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Reflecting on his beginnings as a playwright in the early 1970s, David Williamson aired a familiar lament: 'It was believed that anyone with talent in writing, theatre or film should leave the country immediately and work elsewhere before they were stifled by the deadly distrust of creativity in sports-obsessed Australia'. So there it is, sport is the enemy of art. This from a man whose play The Club (1976) captured the behind-the-scenes drama of an Australian Rules football club, who was the number two ticket-holder for the Sydney Swans, and who cameoed as a football-playing ANZAC in Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981). Why does a creative Australian who clearly loves football feel besieged by his own peers - sports fans? The easy answer is that the opposition between art and sport made for a useful division between high-minded artists and the low-brow hoi polloi, a black-and-white distinction that had the added advantage of casting the culturati as the Zarathustras of the great southern land ...

So for about a century, sport was seen as a dynamic, if occasionally problematic, register of the Australian spirit. Only in the 1960s did the chasm between sport and art open. What happened? Why did sport cease to be the exemplification of national vigour - of a 'youthful race, buoyant and strong, bounding into a manhood that must command the admiration of the world' - and come to represent 'moronity' instead? Was this a reaction to a particular event: perhaps to the provincial pageantry of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics? Or to a particular personality: a cricket-loving prime minister allowing the conflation of love of sport with conservative politics? To my mind, the answer lies in the cultural pessimism that characterised the liberal cultural commentary of the 1960s. Boyd and other social critics surveyed the nation's character in popular texts with consistently negative or ironic titles - The Australian Ugliness, The Lucky Country (Donald Horne, 1964), The Land of the Long Weekend (Ronald Conway, 1978) - and found it wanting. Colonial and modernist confidence in Australian identity gave way to a terrifying vacuum. 'There can be few other nations', Boyd wrote, 'which are less certain than Australia as to what they are and where they are.' Sport was no longer aspirational and affirmative. On the contrary, it was a kind of false consciousness, masking Australia's lack of self-reflection with the glitter of trophies ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2010 issue.