LIBRO DE ESTILO

On 22 October 1923, toward the end of the tour, the Launceston Examiner observed how effectively Millard’s enterprise had met it many objectives:

The visit of the Chinese team should do much to improve the standard [initially of soccer] and also in making the game more popular. It was subsequently learned that the object of the visit of the Chinese team to Australia was not purely for sport, but very largely with a view of endeavouring to bring about a better feeling between the two countries commercially, and in order to provide a number of Chinese students with an opportunity of gaining first hand knowledge of Australia, its people, and customs. In this respect the value of the visit can hardly be underestimated.1

This assessment indicates an acceptance of the inter-related aims of what had at first seemed an extraordinary series of events, and which had held the attention of a significant portion of the Australian public for three months. While the tour had been, of its essence, a carefully circumscribed program – the athletes came, they played, they left – this thesis has argued that its significance extends a good deal beyond a passing spectacle. The boundaries which defined it as a sporting tour no doubt made it possible to manage this degree of popular exposure to the face of a new China, but its meanings went beyond the crowds at sporting fields and receptions. Through the tour, a range of concerns Australians had pertaining to the intersections between race, class and cultural, economic and political development came to the fore. The tour, in its own time, contributed to exposing that ‘big white lie’ of inherent and intractable difference John Fitzgerald has identified in representations of the Chinese in Australia, and – as this thesis has sought to show – an historical analysis of its context confirms the considerable creativity, initiative and receptiveness that could exist in relations between Chinese and Australians.

Each chapter of this thesis has identified these elements of constructive, if opportunistic engagement with the tour and what it might achieve. From the start, Millard’s search for the ‘right kind of Chinese’ expressed elements of idealism and wily business sense, and those who lent support to the venture, whether as investors, sporting associations and promoters, businessmen or politician, the press or the spectators themselves, did so because of what the tour might offer them as much, and probably more, than because of the altruistic appeal of ‘bringing about a better feeling’ between two nations and their people. The tour was both an exercise in populism, with plenty of precedents in exploiting the appeal of a contest of races in attracting a crowd, and in public relations, using an event to convey larger messages. But its success in either dimension was dependant on its success in the other. From this perspective, while it is difficult to identify any single influence or change which can be attributed primarily to the tour, the tour’s significance in marking a break between representations of the ‘laundry-man’ and the modern citizen was considerable.

As a contribution to sporting history, this thesis endorses the importance of understanding ‘sports space’ and its use and manipulation. The arrival of the Chinese soccer team meant that other, dominant codes stood up and took notice of the emergence of soccer as a spectator sport. While these codes did what they could to hinder the progress of soccer, the tour assisted soccer to gain a foothold in the highly competitive football landscape of Australia, one it would fight hard not to relinquish. As a contribution to cultural history, this thesis underscores the need to appreciate the dynamic role of the press of that period in both reflecting and creating new fields of interest in society. Australian editors and journalists latched on to the tour with enthusiasm. They explored an inquisitiveness and curiosity regarding what ‘type’ of Chinese would visit Australia as sportsmen, and fostered debates that discussed race, security, whiteness and population in terms that went beyond usual stereotypes. In

choosing not to describe the Chinese in disparaging and demeaning terms, the press either exploited the opportunity to develop a more sophisticated racism, modelled along the lines of ‘the exception that proves the rule’, or to accept that the tour provided opportunities to move beyond such stereotypes, and question – for neither the first or the last time – what purposes were being served by them. Again, Fitzgerald’s argument is apposite here: an Australian historiography that responds to events such as the tour by asking only how it related to the over-arching White Australia policy greatly diminishes our capacity to understand what was often transacted in the day-to-day domains of experience and tolerance, or – in Fitzgerald’s terms – ‘modernity and mateship’.

As political history, the tour exposes much more pragmatism in handling those issues of race and immigration than we often appreciate, particularly when matters of trade and security, and perceptions of a changing world are allowed into the frame. The local Chinese, for example, viewed the tour positively, working with it to achieve their own aims: to project an image of a new China, represented by Sun Yatsen and the KMT, and to use such an image of Chinese modernisation to break down older prejudices. In this respect, the tour did reflect, and in part enable, new relationships between the middle class Chinese in Australia and Europeans who met and mingled at functions for the soccer players.

As the Examiner noted, this was probably the main objective for Millard and Mok as the tour came to a close. Improving industrial and commercial relations between the China and Australia became the priority for both, in their different ways and according to their different interests. And to make progress on these matters the barriers of immigration restriction against Chinese merchantmen needed to be eased. On this score, Millard did create some interesting debates in the Australian papers, and eventually a trade commissioner arrived from China to further these ends. Yet his main

aim to ease restrictions on the Chinese, and to fundamentally alter the prejudices they reflected, would take a good deal longer to achieve.

The tour was a one-off event in history. It had its roots in the earliest perceptions of the Chinese in Australia nearly a century before. When Millard ventured the idea of a rugby league tour in October 1922, little would he have dreamed that a year later he would be fighting for the rights of Chinese merchantmen against the policies of White Australia. Millard was to continue his fight later in his life, while also remaining a sports journalist. There was for him no repeat of the excitement or publicity of the tour, or substantial progress in securing his ideas. Even so, the tour itself is well worth rescuing from the archives of White Australia as a good deal more than a curiosity.