You notice many curious things as you fly across Australia. It is not just the size of this barely inhabited continent that the mind struggles to compute. As you stare from a tiny plane window, on to a landscape that could easily double for Mars or Jupiter, it is always a surprise to see just how much is happening across this alien interior. Salt lakes the size of inland seas pockmark the landscape like lunar craters (or particularly hazardous golf bunkers). Giant rock ranges crinkle the brown earth for hundreds of miles at a stretch.
There are other shapes you notice from the air too, when you finally reach the populated areas by the coast. Ovals, everywhere. The symmetrical shapes leap out at you, dotted across the landscape, perfectly formed oases of green amid the roofs of Monopoly bungalows. There are rectangles, too, their boundary lines so crisply marked they are easily readable from 15,000ft, a geometry test sketched out in blue and white. Football pitches, cricket grounds, tennis courts. Recreational facilities as far as the eye can see.
On a month-long trip, taking me thousands of miles back and forth across the country, I cannot help but find their regular presence comforting. They reinforce all the preconceptions that I, as a Brit, have always had of Australian culture. Notions informed by decades of Home and Away credits – surfers holding their boards in silhouette, lifesavers sprinting into the sea – not to mention endless traumatic childhood memories of men wearing gold-and-green polyester beating my teams at rugby and cricket.
To outsiders Australia presents as a sports-mad country, one where balls are being endlessly thrown, booted and thwacked, where you learn to swim in utero and are handed your first boogie board as soon as you can crawl on to it. Four decades of travelling here to visit family and friends have never altered that impression.
For a sports lover Australia looks pretty much like heaven. There are few places left in the earthly realms, after all, where you can stumble across so much live sporting action – from rugby to soccer, netball to cycling – on free-to-air channels. Or where – during Big Bash season, at least – cricket becomes part of a family’s evening ritual, flung on the TV for the kids while dinner’s cooking.
Is it all a mirage? Administrators and players alike will tell you the country’s sporting culture is in crisis. And we are not just talking sandpapergate, or Israel Folau’s latest Instapreach. National teams have been underperforming for years. Olympic medal stocks have plummeted.
It is 20 years since Australia achieved their unprecedented personal superslam, winning the cricket and rugby world cups, the Tri Nations rugby league, the Davis Cup, the netball world championships and the Hockey Champions Trophy. They followed it up with the unforgettable glory of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, launching a generation of icons from Cathy Freeman to Ian Thorpe.
But the glow of that golden age has long faded. In November 200 Olympians, Freeman included, called on their new prime minister, Scott Morrison, to restore dwindling Olympic funding. He declined. A month later Stirling Mortlock, the former Wallabies rugby captain, proclaimed “enough is enough”, decrying the “negative spiral” across all Aussie sports and homegrown coaches leaving for overseas jobs.
Elite sport is not suffering in a vacuum. Further down the chain Australians have been losing their active habits, with an obesity epidemic affecting two-thirds of the adult population (only the United States and Chile have a higher rate of overweight men). The CEO of Sport Australia, Kate Palmer, recently lamented that four out of five children are failing to get the recommended one hour of physical activity a day.
It is hard to believe, visiting coastal towns where tanned, honed bodies are on display at outrageously early hours, grabbing their green juice on their way to the beach. Rare is the day when I make it to a café without being overtaken by a pair of octogenarian power walkers. The pavements are lined with joggers, cyclists, skateboarders, and dripping kids in towelling ponchos, just out of the water.
But the reality is more complex. Last year the government released its Sport 2030 plan, acknowledging the health challenges faced by its increasingly sedentary population. A country once considered a decade or more ahead of the rest of the world in terms of its attitudes to sport is now trying something new. Recalibrating its priorities, it is diverting its attention from elite success to inclusive grassroots programmes – everything from non-competitive lacrosse to holistic ice-skating to barefoot lawn bowls.
Recent figures are encouraging. Research released last month showed that overall levels of participation in sport and exercise are up by 3% from 2017. Meanwhile Australian rules football’s launch of a televised national women’s league has inspired a huge increase in young girls taking up the sport. And while it is not immune to criticism, the sport has demonstrated a thoughtful approach to coaching its female recruits, with national club guidelines that offer practical advice on relationship and social factors in girls’ sport – from the importance of showing empathy to choosing the right kit.
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It remains to be seen if Australia has chosen the right path. But either way it is a thought-provoking one, a decision that recognises how the unstoppable boom of the sports industry does not, of itself, lead to healthier lifestyles. The myth of the trickle-down economy has been busted and, as the Sport 2030 report hinted, multimillion-dollar TV rights deals have led to more time spent watching sport than taking it up.
Perhaps Australia can prove, once again, to be sporting pioneers. In the meantime the image of a sports-obsessed nation that it projects to the rest of the world is only half the story – not unlike those ideas we have of its endless red desert.
