IN 1976 MY Aunty Pam, who had returned from her job as a nurse on the volcanic island of Karkar just off Madang in Papua New Guinea and was by then matron of the health centre in the Aboriginal settlement of Cherbourg in southern Queensland, bought my three brothers and me a Montreal Olympic Games T-shirt each. We wouldn’t take them off. The Olympic Games were a few weeks away. We remembered, from 1972, Shane Gould and Mark Spitz; Kip Keino and Lasse Viren.

We believed in the Olympic Games. We were athletes too. We’d competed in Little Athletics, striving to beat our best times and distances and heights whenever we donned the colours of the Red Devils club, and in school athletics where we did our very best for Oakey Primary and Oakey High. Perhaps one day we’d be off to the Olympics ourselves.