Salute

Salute has been received with much critical adulation although I’m not entirely sure why. I suspect it is because of a sympathy towards the subject rather than the merits of the documentary itself. Written and directed by Peter Norman’s nephew, Matt, as much as the film is an unabashed campaign to get recognition for his uncle, the most interesting aspects are really extrinsic to Norman himself and concern the moral and political values of Australian sport and by extension, of Australia in general.

Peter Norman was (unfortunately, he did not live to see this film) an all-round nice guy, a devout Christian in the good sense, and a top sprinter who accidentally found himself a pariah to the official Australian Olympic bureaucracy after the Mexico ’68 incident when he quietly displayed his solidarity with Carlos and Smith's symbolic gesture. It is sad to find out that he was not invited to the 1972 Munich Games, the powers-that-be going to the extent of not sending any sprint team rather than having to include Norman. It is simply amazing to discover that he was not invited to take part in the Sydney 2000 Olympic Ceremony. That this was the Games at which Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic torch and draped herself in the Aboriginal flag lends a symmetry to the story which the film does not pursue. One presumes that Freeman was as oblivious of Norman as we all were prior to this film but it would have been interesting to hear more, both from Freeman and Olympic officials.

Instead, the director tends to fall back on a variety of relatively recently recorded footage of the 3 sportsmen, as well of the two surviving men at Norman’s funeral. As these are all, in one way or another, memorial events, they tend to cover the same ground and do so, of course, in pointedly rhetorical ways, the same points being made repeatedly. But after all, the event in question was a small moment and for Peter Norman, a more-or-less coincidental one. Once again it is the contextual material which is of greatest interest – Angela Davis pointing out Australia’s racist immigration and Aboriginal assimilation policies of the time, the reciprocal solidarity to this day of Carlos and Smith and other black American athletes who were also at Mexico in recognizing and honouring Norman's gesture. I’m pretty sure that the self-effacing Norman himself would agree.

Salute is nevertheless a touching portrait of a decent man whose destiny it was to be caught up in the larger scheme of things.

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