From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Monday, June three. It'll be a decade before the Albanese government's huge boost in defense spending makes our military stronger, according to a new analysis revealed in The Australian Today. It comes as a fresh poll shows seventy percent of Australians believe China will become a military threat within the
next twenty years. The husband of missing mum Bromwin Winfield was jealous and possessive, a former wife, has told The Australian's investigative podcast into her suspected murder. John Winfield denies all wrongdoing and has never been charged over Bronwin's nineteen ninety three disappearance. You can catch the ex wife's account of her unhappy marriage in episode three, exclusively for subscribers
now at bronwyn p podcast dot com. The Australian is turning sixty and to celebrate the milestone, our journalists and editors are delving into the archives to reflect on how Australia and the paper has changed in the past six decades. Today, with the Paris Olympics just around the corner, we hear the story of a young swimmer whose youthful defiance denied her a glittering career. There's a bit of Australian sports
law that almost everyone knows or thinks they know. Dawn Fraser, then widely considered the greatest swimmer of all time, was banned from swimming for a decade in nineteen sixty five.
Like most Australians, Dawn is upset by the drastic action which we'll finish her swimming career.
In an exclusive statement to Sydney radio station two Yue, she's.
A but I'm not going to sit there and let's see bokay in my name. And here's what the man and woman in the street think of it.
Many people believe Fraser was banned for stealing a flag from the Emperor's palace while in Tokyo for the nineteen sixty four Olympics, a crime for which she was arrested, but the champion swimmer apologized and the charges were dropped. The Emperor even let Fraser keep the flag as a gift. The band came about for another reason. Entirely.
What I discovered was that, in fact, at those Olympic Games, there was in the opening ceremony. Obviously, everyone wanted to march at the opening ceremony.
Fion Hairari is a writer for the Weekend Australian magazine.
But the Australian officials told Australian athletes that if they were competing in the first three days of competition, because they might become fatigued, they could not march in the opening ceremony. Apparently someone turned up at the athletes village and said, look, maybe we should march, and at least four people Australian female swimmers decided that they would try and get to the opening ceremony.
Two of those women were nabbed by Olympics officials before they could board the team bus to the opening ceremony. But Dawn Fraser and another swimmer, Marlene Damon, who was just fourteen years old at the time and in Tokyo to compete in the women's one hundred meter backstroke, boarded the bus and evaded detection.
And I'm told it's because they were sitting behind someone who was reading a broadsheet newspaper, possibly the Australian that happened to obscure them.
Fraser and Damon did March at that opening ceremony and went on to compete in Tokyo. Fraser put on a characteristically world class performance, winning gold in the women's one hundred meter freestyle and becoming the first swimmer to win the same event three times.
Play Fraser, Australia, You're start away, not Fraser Way number four, We're pleasure, where.
Before Marlene Damon placed sixth in her heat and it looked like she and Fraser had got away with their cheeky opening ceremony stunt. But less than a year later, in March of nineteen sixty five, the Australian Swimming Union handed down the band that still reverberates through swimming. Fraser out for ten years. Marlene Damon copped a three year ban. She'd only just turned fifteen, but it effectively ended a once promising career in the pool.
So I was really keen to find out what had happened to Marlene because really nothing much had been reported about her then, which makes sense she didn't swim again competitively after the age of fifteen. Some of the others did appeal their ban, some of them did swim afterwards. Linda McGill, who was one of the women who tried to board the bus became a champion long distance swimmer, but I couldn't find any reference to Marlene Damon having swim again.
Fiona went in search of Marlene Damon for a series of articles she's written for The Australian's sixtieth anniversary celebrations.
So after trying to find her everywhere, I finally worked out where she lived. I found her phone number. I kept ringing her and there was no answer. I was in Adelaide for another story, and I thought, I'm just going to have to try and knock on her door, which is not something I tend to do, but I
was really keen to get her in the story. And I was literally in a taxi on the way to her house when I had located her brother by chance, who was a businessman also in Adelaide, and I'd rung him and he ranged me as I was literally in the taxi on the way to her place, and he said, yes, yes, sure, I'm sure she'd be happy to talk to you. He gave me a number, So instead of getting the taxi to pull up outside her house, I got it to
stop at the pub nearby. I rang her and she was just by chance at home that day and she said, I'd be thrilled to talk to you.
I'd be really happy to talk to you. And I said, oh, I'm just in the neighborhood.
So I walked down to her house and ten minutes after I was on her front balcony and we had a fantastic talk. And how do you feel all these years later when you're watching the Olympic Games swimming?
Oh?
I love it and I enjoy it.
I feel as though, you know, you can relate very well to it, even though it's changed a lot. It's a much bigger event.
Now, and she's an amazing woman who's actually lived a really positive, fantastic life. But none of us will ever know the true champion she could have been, because effectively that was the end of her swimming career.
It's a real throwback to the days that probably haven't really left us, where amateur sports are run by blazer clad men who have the lives and hopes of young, very young, quite vulnerable people who often make not very great decisions in their hands, don't they. It's a really tough penalty for these young women.
It seemed so unfair.
It's so harsh for someone who's she's fifteen, And I asked her, why did you march? And I'm not sure that she'd ever talked to a journalist about it actually till I appeared on her doorstep and I asked her why she marched, and she said, look, sport was really amateur in those days. There weren't any managers in the sense of having your own personal manager. No one was plotting a path for you. All she could see was the end of the pool. She's swimming, She's at the Olympics,
she's fourteen. She doesn't know if she'll ever get back there again. And then months after the Olympics, before she was banned from swimming, she did so well in national competitions that she was being heralded as the next Doorn Fraser. But she couldn't see this future because no one was plotting her future. All she knew was that her mum would drive her a swimming every single morning. She'd swim and swim, and swim and swim, get on with life.
She got to the Olympics and she was convinced she'd never get there again, and she did not want to miss out on a marching and Olympic opening ceremony, which I think many of us can relate to. I mean, I still will have a dream so matching at the Olympic ceremony, and.
So she did. She matched because she just saw I'll never get here again. And she was right. She never got there again.
Coming up lessons from sixty years of Australian journalism. Subscribers to The Australian have been first to hear these kinds of stories for six decades, and we've come a long way. A subscription also comes with breaking news alerts to your phone, newsletters and special events. We'd love you to join us at the Australian dot com dot au. We'll be back after this break. Fionahirari is one of the greatest chases
I've ever known. She started her journalism career as a cadet in the Age newspaper in Melbourne and has spent much of her career at The Australian. She's a fast talker and a total charmer, and she wins the trust of her subject because she's ethical and thoughtful. She spent much of the last few months thumbing through The Australian's huge bound archives in search of stories like the one
you heard earlier in the episode. The Australian's Deputy editor, Petra Reese, who's leading the sixtieth anniversary coverage, said she's convinced Fiona can track down anyone anywhere, living or dead.
Well, it's a really special series and I am so thrilled with how it's turned out. The backstory to it is quite interesting. About twenty years ago, I was asked to do a series for every weekend called ad Lib, where I would find a classified ad and I would write the story behind it.
I remember this, and you would.
I remember you looking through the classifieds, you know, in either other papers or our own papers, and finding what you thought might be a good story.
Yeah.
And I have to say when I was asked to do it at first, I remember thinking this is a really stupid idea work, but I'll try it.
And it turned out to be incredibly rewarding.
So I'd find these little ads and i'd ring the number up, And the way I like to describe it often is I might ring someone up who was advertising goats, and I'd say, Hi, I'm ringing about your ad for the goats, and they'd go, oh, do you want to buy?
The goats.
Okay, no, actually, I'm a journalist the Australian and anyways start chatting to them, and very often, from something as obscure as someone selling goats, you might end up with a story about a tragedy in that family, or a really funny story about something else.
You just never knew where it went.
But very often the ad led to something entirely differently, so some of the editors at The Australian decided for
the sixtieth clearly I could find people from ads. I could find people who had been involved in previous news stories, which is a great idea, except that when we had lots of ads around the newspapers in those days came with phone numbers and I was charged with finding one new story for every decade The Australian has been published news story that we had run and then finding out what happened next.
The front team sits not too far from Fiona in The Australian's Sydney newsroom. For months we've heard her on the phone in search of the people who appeared in the pages years and even decades ago.
Very often what I did was google these people, just see if anything had been written about them, and the second thing I did was to find out if they were still alive, and as you can imagine, many people weren't after fifty or sixty years.
So then I would try and find the people.
Very often, as you can imagine, from the fifties and sixties,
they had incredibly common Anglo names, people moved states. And then if I did finally find them, which could take literally weeks to find people, and I was not going to give up on any of them, sometimes they would not want to talk, and I found that mostly that was where there were a story that had something to do with medicine, or there was a sort of a medical backing to a story, so it might be the first person through whatever treatment in a st or transplant recipients,
et cetera. They were the ones who tended not to want to talk. And I think that's fair enough. But every time I got to a dead end with someone who was no longer alive or didn't want to talk, I actually ended up with a better story anyway. So that was quite good because I was not going to give up on any of these stories.
It was the trusty landline that yielded the best results in Fiona's search.
I have to say, after all these years of working, I was so determined to find these people by the end of it. So you know, you can scour all sorts of records online. There's nothing as good as a phone book. People forget some people, particularly for older people,
are still listed in phone books. There's lots of records you can access, but you still won't necessarily be able to contact the people because you actually need an email address or particularly a good old fashioned phone number is going to put you in touch most rapidly with people these days.
Do you find Facebook useful ish? Yes, sort of.
I mean I did reach out to some people through there, But interestingly I look the other day and the few people that I did reach out to through Facebook who I've subsequently interviewed, not one of them has actually seen my Facebook message.
Yes, so I'm not so sure that it's that useful.
Maybe for different demographics, for younger people who are on it all the time, although there were some younger people in this story and.
They didn't reply to the Facebook messages either. I think Facebook's now for old people they didn't reply. I'm not sure it's well.
This exercise in reflection has been as illuminating for Fiona as we hope it will be for readers of The Australian. What have you observed about the way journalism and the Australian have changed in those years.
What I was really amazed about is how little the news has changed. I think we all feel at the moment that the world is spinning slightly off its axes, but in fact there was a similar mix of stories often in the paper about difficulties and wars in the Middle East and in Europe and people being on edge. That was the one thing that really struck me. And obviously there's degrees of seriousness, but the same issues have been around I think for a long time. There are
a lot more human interest stories. I felt back in the fifties and sixties the coverage of women was a whole other world. I mean, there are obviously a lot more firsts that were being recognized. You know, there was the first Aboriginal woman to be a social worker, for example. There are a lot more first because we're obviously a much younger nation sixty years ago than we are now. But it was the sameness of a lot of news that really I found quite interesting.
Fiona Heirari is a writer with the Weekend Australian magazine. You can read her reflections on the australians past six decades every week for the next six weeks, in the paper and online at the Australian dot com dot au.