An Eye On the Public Record

Dawn Fraser, Dawn: One Hell of a Life. Sydney: Hodder Headline, 2001.

Reviewed by Margaret Henderson.

Since I'm reviewing an autobiography publicised as somewhat confessional, I'll begin by making two relevant confessions. First, I am not a fan of the sport of swimming, and the particularly Australian love affair with it that is reignited around the time of the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games, and World titles, where our national pride swells and erupts at our supposed world supremacy (in a sport taken seriously in only a handful of countries). Second, and related to this, Dawn Fraser has never been one of my sporting heroines and I have never entirely understood the national fascination with her. I guess I'm more of the Cuthbert/ Jackson/ Strickland/ Boyle/ Goolagong school. I have, however, been an elite athlete; thus, I have experienced the strange joys and painful contradictions that come with being a female athlete in a still resolutely masculinist domain. So I am really interested in why 'our Dawn' became just that, and in how a superb athlete might write her life.

Dawn: One Hell of a Life provides answers to both those questions, but not without some disappointments. The book's title and the genre of sports autobiographies are clues to how Dawn's life is narrated. We are faced with the limitations of the conventional sports autobiography: ghost written, reading like a fairly direct transcription of interview tapes, heavy on detailed narration but light on introspection, and in need of more editing. The emphasis is on chronicling that hell of a life and, from the evidence Dawn presents, it has indeed been a tumultuous saga of public triumph and trouble, and private pain. We get, in a largely controlled fashion, the downsides of her life when she slipped from public view in the late 1960s-1970s; the continual struggle to make ends meet whilst competing as an elite athlete; personal heartbreak about rape and abortion; tragic deaths in the family; and the failed relationships (straight and lesbian). These join the more often recounted public stories about sporting success, larrikin escapades, constant battles with the sporting establishment, and her new careers as a publican and a member of the New South Wales parliament.

Even with all these ingredients, however, the story still drags at times and something is missing. When you read sports autobiographies, you want to get beneath the statistics and the legendary feats in order to find a different version of the human who happens to be physically gifted, and to experience vicariously just what it might be like to be that kind of body and mind. In Dawn, we get one race after another, one party after another, and name after name of famous people she meets in her travels. Yet, disappointingly, any introspective moments about what it is to be a great athlete are rare, as are descriptions of how the body felt/feels, and how the mind handled the pressure. Fraser tells us that the training was hard, the water often cold, the body tired, but the description never goes beyond this superficial level. When she does drop the public voice of narrative and exposition, the moments are insightful and revealing: 'I have never felt beautiful on land the way I do when I'm in the water. When you're at that stage of fitness and going into competition it's like a love affair…. It is an extremely sensuous experience to swim at that level of oneness with the water, feeling a tingling sensation on the fingertips and the skin' (p.109).

Interestingly, the most personal and engaging parts of the book are the early sections where she recalls her childhood growing up working class in Balmain. Fraser evokes a suburb and a hard way of life now largely vanished, and she tells some wonderful anecdotes. She worked for the SP bookie, Lenny McPherson at the age of eleven, and she describes how she got her friends to dive bomb the middle-class swim squad from Drummoyne when they tried to train in her pool. Fraser really did achieve against the odds, with no AIS, no sponsors, no heated pools, no media jobs to help her, just full-time work and full-time training. In this way, her early working-class life is central to understanding her drive, rebelliousness, and search for recognition (often from famous people). If we don't necessarily discover a different Dawn, we at least gain an account of a different era of sport.

And we also see how national legends get (re)constructed. By this, I don't just mean the tendency in the book for Dawn to replace self-analysis with the easier option of reverting to the national stereotypes of larrikinism, working-class battlers, or the working class made good. I mean, as well, the basic narrative of Dawn's rise and fall from grace, and her eventual reinstatement to her rightful place in the national pantheon as 'Our Dawn' (indeed, she has been described as a national living treasure). Her slow climb back to public prominence in the 1980s and 1990s is a case study of the intersection of an ex-athlete with the codes of national identity, and the expanding sports industry and bureaucracy. Thus Dawn: One Hell of a Life provides dual insights: first, into a collective psyche constructed through those stereotypes, desirous of heroes, and in love with sport; and second, into a working-class female champion who relies on those largely male mythologies for a sense of self (and an income).

Margaret Henderson is a lecturer in the Contemporary Studies Program at the University of Queensland, Ipswich Campus. She is writing a cultural and political history of twentieth century Australian feminism.