Bans against competition almost cost our first female swimmers, Fanny Durack and Mina Wylie, Olympic gold and silver medals
HAVING overcome swimming club objections to compete in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, there was one obstacle Australian female swimming pioneers Fanny Durack and Mina Wylie could not surmount. The 4x100m relay.
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HAVING overcome NSW Ladies Amateur Swimming Association objections and raising their own funds for an ocean passage and expenses, there was one obstacle champion Australian female swimming pioneers Fanny Durack and Mina Wylie could not surmount.
Durack had already won gold and Wylie silver in the women’s 100m freestyle at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics when they attempted to enter the women’s 4x100m relay.
With only two female Australian swimmers at the event, the first Olympics open to female swimmers, their team was short two swimmers. Ever pragmatic, Durack and Wylie offered to swim two laps each. Their solution was rejected, handing a gold in the event to Great Britain.
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Wylie and Durack competed against each other in the Australian and NSW Swimming Championships in the 1910-11 swimming season, when Wylie beat Durack in the 100-yard breaststroke and the 100 and 220 yard freestyle at the Australian Swimming Championships at Rose Bay. With Durack at one stage holding every women’s swimming world record from 100m to a mile, public supporters expected both women to compete at the 1912 Olympics.
But the Australian Olympic Committee and NSW Ladies Swimming Association, headed by suffragette Rose Scott, blocked their inclusion in the Australian team.
The Australasian Olympic selection committee complained they could not afford to send female competitors, while Scott defended the NSW Ladies’ Amateur Swimming Association ban on women appearing at competitions where men were present, as spectators or participants, while women were swimming.
Durack and Wylie’s exclusion from the Olympic team inflamed a public outcry, and unsolicited public donations. Scott and the NSW Ladies Swimming Association were subjected to public ridicule. When the ladies’ association conceded and endorsed Durack, Scott objected and immediately resigned as president.
A fund was raised to pay Durack’s Olympic expenses, while Wylie’s family and friends financed her expenses. Durack’s sister Mary served as their chaperone on the long boat trip. They were the only two women on the Australian Olympic team, which included 20 men who competed in athletics, rowing and swimming.
Born in Elizabeth St, Sydney, on October 27, 1889, Sarah Frances “Fanny” Durack was slightly older than Wilhelmina Wiley, born at North Sydney on June 27, 1891, but began swimming much later.
The youngest of Leichhardt publicans Thomas and Mary Durack’s six children, she took up swimming after almost drowning during a family holiday at Newcastle when she was nine.
Her family could not afford to pay for lessons, so Durack taught herself to dog-paddle, then watched swimmers at Coogee Ladies’ Baths to teach herself breaststroke, winning her first state title in 1906, while still a schoolgirl.
After seeing Marrickville pioneer swimmer Annette Kellermann, in 1908 Durack adopted the trudgen style, using a double overarm stroke similar to freestyle, with a scissor kick.
She met Wylie while training at Wylie’s Baths in Coogee, then managed by Henry Wylie, the 1896 Australasian champion distance diving, or underwater swimmer, who previously managed an ocean pool at Bronte Beach.
At age five Wylie joined her father and two brothers in an aquatic act that required her to swim with her hands and feet tied. Her father, who won the distance diving 1896 title after initially missing the diving guide mark on the bottom of a pool at Parramatta to “ram his head pretty hard against the basin’s side. Further progress was out of the question, as he did not know where he was.”
At his second attempt an hour later, Wylie “succeeded in traversing two laps of the bath (84yds) thus annexing the championship by 8yds lft”.
His daughter, whose training routine consisted of swimming half to three-quarters of a mile daily from September to April, won three events in one evening at the Sydney Ladies Cup Carnival in February 1900.
At the Olympics Wylie swam in “immodest” silk bathers, while Durack ploughed through the water in heavy woollen bathers with a skirt, topped with a rubber cap covered with a cotton bandanna. Durack’s winning time was 1 minute, 22.2 seconds; Wylie’s time was 1:25.4.
In spectacular careers, for 20 years in a row before and after Stockholm, Wylie won at least one Australian national championship. Durack held world records in 100-yard freestyle from 1912 to 1921, 100m freestyle from 1912 to 1920, 220-yard freestyle from 1915 to 1921, 500m freestyle in 1916 and one mile from 1914 to 1926. World War I deprived the women of a second Olympic attempt in 1916.
Durack died of cancer in March 1956. Wylie died in July 1984.
Originally published as Bans against competition almost cost our first female swimmers, Fanny Durack and Mina Wylie, Olympic gold and silver medals
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