Almanac Book Review: Joan Beaumont – Australia’s Great Depression

 

Joan Beaumont, Australia’s Great Depression, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2022.

ISBN: 9781760293987.

RRP $49.99.

Roy Hay

 

 

My former colleague at Deakin University, Joan Beaumont, has published a wide ranging and detailed account of the impact and the responses to the Great Depression in Australia. Among many other issues covered, she is seeking to explain why there was not the kind of breakdown in society that occurred in other countries during and as a consequence of the depression. It is a very informative study and something that deserves to be widely read.

It is, however, another Australian history without sport. There is just a single mention of the bodyline cricket series, but none of the final act of the tourists before they left Melbourne on their way home via Sydney and New Zealand on 15 March 1933. As Hitler was coming to power in Germany, the Englishmen played soccer against Hakoah, the Jewish team in Melbourne and lost three-one. Douglas Jardine did not play, but the rest of team were good or better soccer players. George Duckworth, the wicket keeper, was in goals for the tourists. There were more than 3,000 present to watch the game.

Duckworth got revenge of a kind in 1937 when he came back to Australia and led the team against Victoria. His team was Duckworth (captain and goalkeeper), Sims, Leyland, Worthington, Ames, Copson, Allen, Hammond, Hardstaff, Fishlock and Voce.

 

Englishmen win at soccer

Melbourne, Thursday, 1937.

The English Test cricketers showed their versatility at Olympic Park today, defeating Victoria 5–3. Two fine efforts by Hammond gave the Englishmen victory, and Voce, Fishlock, and Ames were also conspicuous.

Duckworth this time kept goal with merit.

Replying to congratulations by Mr G Hawes, chairman of the Victorian Soccer Council, Duckworth said it was the happiest day of his life, mainly because he had captained England, and they had won.

The Englishmen’s share of the gate was about £80, and this will be divided among the players.

Sun, Sydney, 14 March 1937, p. 5.

 

The tourists also played a Sydney team at Arlington Oval in 1937, who were too good for the tourists. The crowd for this match was estimated at about 7,000. At that time, soccer was still largely a participation rather than a spectator sport, though visits from overseas teams drew large crowds on occasion. A tour by a team from Hong Kong, billed as China in some publicity material, attracted 47 525 to one of its games in Sydney in 1923. The cricketers could not match that, but games were well attended all through the inter-war period.

 

 

 

 

A more serious omission from Joan Beaumont’s account is the absence of any awareness of the importance of sport as a source of income for players, some of whom ‘went bush’ to earn survival incomes playing and coaching local teams. Throughout rural and regional Australia, sports teams were important as the life blood of rural communities doing it tough out of sight of the cities and the policy makers. Even a few Indigenous people managed to eke out an existence with a pittance for playing football in local leagues.

Going in the other direction, Doug Nicholls from Cummeragunja on the Murray and Alf Egan from Myamyn near Heywood in the Western District broke through at top metropolitan level, the former with Northcote and Fitzroy and the latter at Carlton and North Melbourne. While at Carlton, Egan helped coach a women’s team that took part in a carnival in 1933. The full story of this early women’s footy will be told in an article in the next issue of Sporting Traditions, the journal of the Australian Society for Sports History in May this year.

Players could probably not survive on earnings from football alone. Doug Nicholls was given a job as groundsman at Fitzroy that enabled him to quit boxing just after he signed a contract with Jimmy Sharman, who allowed him to do so. The Coulter Law still governed football incomes at VFL level, though underhand payments to star players continued. At the local level however payment in kind was common and often vital, and players, coaches and other officials were expected to pitch in to support the communities.

If we are to understand why there was less of a breakdown in society from the right or left in Australia compared with what happened in Germany, Russia and other parts of Europe in the inter-war years then perhaps we need to look more closely at the role of sport, particularly but not exclusively at the local level, in that. I suspect there is another book on it.

 

 

 

 

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