TRACEY LEE HOLMES The Eye of the Dragonfly. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

In this memoir of her life as a sports journalist, Tracey Holmes views the human condition through the lens of sport. 

Tracey Lee Holmes has had a long and distinguished career as a sports broadcaster. She began her career with the ABC in the late 1980s, and has reported on numerous Olympic Games and World Cups, in addition to holding a variety of other jobs, including as media spokesperson for the Organising Committee for the Sydney Olympic Games from 1996 to 1998, and teaching English when she moved to Hong Kong and China with her husband Stan Grant during the early 2000s.

Besides what might be called her ‘straight’ sports reporting, her major contribution has been with the shows Grandstand and The Ticket, in-depth programs where she interviewed a wide range of players, officials, politicians, academics and commentators on major controversies associated with the wonderful world of sport. This investigative approach is where she has made a major, if not unique, contribution, to sports reporting in Australia.

I like to have a long-form conversation that draws out of my guest a complete story, going to places rarely explored, to gain a thorough understanding of who they are and why.

Holmes starts her book with a few lines from the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828):

The distant mountains

Are reflected in the eye

Of the dragonfly

In her introduction, she explains why she landed on ‘the dragonfly’ for her title.

I try hard to see not what I want or expect but what is there, without filters. I try to see through dragonfly eyes – with their 360-degree view as they flit from this place to that … Native Americans such as the Hopi, Zuni and Navajo believe the insect symbolises maturity and pure water. It seeks to know what’s below the surface and beyond the horizon. It strips away negativity and provides hope. For the Japanese, dragonflies symbolise agility, courage and strength. They are often described as the souls of ancestors. The Chinese associate dragonflies with good luck, prosperity and harmony.

Holmes subscribes to the view that sport is at its most interesting when it is not about sport.

This is not a book about sport; it is a book that uses sport as a lens through which we can interrogate the best and worst of us … [sport] is about people, places, culture, politics, power, influence, tragedy and celebration. Sport has it all … Sport has been a particularly powerful lens through which to examine our attitudes to race and gender.

Holmes says that her object is to provide ‘a candid telling of the key people, places, events and ideas that have most influenced me’.

The Eye of the Dragonfly is organised into two broad sections. The first is autobiographical, providing an outline of her life and career. Her father was a surfer who took the family to South Africa and Hawaii chasing waves. Holmes continued surfing on her return to Australia and worked as a media liaison officer for local and regional surfing events during high school. She subsequently landed a job with a PR firm that was working with surfing events. This led to a full-time job filing media reports on surfing to various outlets, which morphed into a job with the Australian Bicentennial Authority covering surfing.

This work enabled her to develop contacts with both media and sporting organisations. At the end of 1988, ABC sports commentator George Grljusich contacted her and suggested she apply for a position with the ABC’s Broadcast Specialist trainee program. She obtained one of the two positions on offer – ‘thousands of people applied’. On top of performing her required duties, she took it upon herself to conduct 15-minute interviews with women who worked in sport, which she called ‘Women in Sport’. This was the beginning of her investigative reporting for Grandstand and The Ticket.

For Holmes, the glass is always half full, and she is constantly on the lookout for the next story. She quickly worked out that if she wanted to get on she would need to work harder and be more creative (better) in the male-dominated world of sports reporting. In saying this, she points out that ‘most of the experienced, talented men I worked with were happy to give valuable advice when I asked’.

Information is provided on different jobs she has had and the places where work and life have taken her. Holmes met Stan Grant when they were both working for Channel 7 in the lead-up to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Stan, of course, is an Indigenous Australian. Tracey is not. Their relationship caused a degree of angst at Seven.

I had a call from a senior Seven person. I was told, ‘We all like Stan, but they are not like us.’ … The NSW Station Manager called us into his office and told Stan, ‘It might be time for you [to] go back to your tribe.’ … the head of Seven’s sport … told me that Stan and I were not to travel together, and if we did, he would make sure the papers photographed us, piling further hell on our relationship. I suggested he was my boss, not my father … Kerry Stokes invited us to separate meetings at his North Sydney office. He told me that until the Olympics were over, Stan and I were to be separated … [Holmes and Grant resigned in protest.] The lawyer we chose to represent us was awesome.

Holmes reports that the racism she and Stan Grant have been subjected to ‘has been unrelenting during our marriage’. They both resigned from the ABC in 2023 ‘after [Stan] was subjected to the most appalling racism week in, week out, with the ABC offering little to no support’.

The second section of The Eye of the Dragonfly examines major sporting events and issues, and persons she has interviewed over the years. Here her main focus is the Olympics and the soccer World Cups. Her dragonfly eyes see many Olympic controversies as nothing more than political contests between different power blocs, as nations seek to assert dominance and ‘bragging rights’ over each other. She also has sympathy for the Olympic movement that must juggle these rivalries as it seeks to organise international sporting carnivals in such a fractured world.

In examining the lot of Pele, that champion Brazilian footballer, Holmes demonstrates an acute understanding of the pressures placed on star athletes.

Winning in sport delivers a peculiar type of fame. Being recognised globally for something you do with your hands or your feet has somehow come to mean you need to have a view on each global complexity. Worse is when fame makes you think you should deliver these views. The media was the first to amplify this tendency; social media has seen it blow out exponentially. Pele was one of the world’s first successful conversions from athlete to brand, therefore one of the first to understand that politics swirled all about, and that the price for money and fame might be a piece of your soul.

Holmes also examines issues associated with racism and sexism in sport, including the difficulties for female athletes considered to have a difference of sex development (that is, being accused of being male or transgender), performance-enhancing drugs, gambling, social media (especially its negative impact for traditional media and the employment of sports journalists), artificial intelligence, the use of gene identification in searching for better athletes, and the political rivalries fought over sport. Holmes provides information on the growth of women’s sport across the globe in the last decade; and information on increases in the number of female journalists.

The Eye of the Dragonfly provides a no-holds-barred account not only of major sporting events of recent decades but also a glimpse behind the scenes of what is involved in reporting these events. Holmes’s strengths are her relentless zeal in chasing a story, and seeing sport through ‘the eye of the dragonfly’ as a reflection of the human condition.

Tracey Lee Holmes The Eye of the Dragonfly: My life seeing the world through sport Simon and Schuster 2025 PB 324pp $36.99

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things. In the past he has been interviewed by and provided background information on industrial relations issues in sport to Tracey Holmes.

You can buy The Eye of the Dragonfly from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: ABC, Channel 7, journalism, memoir, racism, sports writing, Stan Grant, surfing, Tracey Lee | Holmes