The Sydney Olympics showed us a bolder Australia. So, 25 years on, did we get there?

This time 25 years ago, Sydney, and Australian officialdom, were exhibiting signs of performance anxiety. The opening of the 2000 Olympic Games was a matter of weeks away. Pre-emptive knocking stories had revelled in the 2 million tickets which remained unsold, a rift in the organising committee and even whether the closing ceremony should feature a troupe of drag queens dressed in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert-style regalia. The city was also about to undergo a mass exodus, with Sydneysiders fleeing town. To advertise out-of-town rental properties, this very masthead used the tagline “Escape the Olympics”.

Then came the opening ceremony, with its joyous reframing of the national story. Rarely, if ever, had it been rendered in such a playful, soulful, inclusive and rancour-free way. What better prelude for the “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” euphoria and per capita pride that followed, during which Ian Thorpe glided through the pool to victory and Cathy Freeman almost levitated above the track. Juan Antonio Samaranch, the then president of the International Olympics Committee, declared Sydney “the best Olympics Games ever.” Australia had not only passed a test but aced it.

In a country in which sport has always been “a prime metaphor for Australian life”, as Robert Hughes put it in the 2000 Olympic souvenir programme, athletic carnivals were freighted with more meaning and thus had the potential to be nation-changing. Almost a half century earlier, that had been true of the Melbourne Games. In 1956, when the portcullis of the White Australia policy was still shut tight, the Olympics brought a much-needed burst of multiculturalism. When Melburnians were asked to open their homes to visitors because the city’s hotels could not cope with the influx, civic authorities feared racial prejudices would fester. Instead, nobler instincts prevailed. Applications for the Olympic hostess scheme showed a bias towards non-Anglo arrivals. “After that, the White Australia policy had no chance of survival,” Clive James later observed. Many of the Chinese and Japanese chefs drafted in at the last minute from P&O liners to feed athletes from Asia decided afterwards to make their homes here. They became part of Australia’s culinary awakening.

Just as Melbourne paved the way for greater racial diversity, Sydney took the country further along the path of reconciliation. On “Magic Monday”, 10 days after igniting the Olympic flame, Cathy Freeman sprinted to gold. The 49.11 seconds she took to race around the track weren’t even a blink of the eye in the 65-millennia history of this continent. Nonetheless, it was a moment drenched in symbolism. On her victory lap, Freeman draped over her shoulders both the Australian and Aboriginal flags – colours deliberately braided together. Cheering on Cathy Freeman became both an act of patriotism and a form of atonement: a way of saying “sorry” when the then prime minister, John Howard, refused to utter that word.

In hosting the first Olympics of the new millennium, Australia presented itself as a model of modernity. Held on the site of a former waste dump at Homebush, these were to be the “Green Games”, with an emphasis on sustainability and urban regeneration. It also became the first truly online Olympics, which provided the spur for Telstra to upgrade its mobile network. The Melbourne Olympics had witnessed a bigger technological leap: the launch of ABC TV, which broadcast for the first time just in time for the games.

For a far-off land often defined by remoteness and provincialism, the internationalism of the Olympics, along with the innovations it wrought, contributed to the taming of distance. Self-congratulation and even self-love elbowed aside self-belittlement. Paul Keating, in a speech delivered after the Olympic flame had been extinguished, observed the Sydney Olympics gave “Australians a chance to look at ourselves, and we liked what we saw”.

In the 1950s, Melbourne had been seen as a coming of age. “For this Olympic period the youth is called upon to perform adult functions,” observed The Age. Sydney was portrayed as yet another rite of passage, dusting off the tired trope that Australia resides in a perpetual state of pimply pubescence. Even if the Melbourne and Sydney games were not necessarily transitional, they were certainly transformational. And perhaps their stimulus effect was even more pronounced since both prime ministers of the day – Sir Robert Menzies and John Howard – were sometimes suspicious of societal change. When it came to multiculturalism and reconciliation, the Olympics acted as catalysts for fresh national thinking – sometimes beyond the imagination of ruling politicians.

It is a shame in many ways that Australia has to wait until 2032 for its next opportunity to serve as host (in 2028, in what should be the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, Los Angeles will stage the next summer games). After a quarter-century marked by political instability, policy stasis and national drift, the country is crying out for the impetus of the Olympics effect. It is not that Australia has anything to prove. Surely there is no need to come of age yet again. But with productivity growth at a 60-year low, the country could certainly do with getting its mojo back, and with it a renewed sense of national purpose, optimism and can-do spirit.

This time, one would hope, the Brisbane Olympics will bring meaningful lasting change. Those “Green Games” in Sydney were followed by a quarter-century of climate wars. Freeman’s “400 metres of reconciliation”, to borrow the phrase coined by the then Labor leader, Kim Beazley, did not propel First Nations peoples that far and serves now as a reminder of the distance still to travel.

“Gold, gold, gold for Australia” will doubtless be the cry in Brisbane. After the listlessness and inertia which followed those glorious games in Sydney, what the country needs beforehand is seven years of “bold, bold, bold”.

Nick Bryant is the author of The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost its Way.

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