Published in The Daily Mail, 24 November 2003
The Rugby World Cup has ended with sweet, sweet victory for England and mortification for Australia. For weeks the Aussies have been accusing the Poms of being “smug” and “arrogant”, of playing “boring and unimaginative” rugby, of being “miserable people living in a cold, old country”. Will England now justifiably rub the Australians’ faces in the mud? And will relations between the two countries never be the same again?
Of course not. Nothing will change. England has been gracious in victory. The team paid tribute to Australia’s gallant effort. English supporters joined Australians in singing “Waltzing Matilda in the stands after the match. Yes, the Australian press reported the result under the headline “Read This And Weep”– and many did. But they were often consoled by English fans who know only too well what it is like to be “gutted” by your team’s defeat.
And all over Australia, as the shock wore off, came the admission, sometimes grudging it is true, that England deserved victory. “Biggest event in the Pom’s history since 1066,” said one Sydneysider, getting the date wrong but not the sentiment.
The happy truth is that the ties of language, culture, blood, a shared history in peace and war, business and trade, are more important than any Rugby grudge match. More than a million English people live in Australia. Millions of Australians have relatives, no matter how distant, in the “Old Country”. Australians have been pouring into Britain since the early 1950s–Peter Finch, Shirley Abicair, Dick Bentley, Bill Kerr, Keith Michell, Leo McKern, Joan Sutherland, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Jack Brabham, Frank Ifield, Rolf Harris–the list is endless.
Some were undoubtedly escaping authoritarian Australia, some had been unsettled by the war, some had strong personal reasons. But the majority left because they were ambitious and wanted to make their mark in a wider world and Britain was the place to do it. I know because I was one of them.
Australians felt so at home here that they were able to slip into a new life so smoothly that after a while hardly anyone remembered that they were Australians. (Who would ever have said “the Australian, Robert Helpmann”?)
At the same time the British were heading the other way. On the high seas between the two countries a shipload of Australians bound for London would often pass a shipload of English heading for Australia, part of the flow of “£10 Poms” of the early postwar years. (The Australian government offered migration papers, temporary housing on arrival and a berth on a liner to Australia for only £10.)
Many who made the trip recall it as as one of the high points of their life, a leisurely journey by sea that induced a sense of both loss and rebirth, that emphasized the enormous physical distance between the two countries, but also the close emotional ties between the two peoples.
One of the £10 Poms, John Shaw of Canberra, recalls: “The journey was a last glimpse of the glories of a great maritime Empire slipping reluctantly into the twilight. I felt I was on my way to a newly-born country to hand over the best of the old.” And he did. Like thousands of others, he married an Australian girl and the Shaw family’s total contribution so far to the population of Australia is 15. Anglo-Australians, Aussie-Brits, Pommified-Ozs–call them what you will they are an essential part of modern Australia and a solid plank in the bridge between the two nations.
Although many nationalist Australians deplored the immaturity implied in the phrase “the Mother country”, it was literally true and although, like any family, there have been fallings-out, come the crunch the family members have always rallied around.
Hundreds of thousands of young Brits back-pack their way around Australia in their gap year or as part of their education. (Young Prince Harry is out there now.) They strike up friendships that last a lifetime and many of them marry Australians and return there to settle.
Even Australian republicans agree that links like these do not fade overnight. Since the arrival of cheap air travel, half the Anglo population of Australia has made the pilgrimage to Britain to see where they originally came from–and, of course, hoping to teach a new generation of Poms a thing or two about literature, art, music, theatre, film, TV, journalism, business and life in general.
Margaret Fink, the film producer (“My Brilliant Career”), a quintessential Australian, was here this summer to visit the family origins in the Lake District. Who took time off to drive her there: her old Aussie mate, Dr. Germaine Greer?
Where did they go for dinner in London one night? To the Royal Overseas League, that imposing, caught-in-a-time-warp club in St. James’s that celebrates the bonds of the old Commonwealth countries–and not just the white, English-speaking ones. I know, because I invited them there. Both would find the suggestion that a Rugby match would alter Anglo-Australia relations as ludicrous as it is insulting.
We have withstood tougher sporting challenges than than this. Take the infamous “Bodyline” Test series between England and Australia in the season of 1932/33. England’s captain, Douglas Jardine, and the English cricketing establishment were coldly determined to win. (Sound familiar?)
Jardine let loose on the Australian batsmen his two big, fast bowlers, Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, both from Nottinghamshire, with orders to try to hit the Australians hard by bowling at the body rather than the wicket. It worked. The Australian sporting journalists complained that England had sunk to an all-time low. The English sporting journalists told Australia to stop its undignified snivelling and learn to be good losers. (Sound familiar?)
When Jardine complained to the former Australian captain, Victor Richardson, that one player had called him “a Pommy bastard”. Richardson summoned the Australian team and in front of Jardine asked: “All right, which of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?” Relations sank so low there was talk in the press of the whole tour being called off.
Yet how did it all end? In Sydney in the last Test of the “Bodyline” tour, Larwood, the man who had tormented Australia, a bowler and therefore not expected to make runs, scored 98. The Australian crowd rose to its feet as one and cheered him all the way back to the pavilion.
So why the fuss over a little needling this time around? My view is that we are all the victims of the marketing gurus from the Rugby Football Union. In a few short years they have transformed a cash-strapped minority game into one from which the RFU now stands to make some £60 million annually.
But at first it did not look as if the “dream final” between England and Australia was going to happen. Australia was a long-odds fourth among the final four. And if England thought the Australia media had it in for them, they should have looked a little more closely about what the Australian press was saying about their own team, the Wallabies. “Too slow, too old . . . totally lacking in imagination . . . with a coach who had never had an original idea in his life.”
Then when it became apparent that dream final was a real probability, the Australian sporting press, ably helped by their “abuse columnists” and “shock jocks”–the most virulent in the world–turned up the blast against England. The English media retaliated and instead of trying to dampen it down, the RFU marketing gurus realised they were on to a winner. Prices for black-market tickets soared and sponsorship interest intensified.
Have we therefore placed too much emphasis on the role that sport plays in the life of these two great nations? In Britain, certainly in the heyday of Empire, sport had both a character-building role and a political one. You only have to read Sir Henry Newbolt’s Vitai Lampada, known to every English schoolboy–and, incidentally, to many an Australian one–with its exhortation, “Play up, play up, and play the game”, to understand that playing a game in the right spirit was a metaphor for life, that there was more at stake than “a ribboned coat” or “the selfish hope of a season’s fame”, and that how you played and comported yourself while playing were even more important than winning.
So sport was seen as one way of teaching the Empire what British values embodied. Learn to play cricket and rugby and we will understand each other better. And it worked. British historian Peter Clarke says that sport has proved a more lasting legacy for Commonwealth unity than “anything Joe Chamberlain achieved”.
Let’s agree on the importance of sport and admit that the Rugby World Cup has been a wonderful occasion. In a year of war, terrorism, hunger and despair, it has brightened our lives. In Britain people who had never once watched a Rugby match got up before dawn to turn on their TV to see matches between countries many did not know even existed.
Yes, the cross of St George flies on those bastions of Australian nationalism–Bondi and Manly beaches and the English fans have taken over Sydney They draw a reluctant “Good on yers” from Australians. The English team is heading home for a ticker-tape welcome and a reception at 10 Downing Street. And the Australians are reminding themselves that sport’s like life–there’s always another chance.
Phillip Knightley is the author of Australia: A Biography of a Nation (Vintage). He divides his time–and his loyalties– between Britain and Australia.
