By Staff Writers
First published in The Age on December 10, 1956
LAST MOMENTS OF THE GAMES
FLAME DIES, FLAG IS FURLED ON 1956 OLYMPICS
THE last, dying minutes of the Olympic Games could have been unbearably sad or they could have been overplayed to the point where emotion slid disastrously into the maudlin.
For the first time athletes march together at the closing ceremony of the Olympics, in 1956.Credit: The Age Archives
Neither of these things happened. Melbourne on Saturday, as on each of the 17 days of this biggest of all occasions, showed herself a city of the world, poised and calm, proud of her success, yet attentive still to small courtesies which might, in this final, anxious moment, have been excusably forgotten.
THE ending came under a gentle sky clouded with grey velvet. High above the scoreboard, at the peak of the central mast, Australia’s flag flew bravely, with the flags of Greece and Italy flanking it to right and left.
At a central point in the great crescent sweep of the outer stand, the choir, a massed group in white, sang the softly haunting chorus Will Ye No Come Back Again?
The lights on the score-board flashed a simple message to the departing athletes and a greeting to the next Olympic host: “Melbourne, the Olympic city, bids you farewell and bon voyage. Good luck Rome, 1960.”
The Olympic flame slowly dies as it is extinguished to mark the closing of the 1956 Games.Credit: The Age Archives
As the last army bandsman in scarlet jacket and white helmet disappeared from the ground and the tap of the drums died away, the stadium announcer spoke for Melbourne to her visitors: “We will always think of you in our hearts and we will always have a welcome for you here.”
So, while the great crowd packing the Main Stadium stood to sing the National Anthem, the ending came, inevitably, yet satisfyingly, without sense of anti-climax.
That is the great memory and the great achievement of Saturday’s closing ceremony — that the Melbourne Olympic Games ended fitly.
Opening day, with its heart-catching pageant and spectacle its brilliant sunshine and its nervous air of excitement, was still fresh in memory, a formidable peak of success to be matched, as Saturday’s programme opened.
Australian teammates (from left) Norma Croker, Betty Cuthbert and Marlene Mathews, pictured at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games on 30 November 1956.Credit: Gordon Short
Outside the stadium the crowd hurrying across from the car parks, from the trams in Swan Street or the trains at Jolimont, was eager in anticipation, but more subdued than on opening day, dressed cautiously against the rain that had drizzled in a thin, sad mist throughout the morning.
The red iron bridge across the railway lines and Brunton Avenue was a choked defile, pressing the sprawling flood of people entering it into a disciplined, short-stepping stream.
Ticket scalpers, least loved of profiteers, thrust out their wares, clasped like a fanned deck of cards in each hand.
At windows scattered around the great concrete circle of stands, patrons sensible enough to pass the scalpers found tickets still on sale at official prices.
There were no queues, little pushing or scrambling.
Above the stands, the flags of all nations streamed out, rippling in the wind.
“Betty forged to the front in the last strides of a photo finish.”Credit: The Age Archives
On the peristyle between the new and outer stands, the Olympic flame in its bronze caldron, danced and streamed, flattening for a moment almost level with the caldron bowl’s edge, leaping then to loose a sudden, flickering tongue of red.
Inside the stadium, within minutes of the arrival of the Duke of Edinburgh, the programme’s first event —the Association football final between Russia and Yugoslavia—got under way without fuss or formality.
To eyes used to the dash and clash of Australian Rules, the skilled chessboard move and countermove of the soccer players was interesting, prettily intricate, but lacking, somehow, in fierce excitement.
Yet there were soccer enthusiasts enough in the crowd. But half-time came without score from either side and little to show for all the hard play except a droop in the linesmen’s black-clad shoulders, weary from running up and down and much waving of their yellow flags.
The crowd, eager to fill memory’s store as the last minutes of the Games slipped fleetingly away, stirred a moment, murmured, then fell still.
From a gate near the old members’ stand, Mr Avery Brundage, neat in dark suit head bare, shoulders square, marched to the victory dais for the last but one victory ceremony.
The finish of the Olympic Games eights final on Lake Wendouree in 1956. The US won from Canada and Australia. Credit: The Age
The stadium French announcer, with that odd, almost Chinese sing-song inflection in his voice, announced, “Protocol Olympique.”
From Mr Brundage’s left a little body of men—the French, British and German cycling teams—marched to the dais.
The French team clustered on the dais, filling all steps, then scrambled, precariously balanced, all on the top step at Mr Brundage’s waved prompting.
Britain’s team stood at disciplined ease, one man on the second place-getter’s step, the other two behind. The Germans took similar position at the third step.
Mr Brundage distributed the medals.
The Tricolour was run to the masthead and the crowd stood, feet tapping involuntarily, as the Marseillaise, a battle hymn to set any man fighting, rang out.
Mr Brundage and the cycling teams marched off. The stadium broadcaster repeated an announcement calling for the Bulgarian soccer team to stand by.
The red-shirted Russians and the Yugoslavs in blue returned for the second half of their football battle.
With a crash of drums and some deft work overhead and behind the back by the cymbal player, the massed army bands marched on the arena from one end as four jeep-drawn guns were towed on at the other and lined up, pointing ominously (and little unnecessarily) at the stand where the world’s press, former Olympians and assorted V.I.P.’s sat.
The crowd — that same friendly, enthusiastic, warm crowd which had packed the Main Stadium every day of the athletics programme — cheered and clapped.
Louder cheers came 10 minutes later — after the presentation of the medals for football in the last victory ceremony of all — when the Greek flag headed the parade of standards on to the arena.
On they came in alphabetical order and in their blaze of colour — Afghanistan, Argentina, with the only woman standard-bearer in the parade, the Mexicans, in an escorting squad of six, the giant Fijian wearing lap-lap and sandals, the Indians in pale blue, Australia’s Mery Wood, the sculler, bringing up the rear in the traditional place of the host nation.
Then, as the standards marched around the arena anti-clockwise, to form up in a straight line behind the rostrum, where Mr Brundage, Mr Kent Hughes and Sir Frank Selleck, Melbourne’s Lord Mayor, stood, the day’s high point was reached in a crowning — and unexpected—touch of genius.
Some 400 Olympic athletes, led by three Australian Gold Medallists, Betty Cuthbert, Shirley Strickland and Dawn Fraser, marched on and around the arena clockwise.
No other Olympic closing ceremony has had this final parade of athletes.
Melbourne had it because a Chinese student, in a letter to Mr Kent Hughes, thought it would help symbolise the international friendship of sport, which has been the marked feature of this Olympic Games held against a background of world anxiety.
There was a tear in the cheers the crowd gave and a sadness in the answering waves from the athletes.
Some, like Czechoslovakia’s Emil Zatopek, who waved his cap from the middle of a rank where Russians, Indians, Australians, Americans and Indonesians were marching together, have run in their last Games.
The flame, as if reluctant to go, flickered a moment, then died to the soft-breathed sigh of 100,000 voices. The choir sang the Olympic hymn.
So the ceremony moved to its end with fanfare of trumpets, sharp cracking salute from the guns, the slow march off of the Olympic flag, followed by the nations’ standards, while the choir sang the farewell song to the tune of Waltzing Matilda, then the heartfelt Will Ye No Come Back Again?
There was sadness in the ending, but not the sadness of regret. For Melbourne has now the satisfaction of great memories to treasure and to savour privately in the quiet workaday days to come, when the visitors have gone home, the decorations have disappeared and the cricketers in chaste white can once more call the Main Olympic Stadium the M.C.G.