Gough Whitlam

• Only weeks after the team’s headline-making tour, Australia’s then opposition leader, Gough Whitlam, led a delegation to Beijing promising to open diplomatic relations “when elected”.
• One was table tennis, one was basketball and one was volleyball.
• One was table tennis, one was basketball and one was volleyball.

‘A crowd of 8,000 people’

• A revolutionary who became one of China’s most revered statesmen, he advocated peaceful co-existence with the West and other nations.
• The American team embarked on their tour first – setting the stage for then-President Richard Nixon’s famous visit to Beijing in 1972.
• Paul Pinkewich had just turned 20 at the time of the visit, teammate Steve Knapp was only 18.
• Our first match in Canton, now Guangzhou, I think it was a crowd of 8,000 people,” he recalls.
• “Do you wear this hair because of your disagreement with society or because it is a style?” Knapp replied, “It is the fashion.”

• “Can you believe, one table in the middle of the Capital Stadium [in Beijing] with 18,000 spectators, and that was just an amazing experience.
• But they always let the woman win.” That woman was Anne Middleton, the other player on the 1971 tour, who has since passed away.
• After the trip we were labelled as communists […] but we were interested in friendship first, competition second.”

Why sport diplomacy matters

• Beijing has continued to use sport as a diplomatic tool, including becoming the first city in the world to host both a summer and winter Olympic Games (Beijing in 2008 and 2022).
• French educator Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894, believing Olympics were a global event.
• A new term has also emerged in recent years – almost always applied by researchers in democratic nations – to describe undemocratic nations’ forays into global sport: sportswashing.
• “Amity between people holds the key to sound relations between countries.” At the heart of such amity, sport continues to play a significant role.

Tracey Holmes was one of the fifty Australians interviewed in the 'Fifty People, Fifty Stories' book due to her experiences of previously living and working in China.

• Donald had written an essay called “Mind, body, age” that vigorously burst from the page with life, while addressing death.
• Being out of the loop, no longer an active participant in the cultural life of his beloved Sydney, hurt him.
• In his accomplished and insightful biography Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country, Ryan Cropp puts the man in his context and, without a heavy hand, helps us understand his motivating psychology.
• Good biographies can be like that – Robert Caro is still finishing the biographical series on Lyndon Johnson he started 50 years ago.
• Read more:
  Donald Horne's 'lucky country' and the decline of the public intellectual

The Lucky Country

• Horne is best known as the author of The Lucky Country – a book that seemed to capture the zeitgeist when it was published, reluctantly, by Penguin in 1964.
• The issues explored in The Lucky Country changed with new versions, but the critique remained: Australia got by on luck; it was held back by second-rate leaders who lacked vision, imagination and even a realistic assessment of its place in the world.
• The Lucky Country, which owes more to his journalism than the more ambitiously polished writing in The Education of Young Donald, was a two-way mirror, revealing the nation to itself and him to it.
• Read more:
  An armchair, a desk and 4000 books: the Horne family study gets a second life

Changing contexts

• Cropp shows he has mastered the historian’s essential skill of avoiding this trap, while keeping the narrative moving with fresh and lively writing.
• One striking contrast is between Horne’s confidence in Hayek’s wartime anti-bureaucratic, libertarian ethos, and Gough Whitlam’s rejection of it.
• He was bored and wrote many letters to his mother (like so many others now preserved in archival boxes).
• Times change, contexts shift, and responses by thoughtful people are recalibrated.

Intellectual tradition

• His teachings and methods helped shape a Sydney intellectual tradition that still echoes today.
• For those untouched by this tradition it was mystifying, but for those like Horne, Murray Sayle, Paddy McGuinness and many others, it provided an enduring framework that had the benefit of flexibility.
• The cynical, libertarian realist became, by the late 1960s, more optimistic and more open to what Cropp characterises as “opportunities for civic renewal”.
• The discipline of a biography, even one as grounded in public events as this, is that it demands a singular focus.

The cultural conversation

• The coincidence of the publication of Horne’s Observer, funded by Frank Packer, and Tom Fitzgerald’s Nation in the late 1950s spoke to the need to aerate the national political and cultural conversation.
• Cropp conveys a sense of this through the slightly limited prism of Horne’s worldview, with its emphasis on business, religion, Asia and politics.
• Cropp has captured a full life, well lived, that was a tribute to the importance of paying attention and making a difference.

• His career as a political cartoonist started with a trip to London in the late 1950s, then a stint at young Rupert Murdoch’s afternoon paper in Sydney, the Mirror.
• He had a lead role as The Australian’s political cartoonist during the newspaper’s radical first decade, until it turned right during the Whitlam dismissal and Larry Pickering was promoted to favoured cartoonist.
• Petty then moved to The Age in its glory days, where he was the acknowledged godfather of the troupe of brilliant cartoonists there at the time.

In the vanguard

• Among them are these five particularly vivid cartoons published in The Australian between May 1966 and September 1967.
• Petty was in the vanguard of a small but vocal opposition, drawing the war as a deep tragedy for the Vietnamese and a reckless farce perpetrated by the West.
• The jagged black blob, which covers about half of the box, colours the movement from farce to tragedy arrestingly black.
• Are Johnson and his adipose generals conscious villains, or merely fools being driven by murderous ideas and scarcely sublimated self-interest?

Intimate sympathy

• Is this the moral fecklessness of consumer society projected onto women, or is it the dawn of concern for the people ravaged by a needless imperial war?
• A large part of the power of these cartoons comes from Petty’s deep engagement with people forced to live with the war.
• His first book, Australian Artist in South East Asia (1962), is a graphic account of his journey through seven countries.
• – but he is doing it with an intimate sympathy born of real knowledge.

• At a time when governments are timid, keener to announce reviews than decisions, it’s refreshing to remember what happened 50 years ago today – on July 18 1973.
• Australia’s biggest customer, the United Kingdom, had joined the European Economic Community, agreeing to buy products from it rather than Australia.

Every tariff cut by one quarter overnight

• As Whitlam put it: “each tariff will be reduced by one quarter of what it is now”.
• If Australian businesses (and the Australian public) were caught by surprise, it was because Whitlam had planned the whole thing in secret.

Outsiders, not treasury insiders

• Ttey were also good for government – bringing in tax revenue.
• have a salutary effect upon those who have taken advantage of shortages by unjustified price increases which have exploited the public.
• should not provide relief as a matter of course – that is, simply because the question of relief had been referred to it.
• Over the next seven years, manufacturing employment fell by 80,000, but few of those job losses were immediate.
• more importantly, we seriously doubt that the previous government would have had the wisdom or the courage to undertake it.