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Description
Melbourne's Head of the River
On Friday 8 May 1915, on a calm autumn afternoon, the preliminary heats for the Victorian public schools' Head of the River rowing races took place on Melbourne's Upper Yarra, over what was known as the Henley course, and finished near Princes Bridge. In the three races for the afternoon, the Scotch College VIII defeated the Xavier crew, Wesley College defeated Geelong College, and Geelong Grammar defeated Melbourne Grammar. The victors went through to the finals to be held on the Saturday, while for the losers the months of training and hard work had come to naught, and the hopes of their supporters within and outside the schools were shelved for another year.
At one level, and a superficial one at that, this was an insignificant historical event, a mere piece of ephemera in a year in which much more important events took place in both Australia and the wider world, most of them connected in some way to the First World War which had now been raging for nine months. But a deeper and closer examination of the event itself and its social, cultural and political context reveals this rowing of boats down a river to be rich in multi-layered meanings, and as opening a window onto some of the bonds, strains and tensions that were defining Australian society in wartime. The parade of schoolboy oarsmen was much more than that--it was a parade of masculinity, of values, and of tribal loyalties.
It was, moreover, a parade or performance that operated on at least three levels, for the schoolboy rowers were far from alone on that May afternoon. The schoolboys paraded their rowing ability and associated virtues in front of a large crowd, estimated at 15,000 by the Argus reporter, who in turn, by their attendance and behaviour, paraded their attachment to the individual schools, the public school system and its values more generally, and to other members of the Melbourne middle classes. (1) Further, and despite the large crowds, the competitors' races were relayed to most of the audience through the print media. If the race was performed on the Friday and Saturday afternoons, most of the audience did not 'see' it until they read the Saturday and Monday morning papers, and then encountered a version mediated and interpreted for them by the reporters, most especially 'Old Boy' of the Argus, who provided the most extensive coverage.
To understand the deeper meanings of the Head of the River races, we need to pull the event apart, to 'unpack' it by examining closely its context and the interests, roles and performance of the three main parties that we can access from contemporary press reports--the rowers, the spectators and the newspaper writers. And we need to do so with attention to the meanings with which public schoolboy masculinity, sport and rowing in particular, had been invested, and with consideration of the evolving wartime context in which the races took place, a context which sharpened social divisions and amplified the importance of the values embedded in the races.
In May 1915, Australia had been at war for some months, but its troops had only recently gone into action at Gallipoli. Australian understandings of Australian masculinity were a mixture of pride and anxiety. There was a reasonable level of confidence in the abilities of Australian manhood, developed partly through the nineteenth-century idealisation of the man of the outback, by strains of social Darwinist thought that emphasised the value of Australians' stereotypically outdoors and rugged lifestyle, and by sporting victories over the 'old country,' initially in professional rowing and cricket matches. And yet there remained an element of trepidation, for there were longstanding fears about decline in the colonies that sat alongside hopes for regeneration. Moreover, the Australian troops in Cairo had already earned a reputation for misbehaviour, and there was no guarantee that Australian soldiers would not, in their first major battlefield encounter, fail the sternest test of their manliness. The hoped-for virtues and feared failings of Australian masculinity were thus no doubt occupying many a mind as the crews prepared themselves for the races. Minds were, however, perhaps already being eased by the first reports coming from Gallipoli, and on Monday 11 May, in a not altogether inappropriate coincidence, readers of Melbourne's daily newspapers could read reports of the races and make the obvious connections to the Australian physical prowess, courage and bravery evident in Ellis Ashmead Bartlett's famous reports of the Gallipoli landings, which were published for the first time in the same issue. Regardless of whether pride or anxiety were dominant for most people, Australian masculinity was certainly on show on the world stage, adding importance to the more local parade of manly virtue.
In examining how the Head of the River races were performed, received and reported, it is also necessary to consider contemporary debates that were taking place concerning sport and war. Should these races even have been taking place, given the much more serious business afoot in Europe and in the Middle East? Many did not think so-other sports, particularly amateur sports played and patronised by the more militarily enthusiastic middle classes, were closing down. In Victoria, the Melbourne Amateur Football Association closed down in 1915, while the 'amateur-inclined' Victorian Football Association initially shortened its season, then suspended play until 1918. Rugby Union in New South Wales also ceased, while professional sports, such as the New South Wales Rugby Football League and the Victorian Football League, although severely curtailed, continued. (2)
But the middle classes were able to rationalise why at least some of their sports, such as the Head of the River races, should be permitted to continue whereas professional sports ought to be shut down. Amateur sport, it was argued, was pursued for its own sake, or at least for no monetary reward, and was a valuable tool for inculcating qualities such as courage, selflessness and devotion to a cause--the types of qualities it was expected would be useful in war. Professional sports, on the other hand, essentially paid people to avoid enlisting. As L A Adamson, headmaster of Wesley College and a champion of amateur sports claimed, 'a patriotic German could make no better gesture than to support our paid gladiators to perform in the [football]... |
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