REVIEWS
WARWICK HADFIELD
Non Fiction
DAVID YOUNG – SPORTING ISLAND: A HISTORY OF SPORT AND RECREATION IN TASMANIA
Tasmanian Department of Sports and Recreation, 2005There is an underlying sadness about this manful effort by David Young. In this handsome book he seeks to record the histories of the manifold sporting and recreational activities – since both time immemorial and the ‘invasion’ by British settlers and convicts – of Tasmania.
Young demonstrates that much has been achieved by a state with a proclivity to ‘box above its weight’; to produce champions at a rate disproportionate to its population and resource bases.
However, as he also records – without ever entering into rancorous judgment of any of the parties – the internecine parochialism that began almost as soon as the new colonies were established, the reader cannot help but be filled with a sense of melancholy. The book left me wondering: How much more could Tasmanian sport and sports people have achieved, if cooperation, not obstruction, had been one of the central themes of this history?
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had a privileged insider’s view of the monumental shake-up of cricket in Tasmania. It was led by Denis Rogers, a man who simply refused to allow the game to wallow in its divided state anymore. Too many times in his battle, it became apparent that people all over Tasmania would put their personal fiefdoms ahead of the greater good of the game and its talented young participants.
Happily, though the methods needed to defeat pig-headed parochialism were not always pretty, Rogers won the day. Some of the easily identifiable results of uniting four warring bodies into one are the magnificent Bellerive Oval and an Australian cricket captain from Tasmania. However, most important of all is the chance for young Tasmanians to forge a career in this sport at the highest level without having to move interstate, as Clayvel ‘Jack’ Badcock, Ted McDonald and Max Walker, to name but a few, had to do.
In many ways, David Young has produced a parable for Tasmania and for Tasmanians. Sport, so it is said by Sir Neville Cardus, reflects the society in which it is played. Sport has reflected the Tasmanian societies in which it has been played since the ships first dropped anchor in the Derwent and in the Tamar. The two colonies fought from the outset. The reasonable person would think that, situated so far from England and in such rough circumstances, the settlers would have felt a need to work together. But in the twenty-first century, as young people are being injured and killed on the Midlands Highway because of the madness that insisted on separate campuses for the University of Tasmania, we can see that reasonableness is a hard-won thing in Tasmania.
Again without rancour, Young notes other incidents that might also be homilies for the broader community. He writes, in a section on the ‘sport’ of shooting live pigeons: ‘In 1888 the humanitarian lobby’s efforts resulted in a Bill to outlaw pigeon shooting being put to the parliament, but – like much progressive legislation both before and since – this was rejected by the Upper House’(104). The same sort of gung ho, or gun ho, approach to ‘sport’ also led to the extinction of the Tasmanian emu.
David Young has, by dint of an extraordinary amount of highly detailed work, put together an important history of Tasmanian sport. The long list of acknowledgements – yes, Robin Hood and Noel Ruddock are there – is irrefutable evidence of a lot of days and months of listening, reading and collecting before putting the final pen to paper, or fingers to the keyboard.
The selection of photographs – including the intriguing picture of the woman on roller skates wielding a bow and arrow – adds to the superb nature of this record.
At the end of his labours, though, he has ended up with far more than a straight history. He has produced a work that should be compulsory reading for anyone seeking high office, not just in Tasmanian sport, but in any field of endeavour. After all, goalkeeper and philosopher Albert Camus once said that everything he learned about morality and obligation he learned from football.
Tasmania is at its best when people work together. Far too often in Tasmanian sport – to the cost of a myriad talented, young Tasmanians who either had their chance denied, or had to move elsewhere – this has not been the case.
For this culture to be continuing in the twenty-first century, as it does – aided and abetted by politicians and selfish, short-sighted sporting administrators – is a sinful waste. In a quietly understated way, David Young’s magnum opus has drawn attention to this. It is to be hoped the message will not go unheard in the ‘what about me?’ cacophony.
WARWICK HADFIELD has been a sports broadcaster and writer for more than 30 years. Many of those years have been spent watching Tasmanian sports people in action, everywhere from South Korea to South Hobart.
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