A note from the author

A hitchhiker's guide to the fallacies

NEXT YEAR, THE LEGENDS PROJECT enters its eleventh year. It started when a young ice hockey player with an impressive knowledge of the NHL wanted to know more about the history of the local game, but could not find its heroes or folklore. Even back then there was no-one living who had grown up in the foundation years of the game. No digitized newspaper collections online, just the hard copy at the libraries. And no history to speak of, apart from a battle weary, yellowed story titled the "History of the Goodall Cup". Even that was abridged and revised beyond recognition over decades, as evidenced by the multiple versions of the original we hold. Far removed from definitive, it was like passing the Big Bad Wolf off as the history of fairy tales...

— With son, Jack, 2017 AIHL Grand Final, O'Brien Group Arena, Melbourne. [1]

WHEN I WAS INTRODUCED to the sport about 15 years ago, I was immediately struck by the notion that Victorian ice hockey seemed to have spread from a scratch game against a US warship, to every state, then the world in about 50 years. Less if you deduct the interruptions and disruption of two World Wars. The Victorians began in 1906 and were ready for the Winter Olympics in Italy in 1956, the year the Summer Olympics were hosted in Melbourne, their own capital city. For me, an architect, this mirrored the kind of enterprise that built Melbourne itself, from dust to Federal capital, in about 60 years.

That was about 10 years back when certain other states were promoting their view that they were the founders of Australian ice hockey. In fact, it was founded in Melbourne by a Melburnian, and spread by Victorians to other states as we have now evidenced. But back then you would never have known it. Not from all the talk and most of the revisionist literature. And certainly not from the resistance to change we encountered. A parochial state of mind can be useful in a fiercely competitive club or association, but it is of little value to a researcher of the broader context.

The first ice rink in Adelaide was designed and built by H Newman Reid as a commercial experiment for Australia's first international standard rink in his own home town. Yet, it had been recast as the birthplace of Australian hockey without any verifiable evidence. In Sydney, Syd Tange also claimed the founder of hockey for his state in the form of Dunbar Poole, which was just not true. H Newman Reid introduced hockey in the form of his first instructor, James Brewer of London, who was present at the birth of the modern European game that had so influenced the Victorians here during the start-up years.

Contradictions and complexities like those piled up one upon the other the deeper you looked, conspiring to veil a great story, a great achievement. No-one dared believe the Victorians drew 5,000 people to interstate clashes, even when you showed them the evidence. No-one wanted to know the Glaciarium had its own radio station in the Twenties and Thirties, not even some of the Victorians. It also seemed to polarize those in the driver's seats in various ways, but almost always with a common outcome, a sinking feeling that their train should somehow be further down the line than it is today. And perhaps there is truth in this.

Other Melburnians named Ted Molony, Jack Gordon and Harry Kleiner took this a step further in the 40s and 50s, and later still in the 80s, Pat Burley built a virtual ice sports dynasty with eight rinks in three states and many other temporary ice floors. All four of these Victorian families, including most of the children, were so heavily invested, their enterprising commercialization of hockey here and interstate came to define them. Through it, many found romance and their life partners, or soul mates, or lovers. They lived it.

The official line before the Legends research insisted the national association had formed in 1950 when ice hockey and speed skating became separate associations. In fact, it had started 27 years prior in 1923 and the main drivers were John Goodall and his school friend Leslie Reid who had moved to Sydney after the war. I've mentioned the Reids, but not the Goodall family of Somerset, England, of Melbourne, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Honolulu and New York.

Few had seen a picture of Jack, let alone knew something about him beyond the iconic Cup that bears his name, the third-oldest national ice hockey trophy still contested in the world. And even that, so emblematic of Victoria's achievement, even that had been replaced by an approximate replica, and the original sent far overseas to a permanent new home in the Hockey Hall of Fame!

John Goodall established the first national association, the first national men's and women's games and the first age-delimited junior league. His family connections with his great uncles in North America, helped to position Australian ice sports at the forefront of developments occurring worldwide, not so long after the first wave of engineered ice rinks in the world were built in the 1890s, and long before skating and ice hockey became mainstream sports. He was indeed the flux for forging much of the first superstructure of organised ice sports in Australia, over the foundations laid by the world's pioneers of commercial refrigeration in Melbourne and the Reid family.

But his contributions were more significant than even that because they heralded the development of the nation's first winter olympian and its first Olympic team spearheaded by three Canadian-born Australians‚ Jim Kendall, Doc Carson and Bud McEachern. This began as far back as June 1929, when the NSW Ice Hockey Association was granted affiliation with the NSW Olympic Council in recognition of its cultivation of "ice hockey, speed and figure skating, with a view to sending competitors to the next Games" in 1932.

The third Winter Olympics at Lake Placid in New York in 1932 were not attended by Australians. However, two of Kendall's proteges, Jim Brown and Ken Kennedy, were representing New South Wales in both ice hockey and speed skating, and winning the quarter-mile and half-mile championships. Brown was the first Australian to break British ice racing records, and the first to play hockey in the British National League when it was the biggest amateur league in the world. Kennedy followed suit in both speed skating and ice hockey and was officially sanctioned by the Australian Olympic Federation.

A few years later, in June 1939, the Australian Ice Hockey Council proposed that Australia be represented for the first time in that sport at the 1940 Games. The main difficulty was finance, but the AIHC had opened a fund with the object of raising the required £1,500 jointly between the NSW and Victorian associations. The Games in 1940 and 1944 were cancelled due to the world war. Kennedy returned in April 1946 and, within the week, the Australian Ice Hockey Association announced it was considering sending an Australian team to the 1948 Winter Olympics at St Moritz in Switzerland. A month later the NSW Association withdrew, announcing it was "not considered practicable because of the cost involved". However, the Victorians thought otherwise and Kennedy, the new president of the national association, supported them.

The VIHA was admitted to the Australian Olympic Federation in 1950, and they re-established an Olympic Fund in 1954. It received at least some support from the NSW Glaciarium management. The man who was to coach, Bud McEachern, arrived permanently from Norway where he had coached the national team to their first World Championship and Olympics. It was almost 20 years in the making, but at last everything was in place and the Australian team lodged their request with the AOF seeking permission to compete at the 1956 Winter Games in Italy. They had even offered to pay their own way, yet they did not even receive a reply. They were unable to attend, and they criticised the AOF for their disinterest.

The ice hockey squad that had been developing in Victoria's league for the past decade was performing at its best then, if not a little earlier, with the core of the team in their mid-twenties. This sad antipathy was the key factor that set Geoff Henke, Molony's son-in-law, on the path that eventually ended the neglect of winter sports in Australia, at least in the skiing and skating events. Henke was a player with the VIHA Raiders, comprised mostly of talented New Australians, and a member of the unsuccessful 1956 Olympic ice hockey squad.

Although ice hockey here had suffered a body blow as a direct result of that lost opportunity in 1956, most of the proposed team made the 1960 Games, with one New South Welshman, at a personal cost of about £600 each (about $16,000 in today's money). But they were all 4 years older and Henke and others were not among them. The average age of the 1960 squad was thirty, and a minority of only seven of the seventeen players were in their twenties.

Like the Goodall Cup, this first Australian Olympic Ice Hockey Team was emblematic of Victoria's hockey enterprise, and an equally important development in Victorian hockey history as the 108 year-old national competition. The Australians didn't beat-out opponents to win even a single game on the ice, and the association returned home in terrible debt. But they had participated and scored Olympic goals, despite the shocking antipathy leveled at them by their own Olympic federation. This was a bigger victory than winning, and it set something in motion.

There have since been times when the national competition floundered due to a lack of interest, times when they were over-reliant on imported players at the expense of locals, whole epochs when they lost almost all their rinks, when there was no Goodall Cup victory for almost 30 years, when the round peg of pro hockey refused to fit the square hole of the fiercely amateur Victorian-Australian game. Yet, the early Victorians had no problem dreaming big, and the California Games came to symbolize Victorian can-do, their ability to make a dream come true. Twenty years later, the state formed the first commercial national league and a short time after, the nation was attending World Championships every year.

When I worked on the Centenary of Australian Ice Hockey for the Victorian association some years back, I was told that we could acknowledge the Olympians but not the other great achievers of our game. No-one was really sure who they were, no-one could really agree. This one might have been better than that one. How do you tell? Over a century, the achievements of many had been revised beyond recognition, lost and forgotten. Lots of things were in the way.

The competitive culture and sub-cultures of the sport had become fiercely parochial, "It has to be one of ours". There were many amazing achievers who wore the green and gold in distant lands. But there were also many more who were good enough, but who could not afford to participate. Many who did not get asked. We are a nation at a serious disadvantage in ice sport. Rarely has there been a level playing field. We are naive to think otherwise.

Now, that's a lot on Victorian ice hockey and I was born in Brunswick, Melbourne. Am I biased?

Well, you decide. I can tell you I am a trained researcher bound by scholarly method and usually disinterested in parochialism and sentimental allegiances. You may not find the official line here, but we do work cooperatively with official bodies. We do our best, sometimes under difficult circumstances. We search for objective knowledge and we try to present it for verification by peer-review. The sport has never had that before and it helps to have important things right. Like celebrating the next centenary in the right place, in the right year. That is largely why this research is conducted independently of the politics of the sport and its power brokers.

Not, as some mischievous sectional interests would have you believe, to publish a book and make money out of it. If a hard copy book or books are published in my lifetime, the proceeds from sales will be reinvested in the annual induction celebrations of the Legends Hall of Fame. Last year, the Pilot Hall of Fame involved a jury of ten distinguished sports men and women, all of whom were members of local clubs and associations. In the future, it is proposed the HOF will operate as a Public Trust administered by a Board of Trustees with national and international representation.

Either the Patron or I will chair the Board, and it is envisaged the first Patron will be a descendant of the Goodall family, and the invitation may extend ever after. In the event of my incapacity or death, I will be replaced by my son or daughter, each of whom have been involved with the work since inception. Discussions with related organisations in Europe and North America are ongoing.

The independence of similar organisations to this from the sport's controlling interests is well-known around the world. The UK Hockey Hall of Fame was originally founded by the weekly Ice Hockey World newspaper in 1948 and re-established in 1986 by the British Ice Hockey Writer's Association (now Ice Hockey Journalists UK). The professional Hockey Hall of Fame and the International Hockey Hall of Fame were founded by James T Sutherland, a former president of the Canadian association and an ardent fan.

The sport here owes a great deal to the many, many people who have moved it forward by working independently. Among the independent builders are H Newman Reid, Pat Burley, Harry Kleiner, Jimmy Bendrodt, Ted Molony, Geoff Henke, John Goodall, Jack Gordon, the Argue family, Garry Doré, the Groenteman (Mann) family, Steve Oddy and Jim Thilthorpe, the McKowen family. Moreover, most athletes do not hold office in clubs or associations.

What about the copyrights? The original work is copyrighted in my name because I am its author and curator, and the exclusive rights for its use and distribution are legal rights granted to me under Australian law. I try to protect it and its imagery from unauthorized use by others. Especially from those who would commercially gain from it, without recompense to its contributors. I ensure authorship and ownership is properly credited, but I would like you to be aware that we have only rarely declined genuine requests to use it.

Nonetheless, there are countless Wikipedia articles worldwide that have used its primary source citations and other material, sometimes without even seeking permission. Often the original Legends work is used as a storyboard or road map to rework something slightly different from the Legends citations, saving many, many hours of investigative research. They should reference all their sources according to scholarly method, or at least as a matter common decency, but many do not. I don't consider this fair use, but at least, to the best of my knowledge, it is not being unfairly exploited for commercial gain.

Legends research has been used and supported by state and national associations and the AIHL. The Centenary of Victorian Ice Hockey was celebrated around it by Ice Hockey Victoria in Melbourne in 2009. The Centenary of the Goodall Cup was celebrated around it by the national association in Adelaide in 2009. Parts of it have appeared in publications by the Australian Ice Hockey League since 2008 and continue to do so.

We are a provider of content to many other organisations, including magazines and newspapers, live streamed video, writers, overseas universities, and even film producers. We also complete many research requests from club or association members without charge. We are not only not-for-profit, we are not commercial. We have never charged anyone for anything, although we benefit many.

The project is privately-funded and we have so far declined all donations for ethical reasons. The nature of the work holds greater than usual potential for conflicts of interest. Our own integrity is as important to us as the character and integrity of prospective Legends inductees. We have spent a long time protecting it and we will continue to do so. Opportunities to contribute to the Legends Hall of Fame celebrations may arise in the near future, and we will be very grateful for any public assistance at that time.

Finally, I would like to express our gratitude to every one of the countless people who have so far contributed to the project. They are too numerous to mention here, but they are properly credited throughout the Legends website. Their only reward is the website itself, now archived in perpetuity by National Archives Australia. Perhaps a website is even better for our time than a book in a public library, because it is constantly kept up-to-date with new information, and it is available anytime, online, in our own pockets.

You can tell a champion by their athletic prowess, by their leadership skills, by their ability to work in teams. A Builder, by the rinks they build, manage or operate. By the teams they create, manage or coach. But what if coaching in sport or teaching at school was more than learning how to score a goal, play an instrument of even win a scholarship? What if our No 1 goal was to develop good people for our country — good citizens who will contribute to the quality of life in Australia and the world?

When the question turns to legendary sporting achievement, it is almost always a matter of the value it adds to the sport and to the nation. Did it inspire contemporaries, did it inspire Australians? Did it take the sport, the nation, to a better place? Did the character of the achiever shine through the passage of time with honour and integrity? Without blemish, without being compromised?

Character is who we are when no one is looking. Having good character means doing the right thing just because it is right to do. It means having empathy, courage, fortitude, honesty, and loyalty — all of our values, morals, judgment, decisions that we carry with us. Character is how we define ourselves, and not how others define us. It matters here.

IIHF historian, Birger Nordmark, once described Legends of Australian Ice as the best hockey website in the world. Remote as we are from ice sports' centres of excellence, we really do live in the best corner of the world. Of course, a website cannot compensate for the tyranny of our distance, but this one is nonetheless a veritable time machine that we hope will be used with pride by every fan of Australian ice sports for a very long time to come.



Ross Carpenter
Melbourne, October 2017