Betty Cuthbert: A Golden Life Unmarked

Some things should not happen, yet they do. When Betty Cuthbert died in August 2017, Australia’s parliament found time to honour two prominent Aboriginal figures. It found no time for the Golden Girl. That omission was not a procedural oversight. It was a cultural failure.

Australia has been unusually blessed in sporting talent. Don Bradman remains the towering figure of cricket. Tennis produced Laver, Newcombe, Margaret Court and a long procession of others. Swimming gave us Dawn Fraser, Murray Rose, Ian Thorpe and more. On the track, Edwin Flack, Herb Elliott, Cathy Freeman and Betty Cuthbert stand in the first rank. Cuthbert was the equal of any of them. She deserved the same public respect and institutional acknowledgement.

Elizabeth Alyse “Betty” Cuthbert was born on 20 April 1938 in Merrylands, a western Sydney suburb, twenty minutes ahead of her non-identical twin sister Marie, later known as Midge. She had an older brother, John, and an older sister, Jean. When the twins were five the family moved to Ermington, where her father, Leslie, established a flower and vegetable plant nursery. Her mother, Marion, took the children to Sunday school. The household was modest, practical and close-knit.

From early childhood Betty ran. She ran barefoot between the nursery rows because she felt free. She ran to and from Ermington Public School, around the playground, and through the neighbourhood until called in for dinner. By the age of eight she was already winning New South Wales titles and the school trophy for best girl athlete. She later said she knew then that she had a gift from God.

At Parramatta Home Science School her physical education teacher was June Ferguson, a 1948 Olympian. Ferguson recognised the raw talent, spoke to Betty’s mother about the cold winter nights, and persuaded the girl to join the Western Suburbs Athletic Club. Under Ferguson’s coaching the awkward, high-knee, open-mouthed style was refined rather than reinvented. Betty left school at fifteen or sixteen, worked briefly in a children’s clothing factory, then returned to the family nursery. She remained, in her own words, an ordinary girl from the suburbs who happened to run very fast.

In September 1956, still only eighteen and so unsure of selection that she had bought spectator tickets for the Melbourne Olympics, she broke the world 200 metres record. At the Games she won three gold medals in six days: the 100 metres (after setting a world record of 11.4 in her heat), the 200 metres, and the anchor leg of the 4 × 100 metres relay that set another world record. She became the first Australian to win three gold medals at a single Olympics and was instantly christened the Golden Girl. Injury limited her at Rome in 1960. She returned in Tokyo in 1964 and won the inaugural women’s Olympic 400 metres in what she called the only perfect race of her life. She remains the only athlete, male or female, to have claimed Olympic gold in the 100, 200 and 400 metres. Across her career she set or equalled more than a dozen world records from 60 metres to 440 yards and in relays. She also collected Commonwealth medals, including gold in the 4 × 110 yards relay in Perth in 1962.

After Tokyo she retired for good and went back to the nursery. Five years later the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis appeared. The formal diagnosis came in the early 1970s. For nearly half a century the disease progressively stole her mobility until she was confined to a wheelchair, able to move only her left arm. She never asked God “Why me?” She believed instead that the illness had been given so she might help other people.

In 1985, at the age of forty-seven, she became a born-again Christian. From that point her public life took on a new purpose. She became Australia’s most visible advocate for multiple sclerosis research and awareness. She was present at the inauguration of MS Research Australia in 2004 alongside then-Prime Minister John Howard. She lent her name, her presence and her remaining strength to fundraising, public education and encouragement of those living with the disease. Research fellowships and scholarships carry her name. A rose was named after her, with proceeds directed to MS research. Those who worked with the organisation later credited her with an immeasurable impact on national understanding of the condition.

She never married and had no children. In later years she was sustained by her twin sister and by her close friend and carer, Rhonda Gillam. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics she appeared in her wheelchair, still recognisable, still smiling, still carrying the quiet authority of the Golden Girl. She died on 6 August 2017 in Mandurah, Western Australia, aged seventy-nine.

Mortality is hard and the ending is often rough. Few have endured it with such grace. Her early life in the nursery rows of Ermington, her unmatched Olympic record, her long public struggle with multiple sclerosis, and her steady Christian witness form a single coherent story. That story remains a cultural asset. Parliament should have observed it. The failure to do so says more about the selective instincts of the institution than about the stature of the woman who once ran with her mouth open and her heart fixed on something higher.

The Heart That Endures

Charles Dennis Buchinsky—better known to the world as Charles Bronson—wore a face that rarely cracked under pressure. That composed toughness was no Hollywood invention. Born the eleventh of fifteen children in the hard coal country of Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, he lost his father to black lung when he was only ten. The boy went into the mines himself, earning a dollar a ton. At about twenty-one he left the darkness of the pits for the skies of the Pacific, serving as an aerial gunner on B-29 Superfortresses. He was wounded in combat and earned the Purple Heart—the oldest military decoration still in continuous use by the United States.

Bronson stands in a long line of recipients that includes James Garner, Kurt Vonnegut, Colin Powell, John F. Kennedy, and Audie Murphy. Each received the medal for wounds sustained in service to the nation. Yet the story of the Purple Heart begins long before any of them were born.

On 7 August 1782, near the end of the War of Independence, General George Washington issued General Orders from his headquarters at Newburgh, New York. He created the Badge of Military Merit: a heart of purple cloth or silk, edged with narrow lace or binding, to be worn over the left breast. It was to be awarded for “any singularly meritorious action”—not only unusual gallantry in battle, but also extraordinary fidelity and essential service of any kind. The wearer’s name and regiment were to be entered in a Book of Merit, and the recipient could pass guards and sentinels unchallenged.

Washington’s purpose was clear and radical for its time. European armies reserved honors almost exclusively for officers and aristocrats. Congress, short of funds, had forbidden him from granting commissions as rewards. Washington insisted that in a patriot army and a free country “the road to glory… is thus open to all.” The Badge was deliberately aimed at enlisted men and non-commissioned officers—the common soldiers who had carried the Revolution on their backs for more than seven hard years. Only three known awards were made before the decoration slipped into obscurity for a century and a half.

In 1932, on the bicentennial of Washington’s birth, Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur revived and redesigned it as the Purple Heart. Over time the criteria narrowed to those wounded or killed by enemy action. What began as a broad recognition of merit became the nation’s enduring symbol of personal sacrifice in combat. More than 1.8 million have been awarded.

Did Washington foresee what the Purple Heart would become? Almost certainly not in its modern form. He could not have imagined air power, global wars, or the sheer scale of the awards that would follow. Yet he understood something essential: that a republic must honor the ordinary man who bleeds for it, and that such honor must not be the exclusive property of rank or birth. The purple heart he designed was a quiet democratic statement. That principle has survived every change of criteria, every redesign of the medal, and every generation of conflict.

On the anniversary of its institution, the medal still speaks the language Washington intended. It does not measure victory or rank. It records the cost paid by those who stood in the line of fire—miners-turned-gunners like Charles Bronson, and countless others whose faces, like his, learned composure the hard way. The road to glory remains open to all.

Selecting Hiroshima, 81 Years On

Hiroshima was not the last city subjected to nuclear attack. Nagasaki followed three days later. Neither bomb, by itself, ended the Pacific War or demonstrably “saved lives” in the neat arithmetic long claimed. The Soviet Union’s declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria on 9 August did more to collapse Japanese options in hours than the destruction of one or even two cities.

Japan had been warned. The Potsdam Declaration of 26 July offered terms and threatened “prompt and utter destruction.” Tokyo’s response was interpreted as rejection. After Hiroshima on 6 August, Japanese leaders continued to pursue mediation through Moscow. They fought on. Only when the Soviets entered—invalidating the last diplomatic card and opening a second front that Japanese forces could not hope to contain—did the Supreme War Council confront the impossibility of continued resistance. The Emperor’s intervention followed the twin shocks of 9 August. Historians such as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa have documented this chronology carefully: Hiroshima raised urgency but did not force the decisive political shift; Soviet entry did.

Truman never lost sleep over the decision, at least not publicly. He later said so repeatedly. The choice was effectively pre-shaped by the Interim Committee and Target Committee, which included scientists of the calibre of Oppenheimer and Fermi. Their criteria—large urban areas of sufficient diameter, relatively untouched by prior bombing so the weapon’s effects could be measured, and high psychological impact—systematically ruled out purely military or unpopulated alternatives. Demonstration shots were rejected. Kyoto was removed for cultural reasons at Stimson’s insistence; Hiroshima met the remaining tests as an army headquarters city and embarkation port that was still largely intact.

Japan had placed Allied prisoners of war in industrial and military zones, a practice that complicated any clean distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Truman was aware of the political and moral risks. British firebombing of German cities had already drawn criticism. His private diary entry of 25 July recorded an instruction to target “military objectives and soldiers and sailors… not women and children,” and to spare the old and new capitals. That caveat was empty in practice. The aiming point in Hiroshima was the city centre. Tens of thousands of civilians died immediately; the total, including radiation effects, ran into six figures. A smaller number of Allied POWs also perished in the blast.

Then and now, much of the press and official narrative has treated the decision as self-evidently justified because it was taken by a Democratic administration under wartime pressure. Alternatives—modifying the unconditional-surrender demand to clarify the Emperor’s status earlier, waiting for the already-scheduled Soviet entry, or intensifying the blockade and conventional campaign—are waved away with the assertion that the bombs alone ended the war early and spared American lives. The evidence does not support that clean claim. Japan’s military hardliners remained prepared to fight after Hiroshima. The combination of nuclear demonstration and Soviet assault produced the surrender. Casualties from a full invasion of the home islands would have been horrific; that does not prove the specific targeting of two cities was the only or least costly path available in early August 1945.

The scale of the nuclear attack exceeded anything previously imaginable, even after the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities. Hiroshima finished nothing by itself. What followed was more consequential for the post-war order: a rapid American pivot that left Eastern Europe under Soviet domination, Stalin’s position strengthened, and China descending into civil war that produced a communist victory. Atrocities on the Burma-Thailand railway and elsewhere received incomplete justice. American resolve to confront Soviet expansion was real, yet the pattern of selective memory about the closing days of the Pacific War has persisted.

Eighty-one years later the official story remains largely intact in popular retelling. The historical record is more complicated. The bombs were weapons of unprecedented power used against cities containing military facilities and large civilian populations. The Soviet entry was strategically decisive. Japan had been offered terms and chose to continue. Truman accepted the committee’s framework and never publicly second-guessed it. Those facts do not require romanticising Japanese militarism or denying the savagery of the Pacific War. They do require abandoning the comforting simplification that two nuclear strikes alone ended the fighting and thereby redeemed the civilian deaths.