On its amazing journey across this vast and diverse continent, the Olympics torch traveled through towns and hamlets that are only specks on the best of maps.
In the last three months, an estimated 15 million Australians, or nearly 80 percent of the population, cheered the torch and waved flags on roads from Ngulu on the northern tip to Bourke in the south. The Back o’Bourke is where Australians say their vast, empty Outback begins, a place they call “the Never-Never.”
The path of the torch seesawed crazily across the country from Camarron in the far west to Sydney in the east. It traveled on a camel’s hump, went underwater at the Great Barrier Reef, was rowed across a lake, flew with the Flying Doctor Service that supplies Australia’s empty spaces with medical aid and crossed the forbidding Nullarbor Plain via the Indian-Pacific railway. A train carrying it made 10 whistle-stops to show the torch to those who came to the track.
In the longest torch run in Olympics history, the flame that will light up the Games on Friday traveled 12,000 miles in 100 days. It passed through nearly 10,000 communities and left 11,000 Australians from all walks of life with the memory of the day they carried the torch and were cheered like champions.
Smiling Jack Lockett, 109, the country’s oldest citizen, shuffled for 400 yards along the road clutching the torch with the pride of a man who knows he is part of Australian history.
Therese Garton, a gymnast with Down syndrome, carried it in the stadium at Adelaide. Few held back tears or cheers. Andrew Thomas, the Australian-born astronaut, handed the torch to Garton. He had taken a “space version” of the flame on a shuttle flight.
In one hamlet, a blind torchbearer loped down the street guided by a boy in a wheelchair; in another town a man who had undergone a double-lung transplant bore the flame; and a man with a new heart became the torchbearer in another city.
The flame burned through ethnic and class barriers as rural and urban communities joined hands to turn its passage into unprecedented communal events in which everyone participated free of charge.
“What touched me most,” said Heather Merritt, a Canadian who accompanied the flame as a media official for most of its odyssey, “was how it unified communities. The torch brought together neighbors from different ethnic groups that had not talked or seen each other but were now cheering and crying with their arms around one another.”
“I guess as a Canadian, I didn’t feel this spirit until I took the torch to Betty Cuthbert’s house in Perth, and the Golden Girl of Australian athletics broke down in tears,” she said of Cuthbert, who won three gold medals in the 1956 Games.
In Chinatowns, dragon dancers cheered on the torch. Bare-chested Aborigines blew their didgeridoos, instruments made from hollowed-out branches, to help the fire stay ablaze as it braved storms, wintry rains and tropical heat on its journey.
In the Never-Never, squatters on horseback who run cattle stations the size of small European nations, took off their slouch hats, something they rarely do, as the torch went by.
Skiers carried the flame down Victoria’s Mt. Hotham. It sailed upriver near Perth, rode on a solar car and was taken to the top of the country’s largest radio-telescope by the mayor at Parkes in New South Wales.
On its journey the fire passed places that boast only a pub and a post office, places so small old-timers will tell you, “Mate, if you blink you’ve missed them.”
In a country so vast and diverse that snow falls in one part while monsoons strike another, the torch was run through locations with names such as Yoogali, Gravesend, Woolooware, Wagga Wagga, Dora’s Creek, Rooty Hill and Cootamundra. The last one is a hamlet only on the map because it happened to be the birthplace of Australia’s greatest cricket hero, Donald Bradman.
The passing of the torch enflamed a new spirit of togetherness among a multiethnic people who tend to know more about their athletes, sharks and crocodiles than about their politicians. The torch run has given millions of sports enthusiasts a chance to be part of an Olympics now in the hands of corporate sponsors and so expensive many fans cannot afford to attend.
In a gesture marking another step toward reconciliation with the nation’s disadvantaged Aboriginal population, the first torch runner set out from Uluru, the red rock in central Australia, a site sacred to many Aborigines.
She was Nova Peris-Kneebone, a much-loved Aborigine track and field athlete who ran barefoot in deference to her ancient culture. Her grandmother used to watch her children through a fence, playing in a mission school after they were taken from her by the authorities and given a white education.
Most Australians, torchbearers and spectators alike, described the day the flame came to town as “the most memorable day of my life.”
In a break with tradition, torchbearers were allowed to walk instead of run.
The new rule gave the handicapped, the young and the aged a chance to participate, unlike during the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 when a torch runner qualified only if he or she could clock less than six minutes for a 1-mile dash.
In a country that likes a good joke and has a soft spot for the young rascal, police did not charge youths who tried to snatch the torch from runners on several occasions.
Police reinforced security around the Olympics flame to prevent a repetition of an incident in the 1956 Olympics, held in Melbourne, when a group of Sydney University students, dressed as the torchbearer and his escorts, leapt into the street a mile from Sydney Town Hall. Running along holding a fake torch, they were cheered by tens of thousands lining the roads.
A police officer on a motorcycle, shocked to see the torch arrive without a police escort, jumped onto his bike and headed the fake procession. When the group arrived at Town Hall, the mayor was handed the fake torch and began his speech: “I hereby welcome the Olympic torch to Sydney …,” before he realized the torch was dripping tar on him.
Meanwhile, the real torch relay was still passing over the Sydney Harbor Bridge. In the confusion, the pranksters slipped away and were never identified.
In Paramatta, an outlying suburb of Sydney, nearly 100,000 people watched the torch arrive this week and then feted the Olympics symbol at a park, with films of past Olympic Games and entertainment including singers.
Torchbearers have become instant celebrities in a country whose people like mementos to remind them of big occasions.
This habit prompted dour Australian officials to ban the country’s greatest swimmer, Dawn Frazer, from competition for life after she “souvenired” Japan’s imperial flag at the Tokyo Olympics in 1960, shinning up a flagpole as her teammates watched.
“We had to escort 12-year-old Adrian Jerome to a tent because the crowd all wanted his autograph,” said media official Merritt. “He was tickled pink by his sudden popularity.” Adrian was chosen for the torch relay to represent his grandfather, the first Aborigine to win an Australian boxing title.
Under the spell of the torch, color, race and religion seemed almost meaningless.
Muslim women in black scarves and skirts shrieked with joy this week in Paramatta, one of Australia’s main ethnic melting pots. Next to them, Australian-Italians yelled, “Bravissimo!” Turbaned Sikhs stood at ramrod attention. Ethnic Koreans, Vietnamese and Indonesians waved Australian flags. Motorcades careered through town with passengers screaming “Come on, Aussies!” the national battle cry.
The euphoria generated by the flame was astonishing.
“This event is bigger than the landing on the moon because it’s once in a lifetime,” crowed Chadi Elashker, a Paramatta shopkeeper.
Andrew Lloyd, who ran the 5,000 meters in Seoul for Australia, added, “It’s definitely one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life.”
Mesmerized by the torch, a crowd in Paramatta sat for hours watching the fire flicker under a full moon on a chilly, clear night.
Britain’s Daley Thompson, who won two gold medals in the 1980 and 1984 decathlons, summed up the feelings of many as he watched the torch arrive: “The corporation of the Olympics has gotten so big now that ordinary people can’t even get tickets. That’s why I think the torch relay has been the best thing about the Olympics.”
