Australia enjoys a rich sporting heritage. As a relatively small country, we have produced a disproportionate number of champions over a wide range of pursuits. Australian sports stars have always been held up as fierce combatants and honourable competitors who bring not only soaring victories, but also heart-pounding near-wins and moving defeats.
Veteran journalists Ian Heads and Norm Tasker have observed it all. Each significant sporting victory, and equally every controversy, over the past sixty years has been written in print by these two Australian legends. Having seen the introduction of television into Australian homes, Heads and Tasker have witnessed the eruption that came with World Series Cricket in 1977, turning a comparatively sedate sport of gentlemanly bearing into a cut-throat affair in which, as Kerry Packer so delicately put it, the devil could take the hindmost. They were there when Super League came along, and observed the battle between Packer and his similarly determined mogul rival Rupert Murdoch - and on to the hugely welcome arrival of women, to become stars as never before on major playing fields.
Great Australian Sporting Stories is a collection of sixty-five reflections and inside yarns from sixty years of Australian sport. Here are tales of the football codes, racing, boxing and cricket and of Australia walking tall on the supreme arena, the Olympic playing fields. Famous names of Aussie sport dance through the pages. Within them are never-before-shared insights into the tales that have moulded Australia into the sporting nation it is today.
