She was an asthmatic shipwright’s daughter from the Balmain docks who learned to swim in netted harbour water, and by the age of 27 she had won the 100 metres freestyle at three consecutive Olympic Games — Melbourne 1956, Rome 1960 and Tokyo 1964 — a feat no swimmer, man or woman, had managed before her. She became the first woman on earth to break one minute for the distance, and she owned that world record for fifteen years. This is the full story of Dawn Fraser: the brother she idolised, lost to leukaemia at 21; the car crash in March 1964 that killed her mother Rose and left Dawn nine weeks in a steel brace; the Olympic record she swam anyway; the flag taken near the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, the arrest, and the ten-year ban that ended the greatest swimming career this country has produced. It is also the story of everything that came after — a short marriage, a daughter raised largely alone, years behind the bar at a Balmain pub, a single term in state parliament, the torch carried at Homebush in 2000, a grandson who changed everything, and the fall at her Queensland home in December 2024 that put her in intensive care with a broken hip, four broken ribs and a heart that stopped beating for five seconds. She is 88 now, and she is back in the water. If you remember the wireless in the kitchen, the pubs going off, and the arguments about the blazers who banned her, tell us what you remember in the comments.
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