Sport

From humble rural beginnings, Shirley Strickland went on to become Australia’s most decorated track athlete – but not without attracting the attention of ASIO. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.

How Shirley Strickland ran foul of ASIO

Shirley Strickland in action at the 1948 London Olympics.

Credit: Daily Herald Archive via Getty Images

Her father joined the Western Australian gold rush, leaving Victoria in the 1890s for Kalgoorlie, in search of treasure and employment. The gold rush would permanently transform the state, swelling its numbers and introducing a new class of farmer-settlers encouraged by the financial enticements of the colonial government. David Strickland would become one of them.

He worked odd jobs and saved for his parcel of land. About 1910, he purchased one in Pithara, a small town in the Western Australian wheat belt, and began the hard work of clearing the land so that he might raise sheep and grow wheat. He was not alone – in the first three decades of the 20th century, an area half the size of Britain was cleared of its native vegetation so that it might sustain crops and livestock.

And it was here, on this lonely farm of modest soil, that one of our finest Olympians was born and raised. Shirley Strickland came into the world in 1925, and one of her earliest memories was of looking at the stars through the holes in the tin roof of the family home.

Strickland was born into modest circumstances and would later help her father work the land. She was homeschooled for a while and rarely wore shoes – her earliest taste of athletics was barefoot sprints around the farm. “She only got shoes and dresses when she went to boarding school,” her son, Matthew de la Hunty, tells me. “She was just running wild and free before that.”

Her father was a distinguished sprinter himself, who also played one match for St Kilda in the VFL. On winning the Stawell Gift in 1900, he became eligible to compete in that year’s Olympic Games, but he couldn’t afford to make his way to Paris. He recognised his daughter’s athletic ability early, and encouraged it, despite the era’s suspicion that sport compromised femininity. “I think she was a product of her time and place,” de la Hunty says. “Subsistence farming during the Depression. Everyone looks out for one another. That’s how a community survives. It was the Depression and they didn’t have much money, but she said there was always plenty to eat. They never went hungry.”

To these childhood conditions her son attributes her combination of grit and modesty. “She was very inclusive,” he says. “She used her voice for all the things she cared about. Never once did I hear her sing her own praises. Never.

“Her dad was her coach. Her mother was a well-educated, multilingual woman who fell in love with an older farmer and became a farmer’s wife. She did everything in her power to ensure Shirley got a good education and not become a farmer’s wife.”

At boarding school in Northam, in the central wheat belt, Strickland’s athleticism flourished. She was also a model student. She entered the University of Western Australia in 1944, graduating with a degree in physics in 1946. The next year, at the Western Australian athletic titles, she won the 100-yard sprint – and the 220 yards and 440 yards. She also won the 90-yard hurdles and the shot-put. A prodigious talent, eight years later she would become the fastest woman in the world when she ran 100 metres in 11.3 seconds – a record that would stand for six years. “For literally months afterwards,” she said in 1995, “I’d wake up in the morning and think: Did it really happen? Did I really do it?”

Strickland arrived in the era of amateurism and she made a modest salary by lecturing part-time in physics and mathematics. The pioneer’s daughter had become a Renaissance woman – and an extravagantly decorated Olympian. Across three Games, from 1948 to 1956, Strickland won seven medals – three of them gold – in multiple track events. In terms of medals, she remains Australia’s most successful Olympian in athletics.

For a long time, the world was watching Shirley Strickland. So was ASIO, who suspected her of being a communist. When her children learnt that the spy agency had been surveilling her for decades, after their mother’s sudden death in 2004, they made an application to receive the declassified file that had been compiled on Strickland. It was 150 pages long – 15 of which were redacted – and revealed that the domestic intelligence agency’s monitoring of Strickland stretched from 1948 to 1971.

Strickland had a pronounced sense of injustice and socialist sympathies. She also had fame and influence and a degree in nuclear physics. This combination, Matthew de la Hunty says, was custom-made to attract the sustained suspicion of ASIO during the Cold War.

Strickland’s 100 metres world record happened in Poland, a country that adored her. “She was the darling of Poland,” de la Hunty says. “Tens of thousands turned out in a street parade in her honour because she came alone from the West and beat the Russians! She told the competitors in Poland, ‘I will be waiting at the gate of the Olympic Village for you when you get to Melbourne next year’ [for the 1956 Olympics], which she did. She passed notes to defectors, mostly Hungarian, as to safe houses in Melbourne. But she was not a communist.”

After her retirement from the track, Strickland lived in Perth, where she coached and volunteered for local athletics organisations. In 1999, Strickland received a lifetime achievement award. “It wasn’t anything to do with her athletic record,” de la Hunty says. “It was her life of service as a coach, an administrator, a starter with the gun every Saturday at Perry Lakes Stadium for decades.”

Strickland was also a founding member of the Australian Democrats, and between the 1970s and 1990s a recurring political candidate for the party in both state and federal elections – she contested 11 in total. She was never elected to a parliament but spent several years as a councillor for the City of Melville.

Strickland was also a conservationist and outspoken opponent of the logging of old-growth forests in her state’s south-west. In 1999, her car was firebombed while parked at the front of her home – something she attributed to her environmental campaigning. Strickland didn’t move from her home but did spend the last five years of her life with steel bars on its windows.

Now in his 50s, Matthew de la Hunty speaks passionately and tenderly about his late mother. He loves and admires her but says it wasn’t always easy growing up with a famous parent. “I think she did everything she could to raise me as a normal, middle-class suburban boy,” he says. “But every now and then the photographers would come. But that seemed normal.

“We were encouraged to do sport but not driven. I was pretty good at sport. I enjoyed athletics and footy in particular. Then I made the headlines in the Sunday paper in the sports section as a nine-year-old. The article’s title was ‘No wonder he can run’, so that seemed like I was born to succeed. I think that’s where her fame hit me for six. I was expected to be great because of genetics. That’s probably when I worked out how famous she was.”

Matthew would abandon sport, then the medicine degree he was studying, to embrace his chief passion of music. He quit university, moved to Sydney and started a band. He’s played in several ever since. “It was not a very popular decision with Mum at the time,” he remembers. “I disappeared into the bowels of the Sydney music scene. In Perth, everybody knew I was related, but on the east coast she was Strickland and I was not. It was a relief.”

Strickland’s last years were partially marked by depression and financial stress. There were other painful spasms in her family: a son’s heroin addiction, another’s failed business, and her children’s occasional and public warring.

In 2004, Matthew de la Hunty found his mother’s body on the floor of her kitchen. She had been dead a few days. A coroner ruled her death was of natural causes but some of her children suspected suicide. They requested an inquest, which was denied. “It was an inglorious end,” de la Hunty tells me.

Shirley Strickland was 78.

Twenty-one years later, Matthew hasn’t reconciled the circumstances of his mother’s death – there remain questions and a painful irresolution. He stresses he wants to discuss the good and the great about his famous mother. “She did those things as a personal challenge to herself,” he says. “She liked to win. But it wasn’t about beating them; it was purely about doing her best. Her winning was a very personal achievement – a goal she set for herself – and wasn’t for self-gratification. She was meticulous, scientific. She was a machine.”

A little more than six months after Strickland’s death, a great statue of her was unveiled outside the MCG. Matthew went to the ceremony, but couldn’t then accept that his mother wasn’t with him to see it.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 26, 2025 as "Running into suspicion".

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