The Olympics moved into the new millennium with an Opening Ceremony that strove for reconciliation after recognition of past injustices, especially those done to the indigenous peoples who have called Australia home for some 40 millennia.
The message was clear in a cultural presentation that showed an Aboriginal songman withdrawing in fear from the British ships that landed in the late 18th Century and in the Olympic cauldron being lit by Aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman, a 1996 silver medalist favored in the 400 meters here.
This was the time to address the disadvantaged position of Aborigines in Australia, to celebrate the ever-increasing contributions of women to the Olympics over the century they have been allowed to participate and to hope for a spirit of reconciliation reflected by North and South Korea marching together.
The sight of Freeman as a symbol of her country had a resonance for Australians similar to what the sight of Muhammad Ali lighting the cauldron in Atlanta did for Americans four years ago. Both moments were evidence of countries trying to come to grips with past and present racism. It seemed fitting that Ali was among the 110,000 spectators at Olympic Stadium Friday night.
Freeman, like Ali, has been controversial for her willingness to champion her people’s cause. She stirred emotions in 1994 by carrying the Aboriginal flag on victory laps at the 1994 Commonwealth Games and recently called the Australian government “insensitive” for its refusal to apologize for its treatment of Aborigines. Freeman’s grandmother had been among the “stolen generation,” the primarily mixed-race Aboriginals taken from their families, a policy whites defended as being in the best interests of the children.
In one of the many displays of technical wizardry that enlivened the four-hour ceremony opening the 2000 Summer Games, Freeman stepped through a waterfall and into a pool of water before lighting a ring of fire that turned into the cauldron that will burn until Oct. 1.
As the cauldron rose over Freeman’s head and continued up a multicolored watery track to the top of the stadium, she stood as an emblematic presence for the women who are 42 percent of the 10,400 Olympic athletes and the Aborigines who are 2 percent of Australia’s 19 million people.
International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch and Australia’s Olympic minister, Michael Knight, each addressed one of those issues.
In his speech preceding the entry of the Olympic flame into the stadium, Samaranch gave a “special tribute to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.” In a statement, Knight noted “the most significant part of the Opening Ceremony–the passage of the Olympic torch and the lighting of the cauldron–were dedicated to the contribution of women Olympians.”
Women were not allowed to watch the ancient Olympics, and they were not allowed to compete when the modern Olympics began in 1896.
The six people who carried the torch as it made the interior circuit of Olympic Stadium all were Australian female sports legends, beginning with 1956 Olympic track and field heroine Betty Cuthbert, wheelchair-bound by multiple sclerosis, and ending with reigning world champion Freeman, the only non-white in the group.
Some 60 women were among the flag bearers for the 200 nations. That group included Olympic track and field champions Derartu Tulu of Ethiopia, Deon Hemmings of Jamaica and Ghada Shouaa of Syria.
In 1992, Tulu had been the first black African woman to win an Olympic gold medal. She is one of the many female athletes whose cultures discourage women from participating in sports.
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The female flag bearers came from each of the five areas that comprise the Olympic rings, representing nations as different as Bangladesh and Brazil, Gambia and Germany, Palau and Peru.
A woman, Pak Jang Choo of North Korea, shared flag bearing with a man, Chung Eun-Soon of South Korea, in the most politically significant moment of the evening, the entrance of the two Koreas as a single delegation. Holding hands, the 70 athletes and officials from each country received a standing ovation as they passed each sector of the stadium while marching behind a unification flag with the Korean peninsula pictured in blue on a white background.
The Koreas, divided since 1945, remain officially at war, having never signed a treaty to mark the end of their 1950-53 conflict. The deal brokered by Samaranch to have the countries march together was expected to lend further impetus to the family reunification efforts already under way between the countries.
The country was forced to take a different look at itself in the 90-minute ceremonies director Ric Birch used to present a historical portrait of Australia.
Much of the program, which involved 12,600 performers, concentrated on Aboriginal culture, in song, music and dance. It began with the Awakening, in which Aborigines sanctify a site by reviving ancestral spirits, and continued through sections called “Fire” and “Nature.”
Aerial acts were part of all the sections, which took Cirque du Soleil elements and exaggerated them tenfold in surrealistic tableaus that looked straight out of Henri Magritte.
There were acrobats on pinwheels that spewed fireworks, a fire-breathing horse that turned into an oil derrick, stilt-walkers with flaming stilts and dancing lawnmowers in self-parody of Australians’ desire for the perfect suburban landscape.
In achieving that landscape over two centuries, the country treated the Aborigines like a lawn that needed cutting. That point was made in the segment called “Tin Symphony,” in which the agricultural and industrial machinery that tamed the bush also had the effect of helping push the Aborigines from their ancestral lands.
Those references had to discomfit one spectator, Prime Minister John Howard, who has refused to make a formal apology to the Aborigines and opposed a civil rights treaty for them. That attitude infuriates Nova Peris-Kneebone, the first Aboriginal athlete to win a gold medal.
Peris-Kneebone played on Australia’s Olympic champion field hockey team in 1996. She will run the 400 meters and 4×400-meter relay here.
“John Howard said the stolen generation affected only 10 percent of Aborigines,” said Peris-Kneebone, whose maternal grandmother was among those taken. “How dare he say that? It affected anyone four generations’ distant.”
Peris-Kneebone had been the first to carry the torch when it landed in Australia 100 days ago. She and her daughter, Jessica, ran a leg in front of Uluru, the giant rock outcropping that is both an Australian landmark and a site sacred to the Uluru Aboriginal clan.
Billions of TV viewers around the world saw the completion of a circle begun with Peris-Kneebone running barefoot out of respect for the land. When Freeman, dressed in a unitard whose shimmery whiteness suggested purification, ran up steps from the earth of the stadium floor to the elevated sea, carrying a stick of fire, she was moving among elements of primal importance to Aboriginal culture. Perhaps never before had that culture been so widely viewed as of primal importance to Australia.