Dawn Fraser and the case of the unknown Olympic flag heist
When Dawn Fraser and two fellow Australian team members souvenired an Olympic flag in Tokyo in 1964 and were chased by the constabulary, it wasn’t the first time the nation’s greatest ever female athlete had engaged in flag theft.
Four years earlier at the Rome Games, Fraser, triple Olympic water polo player Keith Whitehead and team manager Hermie Doerner, cut down perhaps the biggest flag ever flown at an Olympic Village and secreted it back to Sydney.
John Whitehead and David Hynes with the Olympic flag at Bondi Beach.Credit:Janie Barrett
Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates said of Fraser, who won gold medals at three successive Olympics: “She might have started something where pinching an Olympic flag becomes an Olympic sport”.
Mindful of the security surrounding this month’s Winter Olympics, he added, “It’s not one I’d recommend for Beijing.”
The 1960 Olympic flag – now faded white but with its five intersecting rings still clear – measures 3.7m x 5.5m and has been on a 62-year peripatetic journey.
It was initially draped on a wall of the Bondi garage of “Gelignite Jack” Murray; used as shade cloth for a barbecue and locked in a Tasmanian shed before finally being returned to the Whitehead family, via a fishing trawler from Hobart, in late November.
Jeff “Fishcake” Stevens, John Whitehead and David Hynes.Credit:Janie Barrett
John Whitehead, the son of Keith who represented Australia at the 1952, 1956 and 1960 Olympics, will hand the flag to the AOC to be displayed in a future museum.
Fraser confirmed details of the heist in a recent phone conversation at her Noosa home. Keith Whitehead, being the tallest of the trio, couldn’t reach up to splice the rope securing the flag, so they hired a Kombi van.
Whitehead stood on the roof, cut the rope and, as they scooped the giant flag through the sliding door of the van, the Italian mounted police arrived. They galloped after the van as it disappeared into the Rome evening.
“That’s correct,” Fraser said as I checked the details with her. “We got away with it.”
Dawn Fraser after winning the 100m freestyle at the Rome Olympics.Credit:AP
The flag was so big, Whitehead was forced to buy a separate suitcase in Rome to transport it home.
“He was shitting himself going through customs in case they opened it,” son John said.
Back in Sydney, Keith, unable to find a place at home to display it, handed it to his mate “Gelignite Jack”, the rally car driver, wrestler and powerboat champion, who hung it in his garage. He leased the garage to Jeff “Fishcake” Stevens, a Bondi identity, who occasionally used the flag as sun protection in his barbecue area, draping it over his Hills Hoist.
Following Keith’s premature death in 1980, the flag remained with Stevens, despite occasional entreaties from the Whitehead family for its return.
Then, midyear 2019, John Whitehead, while watching a State of Origin match at the Beach Road Hotel, Bondi, spied Stevens across the bar. Whitehead was with David Hynes, the Baseball Australia president and a 1996 Atlanta Olympian.
The story was retold and Hynes contacted former four-time water polo Olympian Peter Montgomery. They resolved to involve the AOC. Enter James Edwards.
“It’s been like chipping away at an iceberg,” Edwards, the AOC’s head of community engagement, said. “But Jeff finally, sort-of, agreed over the last two years that the flag could and should be handed over.
“Except on every call there seemed to be a lot of confusion on where the flag actually was, and it was probably lost. COVID then created another year of radio silence … then mid-November, Jeff returned a call with the news his brother-in-law had located the flag in a farmhouse south of Hobart.
“The flag was coming up the coast on a crayfish trawler. Closer, but nobody dared get ahead of themselves.
“Then, in late November, Jeff arranged a meeting with Johnny Whitehead and a handover was observed, 61 years in the making. And so, the Olympic flag is now, finally, back in the hands of its rightful owner – the Whitehead family (as long as nobody tells the Italian government).”
Fraser, who has her own Olympic flag from 1964 as well as a signed note from the former emperor of Japan, also holds fond memories of the earlier flag heist and fellow triple Olympian Keith Whitehead.
“John rang me last year,” she said softly. “He asked did I want the flag? I said, ‘No, that’s your dad’s. I’ve got mine.’ ”
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