Amongst the celebrations, discussions and debates that are taking place this Australia Day, there will be a certain group marking the 40th anniversary of the Australian Institute of Sport.

But, like the day itself, the Institute has become controversial.

And yet, also like the day itself, it is the history of the place that sits quietly, sometimes not recognised, as the volume of the debate cranks up around it.

The Australian Institute of Sport began as an idea in the mind of a Hungarian refugee and more than 8,000 scholarship holders later, and with more than 60 per cent of Australia's gold medals coming since the AIS's establishment, the anniversary should also be regarded as a tribute to those who came from a war-torn world and made a significant difference to the country that provided them with a new home.

Andrew Dettre was 22 years old when he arrived in Sydney on the US Army transport ship the General WM Black in December, 1948.

He had been a young journalist in Hungary and used his language skills to work as a translator in the Naples refugee camp he found himself in, translating English and German to those who could not otherwise be understood.

Four years after arriving in Australia, he was back in journalism, this time with the Bathurst National Advocate … then came Soccer World, the national paper he edited from 1963 until 1982, introducing the wider Australian public to the world he came from and the sport it loved.

It is Andrew who introduced Australia to two men who would become our most loved Socceroo coaches — Rale Rasic, from Bosnia, and Frank Arok from Yugoslavia.

Another friend and fellow refugee from Hungary was Les Murray, who also wrote about the "World Game" and became Australia's voice of soccer for SBS and known colloquially as "Mr Football".

During the 1970s, Dettre worked as the press secretary to the Whitlam government's minister for tourism and recreation, Frank Stewart, to whom he suggested Australia was about to slip off the international sporting stage unless it followed the European lead in creating a centre of excellence that would breed top coaches to get the best out of our young athletes.

In Dettre's memoirs, he wrote of "chewing the ear of Frank", asking, "how will the Australian public react if at the next Olympic Games, in 1976 at Montreal, our team flops?"

With the benefit of hindsight, we know the answer to that question.

Back then, Dettre was nominated as part of a European study group which proudly had its 289-page report tabled in parliament in October, 1975.

A month later, the Whitlam government was dismissed.

It was this report, brought out of a dusty cabinet and brushed off by the Fraser government, that was the foundation of what became one of the world's best elite sports facilities, spawning today's many state-based institutes that continue to prepare Australians to compete on the global stage.

While the government of the day was widely praised for its foresight, this is the true story of the genesis of the AIS in Dettre's own words from his memoir, shared with the ABC by his son Steve:

The highlight of my three years in this job? Without doubt my strong involvement with the creation of the Australian Institute of Sport.

Right through the 1950s and 1960s I began to realise that the naïve, true-blue Australian amateur sport could not keep up with the college-based Americans, the state-supported Eastern Bloc countries or the western Europeans, mainly the French and Italians, enjoying all sorts of municipal and corporate grants.

More and more I started to believe that Australia needed a tertiary institute where the top coaches of the future could be produced and where, with first-class facilities, the elite teams could prepare for major international events.

I thought with envy of those countries which had such institutes and wondered if ever the naïve Australia would follow this path.

My chance came. Early 1973, without a definite plan, I began to chew Frank's ear about this subject.

I enlisted the help of a brilliant physical educationalist, the veteran Canadian Gordon Young, then attached to the NSW Education Department, and also had several long chats with John Bloomfield, then head of the physical education department of the Western Australian university in Perth.

I even wrote a few informal "papers" on this for Frank Stewart, posing the question: how will the Australian public react if at the next Olympic Games, in 1976 at Montreal, our team flops?

It could have even flopped in Munich in 1972 where it was largely the brilliance of one 15-year-old girl, Shane Gould, and a couple of other swimmers who saved the team from wipe-out? What if there is no Gould in Montreal? No Gould and no gold?

Stewart tested the idea with the department and received a cool reception. Their attitude was that we are a ministry of recreation and not sport and recreation usually means mass participation in all sorts of pursuits on a non-elite basis.

I kept arguing that there is nothing shameful about elite sport. That's what the Olympics and all world championships are for.

However, if Australia wished to ignore world trends, the best would be not to send a team to the Olympics where the others, much less naïve and better-prepared, will always slaughter our boys and girls. Australian teams must have the opportunity to compete against all others on a level playing field, I argued.

After many months of arid arguments, Stewart and the department decided to set up a Study Group to look into this question which, to the Australian public, was as remote and mysterious as learning Sanskrit.

Dr Allan Coles, then head of the NSW Physical Education department, was selected to chair it and six others were appointed to be members of a study group.

I was among them.

The first task was to survey what sporting facilities we had in Australia and what else was needed. Then a thorough study was made of the physical education scene in schools and clubs.

By the end of 1974, we had most of the answers to these questions.

I strongly recommended that our little study group should live up to its name and carry out a study of what some leading countries were doing in the field of sports universities and high-performance training.

Together with my very nice old adviser, Gordon Young, we drew up a program to visit the most outstanding sports institutes of Europe.

We settled on Cologne, Vejle (Denmark), Paris, Moscow, Israel and Leipzig.

Our embassies were helpful in arranging a visit by our group … except to Leipzig: the East Germans flatly refused to let anyone in.

As we suspected even then and found out later, they had a lot to hide.

It was in their laboratories and training venues that the experiments to increase performances with all sorts of drugs were carried out.

The six of us split into two groups. I was with John Clarke (the great runner Ron's architect brother), and Elaine Murphy, a Melbourne physical educationalist.

We went to Cologne, Vejle, Paris, Macolin (Switzerland) and later alone I visited Frankfurt's famous "Sporthilfe", where mass participation in sport was planned.

The other trio had Allan Coles, soccer coach Rale Rasic and Geoff Strang from our department. Their schedule was Cologne, Warsaw, Moscow and Tel Aviv.

The trip was an eye-opener. Especially in Cologne and Paris (Vincennes) we could marvel at the enormous effort their countries made to give their best sportsmen and women a chance to improve themselves.

The facilities and infrastructure at most places made you feel that Australia was a whole century behind the world.

This gap, we all agreed, had to be closed.

After the trip, under Allan Coles's direction, we settled down to digest what we saw. We held several meetings in Canberra, first to find a common approach and then to write the report for the Government, together with our recommendations.

Coles had the greatest input into this study, which came out as Report of the Australian Sports Institute Study Report and ran to 289 pages.

In the greatest possible detail, it outlined the current position of competitive sport in Australia and then recommended, in minute detail, how a sports institute should be established, with what functions and authorities, preferably in Canberra.

The report was tabled in the House in October; less than a month later, the Whitlam government was dismissed by the governor-general; new elections were called and the ALP lost office.

The report with its wonderful recommendations went into deep sleep.

And the following year the Australian team returned home from the Montreal Olympics without a single gold medal, as foreshadowed by me in a pessimistic essay…

A few years later, one of the Liberal Party ministers, John Ellicott, happened to stumble on our report; dusted it off and re-presented it to the House and the public as their great initiative.

Malcolm Fraser and his cabinet saw the potential in this scheme and soon surged ahead to establish the AIS, which, without a doubt, has been largely responsible for the tremendous surge forward of many Australian sports.

Today, after numerous expansions and additions, the AIS is regarded as possibly the best in the world.

And I feel immensely proud that I could play such a part at its genesis.

In 2018, Dettre's lifetime commitment to Australian sport — particularly Soccer and the Olympic Games — was recognised with his induction into the Football Hall of Fame.

Later that year, he passed away aged 91, remembered by Joe Gorman, the author of The Death and Life of Australian Soccer, as "Australian football's greatest intellectual". And then some.