Oz on Ice: The World of Australian Hockey

Originally written in 2001

By Lucas Aykroyd

Despite its reputation as a great sporting country, Australia isn’t known for its hockey prowess. The Aussies regularly capture Olympic gold medals in swimming and equestrian events and dominate the international scene in rugby and cricket. To most Australians, the word “hockey” evokes images of a grass pitch and hooked-shaped sticks, since this nation of 19 million inhabitants excels at field hockey.

Lying far south of the ice hockey powers of North America and Europe, the island continent seems about as likely to spawn a hockey revolution as a sailing ship is to win an argument with the Great Barrier Reef. But even though the balmy climate is better suited to kangaroos, kookaburras and koala bears, Australian hockey is growing.

About 5,000 male and female players are registered nationwide, and they make the most of the limited facilities. Currently, the single largest group is the Senior C grade. Many adults take up hockey at a non-elite level after the age of 20, and this grade provides a comfortable introduction to the sport since there is no body contact on the standard 200-by-85-foot ice surfaces.

Yet in a country where 100,000 spectators jam the finals of the ultra-aggressive Aussie Rules Football League, there’s a healthy appetite for the hard-hitting action of the National Hockey League. Cable TV shows 30 to 40 NHL games per season, and a one-hour highlights package called Power Week draws high ratings on regular TV. Even since retiring, Wayne Gretzky remains the best-known NHL player Down Under.

Obviously, Australia has a long way to go before it can dream of producing anyone remotely like Gretzky. One key to success on the ice may turn out to be the popularity of roller hockey, which boasts some 10,000 participants.

Expatriate Canadian Karl Bryan, who co-owns the first dedicated roller hockey rink in Australia, says: “When Canadians and Americans come down here, they are always surprised at the high level of ice hockey. Where I live in the state of Victoria, the kids excel in roller hockey and automatically want to have a go at ice hockey.”

Six members of the 2001 Australian national junior ice hockey team hail from Victoria, followed by New South Wales with five. That reflects the situation in the national senior hockey championships, which features representative teams made up of the strongest club players from Victoria, New South Wales, Capital Territory and South Australia respectively. At the end of the hockey season, which runs from April until October, the champions skate away with the Goodall Cup. The trophy has been presented each year since 1921. Historically, New South Wales has dominated the competition, winning 38 times. Their success is due largely to the many Canadians who live and study in Sydney, the state capital.

Foreigners have played a big role in Australian hockey since its inception. A Scot named Newman Reid pioneered ice rinks in the country, opening the first one in Adelaide in 1904. Next came the Melbourne Glaciarium, where young local men began to experiment with hockey in 1906. Increasingly confident in their abilities, they challenged the crew of the visiting American battleship Baltimore to a game in July that year. The half-hour game ended in a 1-1 tie.

Another indoor rink opened in Sydney, which enabled games against Melbourne teams to be held in 1908. By 1911, Sydney boasted three hockey teams and Melbourne had four. The leading figure in early Australian hockey was Jimmy Kendall, who came from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Hailed by one newspaper for his “speed, accuracy and tremendous force of shooting at the goal,” Kendall helped Sydney dominate Melbourne in the interstate games.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 set back the progress of Australian hockey. Even after Melbourne player John Goodall’s gift of the trophy that bears his name, the game would stagnate through the 1950’s. At one point, Australia had only one functioning rink in St. Kilda, because both the rinks in Sydney and Melbourne had closed.

Still, Australia joined the International Ice Hockey Federation in 1950, and the Australian Ice Hockey Federation was set up in 1954. By the 1960’s, an influx of Eastern European immigrants brought new life to the sport. The 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California witnessed Australia’s debut in international hockey, and one of the national team players was Zdenek Tikal, a Czech who had defected to the West. In a game involving Czechoslovakia, Tikal and his brother Frantisek became the first pair of siblings ever to play against each other in Olympic hockey history. This was the lone “highlight” for Australia, as it finished last in the tournament, scoring 10 goals and allowing 87 in six games.

Australia’s next international achievement came in 1962 at the B Pool World Championships in Colorado. It won its first game ever, beating Denmark 6-2 to avoid another last-place finish. But difficulties in assembling a national team would keep Australia out of action until 1974, when it earned a 4-1 win over North Korea to go with six losses. As usual, imports like Swedish goalie Anders Wiking and Canadian defenseman Charles Grandy made big contributions to any success the team enjoyed.

On the home front, the game was flourishing, thanks to advertising sponsors who funded the club teams and enabled them to fly around the country for games. But as the public’s interest in regular recreational skating waned, so did the popularity of hockey, and by the early 1980’s, the sponsors began to pull out.

In 1987, the IIHF organized the inaugural D Pool World Championships, which took place in Perth, Australia. Perhaps playing at home gave the Aussies an extra boost. They pulverized their opponents, scoring 177 goals in six games against New Zealand, South Korea and Hong Kong. Australia’s 58-0 shellacking of New Zealand set a record for the largest margin of victory in an international hockey game, even bettering the scoring feats of Canada and the Soviet Union. Scott Davidson and Charles Cooper led the way with 42 points apiece.

At the start of the 1990’s, goalie Damian Holland emerged as the star of the Australian national team. Trained at the University of Michigan, Holland’s acrobatics lifted his mates to a bronze medal at the 1992 C Pool World Championships in England. Tournament highlights included beating Hungary 8-1 and Belgium 6-2, plus a 5-5 tie with South Korea.

The breakup of the Soviet Union proved both a blessing and a curse for Australian hockey. On the one hand, it freed up even more Eastern Bloc players to emigrate Down Under. But internationally, the emergence of nations such as Latvia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine decreased Australia’s odds of making it to the top division of the World Championships any time in the near future.

That reality hit home in 1993 when Australia lost 23-1 to Kazakhstan at the C Pool tournament in Slovenia. Kazakhstan was loaded with players from Torpedo Ust-Kamenogorsk, the team that would later produce such talented NHLers as Evgeni Nabokov of the San Jose Sharks and Nik Antropov of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Australia eked out a seventh-place finish among 12 teams with wins over Spain and South Africa.

Today, Australia competes in Division II-A of the World Championships, where it claimed third spot behind Korea and Spain in 2001. The current roster is made up exclusively of players either born overseas or foreign-trained. Some top performers in recent years have included Tyler Lovering, who played for the Moose Jaw Warriors of the Western Hockey League, and John Oddy, a former Peterborough Pirate in the British National League, plus Canadians Chris Rurak and Glenn Foll.

But none of these players matches the stature of Tommy Dunderdale. Born in 1886, the native of Benella, Australia emigrated to Canada and broke into the pro ranks with Winnipeg in 1906. He later moved on to play with the Montreal Shamrocks and Quebec Bulldogs. When the Pacific Coast Hockey Association was founded in 1911 by the legendary Lester Patrick, about 20 players from the National Hockey Association were lured to join, including Dunderdale. The 5-8, 160-pound veteran established himself as a star with the Victoria Aristocrats, scoring 24 goals each year from 1912 to 1914, which twice earned him the league lead. He played both center and rover, since the PCHA maintained the then-traditional seven-player format.

Colorful anecdotes about Dunderdale abound. Playing against Vancouver, he once stole the puck from rival Fred “Cyclone” Taylor and then shot the puck in his own net. Fortunately, he managed to score at the other end as well, and the game ended in a 1-1 deadlock.

In 1918, the explosive Australian once took a 10-minute double major in a game. Under PCHA rules, his team was only required to play shorthanded for three minutes, but when the time was up, they had no one to put out there since their only spare player had been injured earlier that evening. So the referee allowed Dunderdale to get back on the ice and create the unique situation of playing and serving his penalty simultaneously.

Dunderdale achieved a couple of notable firsts during his career. In the 1919-20 season with the Victoria Cougars, he topped the PCHA scoring derby with 33 points and led the penalty parade with 52 minutes. He became the first man ever to score on a penalty shot when he beat Vancouver netminder Hugh Lehman on December 12, 1921.

Considering Dunderdale’s love of scoring goals, he might be dubbed the “Australian Pavel Bure.” Selected six times to the PCHA First All-Star Team, he scored more goals than anyone else in his twelve years in the league (225 in 290 games). His decision to leave the Cougars after the 1922-23 season may have cost him a Stanley Cup, since Victoria was the last non-NHL city to capture the trophy in 1925. Dunderdale died in 1960, and in 1974, he became the sole Australian inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

So are any Aussie prospects ready to fill his skates? To “Shoot To Thrill,” as Australian rockers AC/DC might put it?

“Our program for 2001 represents a further significant step which will position us well as a medal contender,” says Colin Chandler, general manager of the Australian national junior team. “Nothing comes without hard work and we are confident we have the team to strive for gold.”

Youngsters like Joey Hughes and Lliam Webster are up-and-comers on the Australian junior scene. But they may have to go overseas if they want to maximize their abilities.

The grassroots growth of hockey in Australia today is encouraging. The passionate chants of “Vic, Vic, Vic, Oi, Oi, Oi” and “New South Wales, NSW” and the painted faces and airhorns at a Goodall Cup game demonstrate that Aussie fans can get just as passionate as their North American counterparts. Still, until the best arena out of 14 nationwide is no longer the 3,500-capacity Macquarie Arena in Sydney, there are obvious limits to how big hockey can become. Especially when the ice typically starts to melt in summer temperatures that exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The East Coast Superleague, featuring the Adelaide Avalanche, Sydney Bears, Canberra Knights and Melbourne All-Stars, represents another stab at getting a national league going. And this fall, Australia’s first pro roller hockey tournament should also increase interest in ice hockey. Sponsored by Puckhandlers.com, it will boast the presence of former Boston Bruins forward Ralph Barahona.

Increased government funding for the national team and access to experienced coaches from overseas could really help Australian hockey. But there are no guarantees right now.

The sport may not be moving forward in leaps and bounds like a kangaroo on the run. Still, it’s progressing faster than your average ascent of Ayers Rock.

One day, you may wake up and find out that the icemen from the Land of Oz are no longer Munchkins in international hockey.