Original scientific paper
One day 30 years apart in the Croatian-Australian transnational social space: 18 September 1919 and 1949
Walter Lalich
Abstract
This article reviews two important events in Australian and Croatian transnational histories. The post-war deportation of Croats incarcerated during the Great War seemingly has little to do with the tour of a football club thirty years later. This article aims to establish a symbolic link between these two disparate events. The football club Hajduk arrived from Dalmatia, the same region that most of the deported citizens of vanquished Austria Hungary came from. Both events occurred in the days of the White Australia policy, which stressed the superiority of British culture and disregarded others. However, the most popular world-wide British cultural export, football, had much deeper roots in Dalmatia than in Australia. The tour occurred in 1949 amid the Cold War, ideological schism among former friends, fear of the atom bomb, and the hostile Yugoslav migrant organisation, which supported the USSR in its ideological strife with the homeland. Hajduk, which played under the name of Yugoslavia, won most of the games, gave many football lessons to Australian football enthusiasts and deflated the superiority of the Britishness and the White Australia dream. Furthermore, the club bonded strongly with its countrymen. During the tour, only one player, whose relative was deported thirty years earlier, played all the games. This article attempts to comprehend the reasons behind his endeavour to play all the games and considers the special significance of the club’s name on this occasion.
Keywords
football; deportees; Hajduk; Dalmatia; Australia
Hrčak ID:
279628
URI
Publication date:
27.6.2022.
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