Legends of Australian Ice

Legends

The story of the first century of Australian ice hockey, from its foundations at the turn of last century, to the Australian Ice Hockey League.

Articles are ordered chronologically and grouped in several time periods via tabs. To see all titles, be sure to choose all tabs. Titles shown in grey are not yet available on this latest version of the website. See the Articles section of the old Legends website.

Melbourne

When this website started, 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...

1890sMelbourne

It wasn't for the glory that followed. Nor even for the money. For the English-born son of a prominent Melbourne clergyman and Shakespearean scholar, it was more the challenge of engineering the first ice arenas in the driest continent on earth. Refrigeration was one of the great engineering achievements of the 19th century, and that was nowhere more heartfelt than in the Australian climate. As it happened, Melbourne was already at the forefront of ice technology. It had been pioneered nearby at Geelong and, typical of Australian priorities, it was soon commercialised to cool large quantities of beer.

1904-1908Adelaide

"A throne is only a bench covered with velvet," Bonaparte once said, and that was exactly how we watched Australia's very first ice sports.

1906-1956Melbourne

THE CRADLE OF NATIONAL ICE SPORTS: Melbourne GlaciariumIt was the longest operating rink of the original indoor rink era in Australia, perhaps the world. Then, vacant and unused, the building was destroyed by fire on Good Friday, 1963, and this time it did not rise from its ashes. It was the cradle of National ice sports, a major building of National significance, and its spirit lives on.

1906-1908Melbourne

GENESIS: THE FIRST GAMES Australia's first ice hockey games were an international exchange of goodwill because for the first time hockey was able to be played against visiting teams from North America on a world-class rink designed for "their" game.

1907Melbourne

THE MASTER SHOWMAN: Dunbar Poole and the sport of kings He helped set-up the first three ice rinks in Australia at the turn of last century, played on the first ice hockey team in 1906, won a Goodall Cup with Jim Kendall in 1911, and another as team manager in 1930 with Jimmy Brown. Yet, he represented Sweden in the figure skating Worlds in 1910 and 1911 and went on to manage rinks in Ottawa, London and Scotland, earning himself the reputation of "Master Showman". Dunbar Poole served as secretary-treasurer of the New South Wales ice hockey association and was its third life member, yet he was also inducted to the Australian Figure Skating Hall of Fame...

1907-1955Sydney

SKATERS OF SYDNEY: Sydney GlaciariumTen skaters from Melbourne helped the developers open Sydney's glistening new rink in a text book lesson in collaboration. Over the thirty years that followed, the skaters of Sydney produced the State's first national men's champion, the first Australian woman to compete in a world figure skating championship, Australia's first international ice hockey player, and its first Winter Olympian.

1909Melbourne

Whatever else it lacked, the Goodall Cup was durable, and this was surely the quality that eventually won the respect of its carefree handlers. The honourable scars this veteran wears suggest it is anything but the symbol of Australian ice hockey supremacy. But the history of Goodall Cup hockey is the history of hockey in Australia, and the names that appear on the trophy really have made the game's history. Part 1 of this 2-part story documents the years from inception in 1909, until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

1909Sydney

The man who scored the first ever Goodall Cup goal was an Anzac and a well-to-do "gentleman" who didn't need to work.

1909Sydney

He was one of the few men in the world — one of just two goalies in the world — to contest the first Goodall Cup, the champagne trophy of Australian ice hockey.

1913Melbourne

The story of the Steele family and the second president of the Victorian Ice Hockey Association (VIHA).

1914Melbourne

THE ADF: Australian ice hockey and the fight for the free worldIce hockey began here with the generation that gave the world the first Anzacs. A reading of the history of Australian Defense Force men and women in active service who played, is like a reading of the history of the game itself. They were there from the beginning, they still are, and more than a few were major influencers.

1917New York

Victoria's first ice hockey captain and his partner were Australia's first professional ice show performers and skating instructors at the international level. Bobbie was a judge and council member of the National Ice Skating Association of Australia (NISAA) formed in 1931, and he remained active in skating and curling for many more years.

1921 to 1939Melbourne

INGLORIOUS FORTUNES: Ted Molony and the art of losing For 24 years between 1922 and 1947, Victoria contested all 17 interstate series without ever winning a Goodall Cup, while their opponents won 9 or 10. Jimmy Brown won 11 and a tie. Sydney's Percy Wendt and Jack Pike were respectively top scorer and runner-up in the first half-century of the game, while successive generations of Victoria's top players came and went with nothing. It was the longest losing streak in the annals of Australian ice hockey until Victoria lost 26 Cups straight between 1980 and 2009, although that is a story less difficult to fathom. The greatest mystery in the long history of the Goodall Cup, the symbol of Australian ice hockey supremacy, is Victoria's inglorious fortunes between the wars.

1922Sydney

Once hailed "the finest all-round woman athlete in Australia", she was a national tennis and rowing champion as well as a talented swimmer, surfer and horse-rider. One of Sydney's leading figure skaters and seven-times captain of the New South Wales ladies ice hockey team in her forties, she had pursued a sporting career in her youth that was nothing short of spectacular.

1923Melbourne

There was probably no man alive in the early-1940s whose father had fought with Wellington against Napoleon in 1815. Except, of course, this former president of the Victorian Ice Hockey Association and Chairman of Directors of Glaciarium Ltd.

1923Sydney

She went to Sydney uni, she hung out in slummy Newtown, and she "played boys' games in skirts that were shortened to six inches above the ground.

1923Melbourne

THE LAST SUPPER: Albert Enders and Sadie Cambridge Sadie and Albert Enders were born in Australia, but their love of skating brought them to South Africa and England before landing in Canada in 1940. The Enders’ were coaching pioneers in singles, ice dance, and particularly pairs, having been pair skaters themselves. The coaching duo guided Skate Canada Hall of Famers Suzanne Morrow and Wallace Diestelmeyer to Olympic and World bonze medals in 1948, among many other of their students’ successes. The Enders’ are being honoured posthumously.

1925Melbourne

So it's a backbeach in the summer, the chalet for the snow, from Portsea pier to the roulette wheels of Juan-les-Pins, Nan Irving played them all, and played to win.

1934Sydney

BLOMBERG THEORY: Axel Axel Lennart Blomberg (1911 - 1993) He hadn't played ice hockey, yet when Swedish bandy player Lennart Blomberg moved to Sydney in the 1930s he became netminder for St George IHC, and almost the state's first overseas goaltender in a sea of local netminding talent.

1937Melbourne

He was a necessary acquisition for a State team struggling for competitive balance against opponents who had already played a crack Canadian goal-scorer for seven seasons, and ruthlessly corralled a national trophy for sixteen.

1938Sydney

LEFTY: Percy Wendt and the game-changer goals In 1938, Ken Lewis, the visiting Canadian Bears manager remarked, "We are supposed to be invincible in hockey. Of course, you must admit that the old guy from Toronto Canada, who played for New South Wales had a big part in your smart moves..." He was speaking of Sydney's Percy Wendt, who did not shirk the rough and tumble when it came to a point, but preferred to dazzle the opposition with science in a remote and unconnected sort of way, leaving in his wake a puzzled lot of players who felt so completely thwarted, they wanted to whack him hard with their sticks.

1938Sydney

TALKIE: Russ Carson and the road less traveled Carson was the first in Australian ice hockey to romance the Olympic dream, perhaps because of his remote, small-town beginnings. By the 1930s, pro hockey teams and leagues were a "North American reality", but pro teams were not viable in the remote northwest, and might never be. There were just too many others with more money and more concentrated populations who also loved the game. Russ Carson chose the road less travelled, trailblazing a path to the Olympics for Australian ice hockey.

1938Sydney

THE PROFESSIONALS: Jimmy Bendrodt and the Ice Palais Bears Commercialisation of ice hockey in Australia first occurred in Sydney in 1938. It was razor sharp and positively icy.

1938Melbourne

THE HOUSE THAT HARRY BUILT: Harry Kleiner and the skaters of St MoritzThe story of H H Kleiner's St Moritz Ice Palais on the St Kilda foreshore in Melbourne.

1944Calgary Canada

THE GATES OF FREEDOM Few know that Australian and New Zealand hockey players were curtain-raisers for the Chicago Blackhawks and the Toronto Red Wings [sic] at Victoria Arena in Calgary Alberta during the 1940s.

1940sShanghai

SHANGHAI GHETTO: Kurt Defris and the myth of the underdogThere was one place to which a Jewish refugee did not want to flee, until eventually even that looked like heaven. Such was the experience of Kurt Defris.

1945Melbourne

He was 19 when he saw his first game of ice hockey in 1945, yet one of the top scorers in the new A-grade when the game resumed in Melbourne in 1946. Noel Derrick played an astonishing 27 years without ever missing a game to become one of the most prolific scorers of his time.

1946Melbourne

The Australian game peaked in the 1950s coinciding with the big change that came with the migration inflow in the late-Forties and early-Fifties. The war years had produced the first intensive coaching programs in both States and the first corporate sponsorships for local teams. The return of Australia's first internationals and changes to the rules placed the game on a different footing and the focus of the sport's organisers shifted to commercialisation and international competitiveness.

1948Melbourne

ONCE UPON A TIME: Reg Park and the storybook story. Reg Park competed in the World Professional Championships seven times and twice in the Pairs event. He skated for seventy years, from age eleven in 1939 at the new St Moritz Ice Palais in Melbourne, until he retired in Canberra at 81 in 2009. Reg had been in the ice show at Wembley so often, wrote a London theatre critic, he may as well change his name to Wembley Park, the nearest tube station.

1948Melbourne

Waiting for Victoria to win back the Cup between the wars was like leaving the porch light on for Harold Holt, but when they did we got the first All-Australian ice hockey team.

1949Hobart TAS

VAN DEMONS LAND: W D Counsell and the Twilight TarnIce skating on the Apple Isle had its roots in the frozen tarns of the Tasmanian wilderness in the 1920s. In the late 40s, a new wave of European immigrants and touring ice show stars helped create Tasmania's first Olympic-size ice rink and ice sports clubs.

1949Perth WA

EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST: Bruce Carroll and Perth Ice Palais The foundation story of ice sports in the West coincided with the first rinks in both Perth and Tasmania. Although the state's first four hockey clubs and controlling body were short-lived, hockey and skating returned to the city at the Premier Ice Rink in 1963.

1949Melbourne

PRAGUE 20: Ivo Bohumil Vesely (1926 - 2002) From war-torn Prague, to the moors of York, this young Czech national stepped over the German border into a new life in the free world and helped Australian ice hockey to its first Olympics.

1949Melbourne

To Victorians, this former Goodall Cup champion, coach and administrator was once a Hungarian socialite, doctor of laws, lawyer, member of parliament and millionaire. The world knows him as one of the best Hungarian players of all time.

1950Melbourne and Sydney

RAIDER NATION: Jack Skolnik and the import businessAmateur ice hockey, which began in Australia as a diplomatic gesture for a world trade in frozen export products, turned into a world trade in imported ice hockey professionals within fifty years. With the help of Jack Skolnik and healthy youth development programs, Australian soccer eventually emerged from underneath the import business. But what about his ice hockey team?

1950Melbourne and Hobart

He blazed across Europe leaving trails of flame and when he fell to earth it was in Australia. With players and coaches of his calibre, we can only imagine how Tasmanian hockey might have evolved had its first rink survived.

1952Melbourne

OUTSIDE IN: Bud McEachern and the Olympic outsidersIt started long ago in the Palais de Sports in Paris, perhaps earlier in the quest for the Allan Cup, or the bitter feuds in the Maritimes. Whenever and wherever it began, it lasted a sporting lifetime and left an indelible imprint on Australian ice hockey's pursuit of the Olympic dream. Coach Bud McEachern turned outside in for his team of post-war hockey outsiders on a mission to defeat their most fearsome opponent — the antipathy in their own backyard.

1952Sydney

Viv Chalwin made an important contribution to Australian sport, not least of which was his patronage and commercialisation of the post-war ice hockey league in New South Wales.

1952Sydney

The second installment on the history of New South's most successful club profiles the foundation player-coach, Emil Butchatsky, who played more hockey here than in his homeland or anywhere elsewhere in Europe.

1952Sydney

The third installment on the history of New South's most successful club profiles the foundation captain, Dick Groenteman (Mann).

1960Brisbane

BRIS VEGAS: the Messengers and the first ice rinks in Brisbane.The Sunshine State was last to open an ice rink to the public, years after Australia's first rinks down south had celebrated a half century of ice sports and closed.

1960California USA

THE GLASS SLIPPER: Australian Ice Hockey at the Olympics The enchanted legacy of the Australians who danced on ice with hockey's elite at the VIII Winter Olympics.

1961Melbourne

THE ADAGIO FLIER: Carie Richardson's adventurous journey Carie & Joop forged an act on the mercurial surface of show ice from the blistering circuit of international tours, working hard and partying harder. No one raked over the complexities of what they were doing. The synergy was quick and alchemical. We are here, they said. We are clean and precise.

1962Colorado Springs USA

AUSTRALIA'S RED LETTER DAY: Denver Coliseum March 15th 1962 What happened to Australia after a winless debut at the 1960 Olympics? The story of Australia's 2nd World Championship.

1962Melbourne Australia

ADVENTURES IN PARADISE: Tony Martyr and the never-ending game From the Fifties boom years of Victorian ice hockey's Golden Era, to the Sixties Olympic ice hockey qualification teams and the world stage, Tony Martyr's adventures in paradise on Australia's Gold Coast extended his career like no other.

1964Brisbane

It's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace, and a world competitiveness we must master. Our junior and youth squads matter for as long as we want our national team to be populated by Australian-born players.

1964Tokyo Japan

THE GOD'S CROSSING: Australia's elimination at the 1964 GamesThe story of Australian ice hockey's elimination at the 1964 Winter Olympic playoffs.

1964Adelaide

NEVERLAND: Bill Young and the West End boysBehind the rivalry, there is a kind of brotherhood between Adelaide and Melbourne ice sports, a kinship linked by a common history. Young's twenty-year association with St Moritz Adelaide was made possible by Melbourne developers, mirroring the making of the city's first rink in ways that were almost magical, right down to their common foundation on quad roller skating.

1964Melbourne

ICELANDER: Pat Burley and the temples of hopeEight permanent rinks in 3 states and countless touring and temporary ice floors. For a time, Burley's temples of hope ended an era of neglect, a time of despair when most of those in a position to help Australian ice sports had either gone out of business or turned a blind eye.

1960sMelbourne

In the 1960s, Franciscus van Rijswijk finished his career down under with the St Moritz Pirates then coached the Ringwood Junior Flyers.

1969Sydney

A HOTEL SOMEPLACE: Part 1—Syd Tange and the game anyone can play Against a grey backdrop of senior self-interest, interstate parochialism, and a general malaise of indifference, Part 1 of this story explains how Syd Tange came to be associated with the the first junior National; when the other junior tournaments arrived; and why it took 39 years for John Goodall's original age-delimited junior hockey initiative to reach the national stage.

1969Sydney

A HOTEL SOMEPLACE: Part 2—Juniors in search of excellence The second instalment of the history of the junior ice hockey movement in Australia, including a database of state champions for the Tange Trophy and all other Junior tournaments since inception.

1970sMelbourne

CAPTAIN OF BRITAIN: Robbie Stevenson and the ice gladiatorsWhere was Australian hockey when Britain's captain and top point scorer emigrated to Australia in 1970?

1971Sydney

THE KISS OF DEBT: Dick Mann and the EAIHLThe breakaway Eastern Australian Ice Hockey League could have been a vehicle for Dick Mann's incentive-driven league proposal. Well-suited to a country like Australia where ice hockey was less well established, it opened up the possibility of competing against higher ranked nations as it grew. Or it could have been an ultimatum like the local association thought. Change is hard for some. Especially those for whom success is determined less on the ice, than in the shadowy haunts of a sport's double dealers.

1973Melbourne

VIHDC: Elgin Luke and the Ministry of YouthIn the late Seventies and Eighties, Junior development snowballed. Branded white on the dark navy of the state's ice hockey finery, this veritable ministry of youth development was a shot to the veins of Australian ice hockey. But, before then, it was known as the VIHDC. The Victorian Ice Hockey Development Council.

1977Melbourne

THE STRIDE OF GIANTS: Graham Argue and the rink entrepreneursWhat happened when Germany's Olympic ice hockey medalists strode the world in the Seventies, dropping in on Team Australia at Melbourne's suburban ice rinks? What happened was a great moment for ice hockey in Australia at the time, a much needed injection for the depressed sport of the time, and an administrative breakdown of gigantic proportions.

1977Sydney

KILLER: Kevin Price and the first rule of ice hockeyWithout the Canadian imports, Australian ice hockey would never have undergone its commercial revolution in the 1980s, but it came at a price. What happened when the Australian game burst out of the beer leagues of the 1970s and returned to its own sporting culture? What happened was a junior development revolution, was frustration with the limitations of amateurism, and rediscovery of the way forward by an ambitious new breed.

1978Sydney

THE NORTH AMERICA OZ HOP: Sandi Logan and the NIHLThe CP Air sponsor package was different to most, designed to benefit the developing juniors of Ice Hockey, not the League, the Clubs or participants. Juniors had no National Team, and the neglect of junior development combined with lobbying encouraged CP Air to take up the reigns through the NIHL. Its sponsorship plan, which included scholarships for junior players in Canada and overseas coaches and referees for Australian clinics, was one way CP Air made its presence more widely felt in what was developing into a lucrative route . . .

1980Sydney

MAN ADVANTAGE: Wendy Ovenden and the higher goalShe learned to play hockey with boys, then learned to coach them. She was there at the dawn of the first local women's team, the first state women's team, the first national women's league, the first international women's team. She was a trailblazing champion who excelled all the way to a point of departure, then left the game without once looking back.

1980Adelaide

WINDY POINT: John Botterill and the power of perspectiveFrom a farm on the Manitoba Prairie, to grape-picking in the Barossa, he backpacked one of the longest roads an Australian hockey coach has ever taken. This career spanning over thirty years is already one of the most accomplished, certainly the most diverse, and it just keeps on truckin'.

1980Adelaide

THE LAKE HOUSE: Arte Malste and the hammer of the godsThirty-seven years ago a new state-of-the art ice rink was the essential difference between coming first and coming last in a brand new new league. There were reasons for moving here and reasons for staying on. With time, friends became important to him.

1981Sydney

MR HOCKEY: Phil Ginsberg and the lifetime playerIf someone said the growth of Australian ice sports was limited by a shortage of ice rinks you might agree. But what would you say if someone said the number of ice rinks is limited by the economic growth of Australian ice sports?

1982Melbourne

A REMINDER OF WHAT WE CAN BE: Scott Davidson and the first World JuniorsAustralian hockey was in big trouble before the arrival of overseas coaches in the early Eighties. When the nation reached out to Canada for help, the CAHA considered it carefully, and were very particular about who they sent. Scott Davidson was one of the young uni grads who stuck his hand up, and it wasn't for a hockey holiday. At 22, the young ambassador of Canada's game blazed a trail for our country's first World Juniors, changing the way we thought about the top-level game forever.

1982Adelaide

GURO: Vlad Mihal and the art of sticksHe captained Czechoslavakia's U20 Championship team, then defected to Adelaide Australia where he was a scoring leader and a state and national representative player in not one, but two extreme sports.

1981Sydney

BLOODLINE: David Turik and the home of championsAlthough it has been in his blood for a half a century, the part of David Turik's hockey career that unfolded in Australia has spanned 35 years, on and off, morphing from pro netminder to hockey entrepreneur with business partner, Rick Williams.

1982Sydney

CANADIAN SNIPER: Craig Hutchinson and the six-goal gameFrom the Cariboo to the UBC Thunderbirds, from Canterbury United to the Warringah Bombers, he took the Australian ice hockey scene by storm. From the birth of the NSW Super League in the early-Eighties, Craig Hutchinson averaged almost 3 points a game, and a personal best of six.

1982Sydney

BLAZE OF GLORY: Glen Foll and the higher levelHe captained Australia's World Championship team for so long he set the IIHF world record, then just disappeared from the world stage.

1983Adelaide

GUNNER: Geoff Rains and living the dreamHe rose through the new player development system — from the inaugural President's Trophy in '83 to his last Goodall Cup in '96 — and along the way he was in the vanguard of local players who moved overseas to further their hockey careers.

1987Sydney

THE SOUL OF A NEW TEAM: Ryan Switzer and the greater gameAfter the curtain went down on Australian ice hockey in the Eighties, another went up on a new breed of team at the dawn of the new decade. The young athletes of Ryan Switzer's assault on the world stage, broke with old school ties and ad hocery, to blaze a path into the unchartered territory of the nation's international game. They delivered the most competitive and sustained ice hockey results Australia had achieved up until then, by raising the sum of their parts to something greater. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, their labour of love and the secret to its chemistry — their legacy — are either misunderstood or ignored.

1992Sydney

TABOO: Ellen Jones and the magic skatesThe "Newtown Tart" stigma that women hockey players at Sydney Uni had endured in the 1920s, had become "Tom Boy" by the 1990s, but all it did was fuel a raging fire, a passion to belong in a sport in which her family was no stranger. It seemed she burned as brightly here as in the USA, but after peewees the task of hammering out the first women's league for her state and nation was left to her father and a handful of like-minded people.

1999Sydney

GIFTS THAT KEEP GIVING: Kathy Berg and open-hearted heroismFor eight remarkable years Kathy Berg coached Australia in women's ice hockey, from the founding of the first National Team in 1999, through its first international qualifications in 2000 and 2001, to three Women's Worlds. But her protégés will tell you it was much more than that. Berg left no stone unturned in her fabulous quest to expand the sport she loves.

2000Sydney

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: The AIHL and the fight for the Big LeagueAs the NSW Superleague stumbled and fell in the Nineties, three teams survived to decide its future: the Adelaide Avalanche, the Sydney Bears, the Canberra Knights. They met among the smouldering embers one last time to announce the start up of a new three-team competition with a remarkable founding principle.

2015Sydney

CHAMPIONS ARE MADE NOT BORN: Hockey as a second f*cking languageAfter sixteen seasons, the AIHL had succeeded where others did not, despite criticism. But it does not need the Australian player development system to continue, nor the priceless trophy Australian amateurs have aspired to for over a century.

2022East Coast

BY PLAYERS FOR THE PLAYERS: The PHL and the soul of a new leagueIn 2022, players launched a new national men's ice hockey competition. The authorities reacted by doing things it had not done for a decade and more, in desperate moves to maintain power and control. They launched new teams into PHL markets they had long abandoned, threatened players they would not be selected for the National Team, and threatened to disaffiliate officials.