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Australians embraced the boxer less than 12 months after the 1967 referendum on Indigenous rights
Fifty years ago today, Lionel Rose defeated Fighting Harada in Tokyo to become Australia’s first Aboriginal world champion. For a time in 1968 and 1969, he was the most famous Indigenous person in Australia, and perhaps the most famous Australian athlete in the world.
It’s hard to overstate the impact Rose had in his home country. He was the first Indigenous person to be named Australian of the Year. He released a hit country record. He was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Elvis Presley wanted to spend time with him. When Rose returned from his win over Harada, 100,000 Melburnians lined the streets.
The softly spoken 19-year-old saw the crowds and asked the flight attendant whether the Beatles were in the front of the plane.
It’s hard to blame Rose for doubting whether the reception was for him. When he stepped down the stairs brandishing a samurai sword, it had been less than 12 months since the 1967 referendum on Indigenous rights, and Australia’s embrace of Rose the champion was the exact inverse of its treatment of his Indigenous family.
He grew up in a single room tin hut at Jackson’s Flat, an Aboriginal settlement outside Warragul, east of Melbourne. His parents had not been welcome in the town proper because of the colour of their skin. There was no running water or electricity, children rarely went to school and were often sick. “Sometimes all we had to eat was black tea and damper,” Rose remembered later.
He learned the rudiments of the sport from his father, Roy, a former tent boxer, hitting a flour sack filled with sand hung from a gum tree. After showing promise as an amateur he moved to Melbourne where he lived with his trainer and manager, Jack Rennie.
Never a huge puncher, Rose was lightning fast and stylish. Despite his smoking (he was eventually convinced to switch from a pipe to cigarettes for health reasons), he was phenomenally well-conditioned.
Rose holds up a samurai sword on his victorious return to Melbourne in 1968. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images
In boxing history, Rose was a shooting star. His reputation is based almost entirely on his performances during an 18-month period in 1968 and 1969. During that time he fought two of the best boxers of the 20th century in Harada and Ruben Olivares, as well as a number of tough contenders, earning him a spot as one of Australia’s all-time greats.
After losing to Olivares he fought on until 1976, but never regained a world title, nor the form he showed during that brief but incredible run at bantamweight.
Rose’s retirement wasn’t always happy — he struggled with the same things that suddenly superannuated young men with cash to burn always do — but he was supported by his family, admirers and former coaches. He died in 2011.
At Rose’s funeral, Archie Roach spoke about the excitement of listening to him fight on the radio and being told by a foster carer, “This man who’s fighting, he’s your people.”
Warren Mundine referred to Rose as his childhood hero in his 2017 biography, writing that he and his family “screamed and yelled and danced around the room” when Rose beat Harada. No doubt many Indigenous Australians of a certain age can recall sitting down to listen and feeling a similar sense of pride.
In that sense, if Rose reminds me of anyone in boxing history, it’s Joe Louis. He may not have been as outspoken, as charismatic, or as political as those who followed him, but Louiswas the heavyweight champion who united African Americans.
The author Kasia Boddy notes that it’s almost impossible to find an African American biography that covers the 1930s and doesn’t recall, as Miles Davis put it, “sitting around the radio waiting to hear the announcer describe Joe knocking some motherfucker out”.
In an era of corporatised sport, it’s easy to be cynical about the idea of athletes as role models. But, like Louis, Rose was a visible example of excellence for a community so marginalised it had few others.
Fifty years on, with Indigenous excellence on show not just in the ring and on the field, but in many other walks of Australian life, Rose is still worth celebrating.
(GUARDIAN)
