But they sensed that Opperman possessed something more. They dubbed him ‘le phénomène’, the phenomenon.7
Australia already knew Oppy. But success in Europe propelled him to fame and fortune still unimaginable to the twenty-four-year-old rider from Rochester, Victoria.
And this was only the beginning.
* * *
No-one saw him coming. A short, lightly built lad with wing-nut ears and an easy grin, he was hardly the most imposing of men. His unlikely look and unassuming manner fooled many competitors – in the beginning, at least. What set Hubert Ferdinand Opperman apart from his generation could not be seen. The will to win is common to all athletes. But Opperman rode with a determination so furious, blinding and irrepressible that it left competitors andfans awestruck.
Opperman electrified Australia and the cycling world with his unique combination of discipline, desire and an enormous capacity for suffering. Unlike any other cyclist, then or now, it was Opperman who set ‘humanity on fire’, to use the beautiful phrase coined by his Italian rival Giuseppe Pancera.8 For an athlete who became an international cycling super-star, an icon of the sport, it is curious that most Australians know so little about the man they called ‘Oppy’.
This book tells the story of how a young cyclist with a breathtaking talent became one of the most potent and transcendent figures in Australia’s sporting history. Whether he was racing in the Tour de France or crossing the vast Australian continent in record time, millions admired Opperman as a consummate athlete, a humble and approachable champion and the epitome of good sportsmanship. In Australia, like the cricketer Don Bradman, and the racehorse Phar Lap, Opperman became a unifying cultural force during a time of painful economic and social change. Yet his contribution to public life did not end when he retired from professional racing in the late 1940s.
Opperman’s life, which he himself described with characteristic understatement as ‘varied’, spanned almost the entire twentieth century. He was intimately involved in the making of Australia’s social, cultural and economic history – first as a professional athlete, then as an influential minister during the Menzies era and latterly as Australia’s first high commissioner to Malta. His fame helped make his sponsor, Malvern Star, the most coveted bicycle of a generation, from big name professionals to boys and girls riding to school or the local shops.
This biography also examines Opperman’s entry into federal politics and his relationships with key political figures of the time, including Richard Casey, Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser. It explores his ideas about economic development, national fitness, car culture, the assimilation of migrants, and the treatment of Aborigines. It pays particular attention to his contribution to the reform of Australia’s immigration policy in the 1960s.
Opperman’s life is shrouded in myth. After peeling away decades of nostalgia, he emerges here as a more vulnerable, complex and nuanced figure than his legend has allowed; a far cry from his reputation as the mild-mannered, ‘simple, uncluttered Hubert Opperman’, as one of his political friends remembered him.9 By looking at the man behind the myth, the story explores the controversies that dogged his sporting and political careers, the emotional pain of his private life, and the nature of his racial politics. More than any other account of Opperman’s career to date, it delves deeply into the life of one of the world’s greatest cyclists and an extraordinary Australian.
_________
1 Le Sport Universe lllustré, No. 1334, 22 September 1928, p. 634.
2 Sports Novels, December 1947.
3 Hubert Opperman, Pedals, Politics and People (Sydney: Haldane Publishing, 1977), pp. 119–120.
4 Sports Novels, December 1947; Opperman, Pedals, p. 120.
5 Beverley Times, 24 February 1950;Cycling (UK), 17 November 1949.
6 Sporting Globe, 5 September 1928.
7 L’Intransigeant, 4 September 1928.
8 Pancera to Opperman, 1970, MS 6429, Box 13, Folder 72, NLA.
9 Hansard, Senate, 30 April 1996, p. 31.
Chapter 1
Learning to Fly
The winter of 1914 was dry – too dry. By October, soaring temperatures and desiccating winds had turned the great inland wheat and wool producing country of central and Western Victoria into a howling wasteland. Thousands of sheep and cattle perished where they stood, while others had to be moved north in search of fresh country. ‘Failure in everything sums up the position here. No crops, no grass, and very shortly there will be no stock,’ wrote a reporter from Kaarimba, just north of Shepparton on the Goulburn River. ‘The misery of it is indescribable,’ wrote another.1
As unemployment rose and the grinding desolation of the worst drought in almost half a century took hold, Australia mobilised for war. Thousands of fit and strong men rushed to enlist. Many left the land reluctantly, compelled by the lack of paid work. Many more were drawn by the patriotic call to defend the Empire as well as the promise of adventure and good wages.
In Rochester, a small farming community on the railway line between Bendigo and the Murray River port of Echuca, George and Myrtle Parr were optimistic. They hoped to find some salvation for their property, ‘Pine Grove’, with their remaining flock and a small crop of wheat, sown early on well-worked fallow. As the drought deepened, the Parrs were forced to lay off their farm hands. Like so many others on the land that year, they turned to family. They were fortunate to already have Myrtle’s nephew staying with them. Ten-year-old Hubert had come for a short stay in the summer school holidays to experience life on the farm. After he settled in, Hubert was delighted to learn that instead of returning home to Melton, a village fifty kilometres from Melbourne, he would remain with his aunt and uncle until the end of the year. Better still, he did not have to go to school.2
Hubert soon became indispensable. Energetic and eager to learn, he rode bareback, hunted rabbits, ploughed the fields and led a horse for days drawing buckets of water from a deep well. With no workers to run errands, Uncle George taught Hubert to drive a coach-and-four. Once he could bring the horses under command, George sent him out on a thirty-kilometre trip to Echuca to collect a group of shearers. When Hubert arrived alone, the men were somewhat concerned by their youthful driver and decided it best to take the reins for the return trip.3 By the end of his year at ‘Pine Grove’, Hubert showed independence and trustworthiness beyond his years. He returned to his parents in Melton in the baking summer of 1914.
* * *
Adolphus ‘Dolph’ Opperman was a drifter. He believed in hard work, enterprise and chance. A complex man – both restless and lackadaisical – he was also endowed with rude health and unflagging vitality, traits he would pass on to his first-born son. Dolph’s wife, Bertha May, brought her own virtues to the union. She could sew, play the piano and sing. She appears also to have possessed forbearance beyond measure.
Before Hubert Ferdinand Opperman had turned three, Dolph had decided to move his young family from Rochester to Greenbushes in Western Australia to try his luck at mining tin. They arrived too late. The price for the metal had already collapsed. Dolph found a job as a timber worker and they stayed long enough for Bertha to have another child, Winifred Myrtle, before moving back to Victoria. In 1910, Bertha gave birth to twins, Alex and Bertha. Perhaps to ease the financial and domestic burden, the Oppermans decided to send seven-year-old Hubert to stay with his paternal grandmother, Wilhelmina, in the small town of Baillieston in central Victoria.
Calm, strict and practical, Grandma Wil lived in a log cabin, hewn from the local bush and lined with hessian and paper. Her fortitude and endurance were legend. She had raised a large family in an isolated bush town and liked to tell a story about how she pinned a brown snake with a flat iron. She looked after Hubert like one of her own. She impressed upon her grandson the virtue of industry, thrift and consistency. He went to school and to church and did his share of the chores. Even in her sixties, she was not a woman to trifle with.