporters' minds as well as their emotions.
In one match, he would score an incredible last-gasp winner by curling the ball into the net from a corner-kick. In another, he would waltz around two defenders, skip past the advancing goalkeeper and casually dribble towards goal. Instead of simply side-footing the ball into the net, however, he would kneel down, pause for theatrical effect, and push the ball over the line with his forehead.
Almost every section of Australian society found a place in soccer. By 1958, around the country there were Italian teams called Juventus and APIA, Dutch clubs such as Hollandia, Wilhelmina and Windmills, the Greeks of Pan Hellenic, and Czech clubs named Prague and Slavia. The Scots supported Caledonians and Rangers, the Yugoslavs cheered for Yugal and JUST, the Croatians for Croatia, the Hungarians for Budapest, and the Maltese for Melita and George Cross.
In Sydney, an all-Asian side named 'Wings' played in the Metropolitan League. It was made up of mostly Chinese students on study visas, and its star player was a strapping young Malaysian international named Wong Leong Kong.
Nicknamed 'the Golden Boy' by his teammates, Wong was born in Ipoh, Malaysia, to Chinese parents in 1936. He had made his international debut at 19 years of age, and was then sent to Australia by his father to study accountancy. By 1959, he was snapped up by North Side United and finished third in the Sydney Morning Herald best and fairest award. He was one of the few Asians in the country, and the only Asian in top-flight sport.
'Because of Australia's great migrant intake,' reported Soccer World, 'the population has now become very cosmopolitan. The success of the Federation has been due to the fact that they have catered for that type of fan.'
Soccer World was first published as Soccer and Other Sports on 12 July 1958. From the beginning the newspaper suited Andrew Dettre's style of writing and his disposition. Its editor-in-chief was Marcel Nagy, a bespectacled senior who had once served as the president of the Hungarian Football Association, and the green newsprint – which gave it the nickname 'the Green Paper' – was an homage to the colours of Ferencvaros and Nemzeti Sport, the most famous sports daily in Hungary.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Death & Life of Australian Soccer"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Joe Gorman.
Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
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Table of Contents
Author's note,
The World Is for Them: Introduction,
PART I: THE NATIONAL INTEREST,
They Speak with a Soccer Accent: 1950–1966,
It's Time: 1967–1976,
A Golden Opportunity: 1977–1979,
We Took Their Name and Their Game: 1980–1982,
They're Our Fucking Wogs: 1983–1985,
The Final Winter: 1986–1989,
PART II: THE UNINVOLVED AUSTRALIANS,
For the Homeland: 1990–1995,
A Generosity of Spirit: 1996–1998,
The Sons of Immigrants: 1999–2002,
Death to the NSL: 2003–2004,
The Sum of Its Parts: 2005–2006,
Just Another Page: 2007–2014,
The Way We Organise Ourselves: Epilogue,
Acknowledgements,
Endnotes,
Index,