TRIBUTE TO LES MURRAY Andris Heks 31.07.2017This is scary for me, as I am nearly as old as he was.
But there is so much more than our age, that Les and I share.
For a starter, we are both Hungarian refugees.
When SBS Michael Tomaralis asked Craig Foster, Les fellow soccer tragic, sports commentator and close mate, what it was that Les wanted to be remembered for, Greg answered:
That he was a refugee.
I nearly cried on hearing this.
Wow! I mused.
Wanting this, in todays Australia, when the word refugee has been so much demonised takes a lot of guts!
Still, it was more important for Les to be remembered as a refugee, than the man who was by far the most important person in the history of soccer in Australia in turning this game from being regarded as a fringe sport, played by refugees, into a mainstream sport, which is beginning to nearly rival Australias traditional love affair with those funny egg shaped-ball-based-sports, which are also called football here.
Well, I am showing my bias.
Because, as a Hungarian refugee, who arrived to Australia nearly at eighteen, eight years after Les got here as an eleven year old kid from the outskirts of Budapest, I could never understand why football was so much more admired in Australia than the then fringe sport of soccer.
This was because Les and I were in a unique position to see what outstanding soccer could do to a nations morale.
Les and I were both soccer fanatics. You will understand why in a moment.
We shared our soccer fanaticism with the rest of the Hungarian nation.
Why were we Hungarians so besotted with soccer?
Because soccer was our national religion in the nineteen fifties till nineteen fifty-six. Yes, till 1956, the very year, when Les defected from Hungary as an 11 year old with his parents, to come to Australia as a refugee, after the shameful crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Les caught that truck which took his family to the Hungarian-Austrian border, to cross over illegally to the free Austria, which I also wanted to catch so much at that time as a ten year old boy. The truck waited for us too downstairs, to take any potential defectors to the Austrian border.
In the distance we could hear the approaching, invading Russian troops gunshots as they were advancing and rapidly closing in on Budapest.
I pleaded with my father:
Lets go! Aunty Cuni is waiting for us with open arms in Australia. This is our only chance to get out.- Mum and I cried.
By 1956 Mum had not seen her sister Cuni for 12 years, as she defected from Hungary in 1944 to escape with her daughter the lethal threat of The Final Solution that Eichmann started to prosecute in Hungary against the Jews with great enthusiasm and precision, starting in March 1944.
And now the Soviets were coming back to revenge a nation that rebelled against their tyranny.
Who knows, what was going to happen?!- Mum and I were pleading with Dad.
My sister Erzsi, then twelve, kept silent. She was a great patriot; I knew she would rather stay. Unfortunately, this was also Dads position.
He answered sadly:
Look, I am already 54 years old. At 60 Ill retire. I am not in a position to start a new life in the West at this age. Here, I am established in my Hospital job and private practice as a doctor. The chance is, they would not even recognise my medical qualifications in Australia, let alone starting now to learn a new language at my age.
Sorry, but it is out of question for us to leave.
Well, that was it. The truck left without us.
But this was not the case with the Asrge family. Asrge (wombat) was LA?szlAls, come Les Murrays, original Hungarian surname before it was anglicised.
And when Les left Hungary in that game changing year of 1956, there is one thing he surely did not leave behind in Hungary.
It was his childhood memory of what soccer did to our nation there.
It gave us a sense of pride and unique identity that was unmatched in significance by anything else in our lives in the 1950s.
Why?
Because Les and I were privileged to witness the monumental successes of a once-in -several-life-times national soccer team, led by the legendary PuskA?s, who to this very day still holds the world record of the number of goals scored by a player in international soccer games!
See my article on the Golden Team in SAS: https://startsat60.com/stories/opinion/match-of-the-century
It was the peerless Hungarian Golden Team who won the 1952 Helsinki Olympics in soccer, the team that beat England at home for the first time in its history with a staggering score of 6:3 in London and with the even more staggering one, 7:1, in the rematch in Budapest.
But most importantly, it was also the team who routinely beat our giant oppressor, the Soviets, on the level playing field of soccer.
So the national pride that soccer was able to give to a small, captive nation like Hungary, was clearly on the mind and in the heart of the young Les Murray.
He then became a newspaper journalist in due course in Australia and then moved over to the newly formed SBS Broadcaster, first as a Hungarian translator on soccer with SBS radio and then as their Sports Commentator, on SBS TV.
The comet of the Golden team disintegrated with the crushing of the1956 Hungarian Revolution, but not Les Murrays dream, that perhaps his adopted country, Australia, could eventually build its own Golden Team of soccer.
So he directed all his professional efforts, time, heart and mind to this noble goal.
When in 1974 at last Australia made the qualifiers for the World Cup for the very first time in its soccer history, it was like a dream coming true for Les.
He was beside himself with joy.
And with that qualification success, there was a quantum shift in mainstream Australias attitude to soccer as a national sport!
The SBS Broadcaster was, of course, established to give voice to Australian multiculturalism, which had become increasingly strong with the arrival of ever more newcomers to Australia, including refugees.
When I arrived to Australia, eight years later than Les, multiculturalism was still in its infancy.
My Aussie wife later told me of her childhood when she grew up on a diet of mashed potatoes, lamb chops, lumps of charcoaled steak and vegetables, like frozen peas which were boiled, until they turned yellow.
I remember that the main take away foods in 1964 were chicko rolls, meat pies, fish and chips, tasteless hot dogs and roughly thats it.
For exotica, you occasionally visited the only widespread non-Aussie restaurant, the Chinese.
When in 1970, I took my future wife for a meal in a new Hungarian Restaurant, the Gelato Bar in Bondi, that was the first time she tasted non-Aussie food, apart from the Chinese.
But it did not take long for cosmopolitanism to make inroads into and gradually transform Australia to such an extent, that todays mainstream Australia is culturally, incomparably richer than it was in the early 1960s.
Les Murray played a pioneering role in this.
He made the word refugee look sexy in those days.
For it was the reffos who primarily brought soccer to Australia and with Les and other refugees tireless effort, made it into the popular mainstream sport here that it is today.
So, how come, that Les had the resilience for pushing an absolutely marginal refugee sport in the face of years of indifference towards it in mainstream Australia, until at last, soccer captured the imagination of Australia as a nation?
I am convinced, that it was because he personally experienced what a good national soccer team can do to the morale of a small nation, when he witnessed the impact on us, the oppressed Hungarians, of our legendary Golden Soccer Team.
Australia in the 1960s was still in the shadow of its mother country, Britain.
But Britain was not the mother country of refugees.
So Australia as a whole, and the refugees within it, needed to forge an authentically new identity.
That came together in multiculturalism, where world cuisine, world music and the newly emerging soccer were leading the way.
I met Les Murray some twenty years ago when I was interviewed on multiculturalism in the SBS studios in Sydney.
My Hungarian interviewer introduced me to Les.
We struck up a conversation in Hungarian.
I was pleasantly surprised that even though he spoke English without a trace of a Hungarian accent, he also spoke perfect Hungarian without a trace of an Aussie accent.
Because he was only eleven when he came to Australia, he could learn English without an accent, whereas I, who was nearly eighteen when I landed here, will always carry a Hungarian accent.
His lack of a foreign accent also explains, why it was so much easier for him to be seen by Aussies as one of us and evangelise about soccer from such an accepted inside position as a person, rather than advertising his refugee origins by a foreign accent.
I was not so lucky when I happened to be the very first and last non Anglo-Celtic accented reporter trainee on national television, via ABC TVs This Day Tonight. My accent eventually cost me my reporters job on the National Broadcaster, forty seven years ago and there is still not a single non Anglo-Celtic accented newsreader on the ABC, let alone a reporter!
That is why I felt so moved when Les Murrays Aussie mate, Craig Foster, said in talking about the newly deceased Les, that (even though he became a very popular Aussie champion of soccer, still,) he wanted to be remembered most of all, as a refugee.
So, here is to you Les Murray, aka LA?szlAl Asrge, my dear fellow refugee!
