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Australian Sailing Hall of Fame
A new round of inductees
The latest people inducted into the Australian Sailing Hall of Fame are Olympic gold medallists Malcolm Page OAM, Paralympian crew Noel Robins OAM, Jamie Dunross OAM and Graeme Martin OAM, and legendary designer and meteorologist Frank Bethwaite DFC OAM. Daina Fletcher profiles the honourees and their careers.
2020 Australian Sailing Hall of Fame honourees, Paralympic gold medallists Noel Robins, Jamie Dunross and Graeme Martin, in their Sonar class boat in Sydney 2000. All three were awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2001, while Robins was posthumously inducted into the America’s Cup Hall of Fame in 2013. Photographer unidentified, image Getty Images
Sailing was introduced to the Paralympic Games as a medal sport in the 2000 Sydney Games
THIS YEAR HAS BEEN VERY SPARSE in the world of competitive sailing, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing the postponement of the Tokyo Olympic Games and limiting movement of sailors in and around the country. While all Australian national and many state championships have been cancelled, the announcement this year of three new honourees to the Australian Sailing Hall of Fame is cause for quiet celebration. The Hall of Fame acknowledges the rich history of Australian sailing by recognising national and international sailing stars, including athletes, coaches, designers, builders and administrators. Many fell in love with sailing on the club circuit – a circuit that is on the rise as sailors rediscover their local clubs and embrace the freedom of the winds and waters for friendly competition. The honourees this year are Malcolm Page OAM, double Olympic gold medallist in the 470 class; Noel Robins OAM, Jamie Dunross OAM and Graeme Martin OAM, Western Australian Paralympic gold medallists in the Sonar class; and Frank Bethwaite DFC OAM, legendary designer and meteorologist. All cut their teeth in the club circuit and went on to elite achievement internationally.
Noel Robins OAM, Jamie Dunross OAM and Graeme Martin OAM
In 2000, Western Australians Noel Robins (1945–2003), Jamie Dunross (born 1965) and Graeme Martin (born 1949) became Australia’s first gold medallists in the Paralympic Sonar Class at the Sydney Olympic Games. It was a remarkable achievement at the home-grown Games, when sailing was introduced to the Paralympic Games as a medal sport. It had been a demonstration sport in Atlanta in 1996, then the 2000 Games saw medal racing in two classes: the three-person Sonar and the one-person 2.4mR keelboat classes. With experienced America’s Cup skipper Robins as skipper and Dunross and Martin as crew, the team finished top four in all their counting races and went on to take gold, ahead of the German and Canadian teams in silver and bronze medal positions respectively. Robins had sailed as a child, but a car crash at age 21 rendered him partially quadriplegic from a spinal fracture. His long list of sailing achievements included skippering Australia in the 1977 America’s Cup against Ted Turner’s Courageous. He was 55 when he won gold at the Paralympics. In 2003 Noel Robins died after being hit by a car. Jamie Dunross became a quadriplegic after an explosion at a gold mine in Meekatharra, Western Australia. After the Paralympics he became the first person with quadriplegia to circumnavigate Australia unassisted, in 2010. Martin, who had his left leg amputated after an accident while fighting fires, went on to win a bronze medal in the Sonar class at the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing. While sailing was removed from the Olympic program for the now postponed 2020 Games, lobbying continues to return it to the program for 2024.
01 Malcolm Page with the 470 class Practical Magic at the Australian National Maritime Museum, 2013. Image Janine Flew/ANMM 02 Frank Bethwaite at Woollahra Sailing Club c 2007, working on a foiling speedboat which was the precursor to the 49er foiling program. Image courtesy Bethwaite family 01
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Malcolm Page OAM Malcolm Page (born 1972) has won multiple world and national titles and is currently Australia’s most successful Olympic sailor in the 470 class after winning gold medals at successive Olympic Games, under two different skippers – Nathan Wilmot in Beijing in 2008 and Mat Belcher in London in 2012.
Page overcame childhood seasickness and started sailing in Manly Junior dinghies when he was eight. In 1986 he won his first gold in that class as a teenager at the Australian National Championships. He sailed Flying 11s, 16- and 18-foot skiffs and the International 505 class, then moved to the 470 class for Olympic competition as the new millennium dawned. Under the tutelage of Australian Olympic coach and former 470 class sailor Victor Kovalenko (himself inducted into the Australian Sailing Hall of Fame in 2017), this became Page’s forte, although he also later won events in the larger Farr 40 and Sydney 38 keelboat classes. His first Olympics in the 470 dinghy class was in Athens in 2004. After going in as world champion, he was unplaced. In the following two Olympics, he and his successive skippers won gold. Excelling over these years meant considerable self-control for the 186-centimetre-tall Page, who adopted a strict diet to control his and his skipper’s optimum weight to race the dinghy in varying conditions. In acknowledgment of his career, Page was given the honour of carrying the flag for the Australian team in the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games. He retired to coach soon after.
Frank Bethwaite DFC OAM
The third honouree this year is Frank Bethwaite (1920–2012), a global innovator and pioneer in design and meteorology. He and his wife Adelaide (known as Nel) founded a sailing dynasty along with their four children, Christine, Mark, Nicky and Julian. Bethwaite loved experimenting with rigs and hull designs; he joined the Northbridge Sailing Club in Sydney after moving to Australia from New Zealand in 1959 and was instrumental in forming a group to design a dinghy to make sailing more accessible. The Northbridge Senior, or NS14, was born – a small, light dinghy in which hundreds of children have learnt to sail, with many going on to win world championships. In 1968 Bethwaite established Starboard Products. There he created a small wind tunnel to experiment with wind flow over sails, which led to innovative breakthroughs in rig design and performance. In 1975 his Tasar design was picked up by Performance Sailcraft, which produced 3,000 dinghies worldwide, in Canada, the UK, Japan and Australia. Another high-profile class bearing the Bethwaite name is the 49er skiff, a concept son Julian developed with his father’s support in 1995. The 49er was selected for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, the first Australian design ever to be so honoured. Today it remains an integral part of Olympic sailing. In 1976 Bethwaite was appointed meteorologist for the Australian sailing team at the Montreal Olympic Games. The research he did for those Games formed the basis of his 1992 book High Performance Sailing. Seen as an industry standard, it was translated into 12 languages. He went on to write Higher Performance Sailing in 2008 and Fast Handling Technique, which he completed shortly before his death in 2012.
As grandson Harry said in his speech at Bethwaite’s funeral:
Frank was the man that was never going to stop, he always had more energy and excitement for life than any of us … As he once told me during a trial run in the foiling 49er, ‘if it breaks, then we now know how not to do it’. This was said as the pinnacle of the sport was trying to be reached with plywood foils with a couple of bits of carbon on it, which was controlled by a cut fishing rod connected to another rod by a Velcro pad. That first trial run was definitely a good learning curve ...
For more information on these and other honourees, please visit sailinghalloffame.org.au/ Australian Sailing Hall of Fame is developed by Australian Sailing in partnership with the Australian National Maritime Museum
