HUNGARY AND RUSSIA IN FIERY POOL CLASH was the loud headline accompanying a black-and-white image of anguish and bloodshed.

It's 1956 at the Olympic Games in Melbourne, and rising Cold War tensions have been encapsulated by the badly gashed right eye of Hungarian water polo player Ervin Zádor.

The infamous "blood in the water" match, a semi-final showdown between the USSR and Hungary, is perhaps the most violent clash of political and sporting rivalries in an Olympic arena.

A month earlier, Soviet tanks had silenced revolutionary forces in Hungary. The timing of their travel meant the Hungarian team endured days of uncertainty about the fate of their homes and families.

The fiery clash made front-page news. ( Supplied: National Library of Australia )

And in the temperate waters of the Olympic Swimming and Diving Stadium on December 6, tensions simmered to a boil.

"They [the Hungarians] were extraordinarily angry and they had two objectives," said historian and journalist Dr Harry Blutstein, who detailed the showdown in his book Cold War Games.

"The first objective was they needed to win the match.

"To be defeated by the Russians would've been another humiliation — they've run over Hungary with their tanks and they're running over us with their polo team.

"The second thing was they just wanted to lay a few fists and see a fair bit of Russian blood in the pool. And that's what happened."

In the closing minutes of the match's violent second half, Soviet player Valentin Prokopov rose from the water, brought his elbow down on Zádor's face and entered into history.

People had been injured and players ordered from the water before Zádor was hit. ( Supplied: Public Record Office Victoria )

Photos of Zádor, who swam to the far side of the pool and fronted press cameras as blood streamed down his face, were published the world over.

Less well known is the unlikely story of the team's journey to the Games, when the fallout of the uprising, coincidental timing, and a team of unsuspecting volunteers converged at Darwin airport.

A mysterious package

Last year, a package sent via express post arrived at the Northern Territory Archives Service (NTAS).

From its office in Darwin's green northern suburbs, NTAS houses kilometres upon kilometres of significant historical and government records; its archives humming to perfectly conserve materials at 20 degrees Celsius and 50 per cent humidity.

But for Katherine Hamilton, the manager of access and promotions, opening the mysterious package was "like Christmas".

It was a surprise — a time capsule, a fragmented chronology of a stranger's life.

The woman's donation contained miscellanea from her time in Darwin. ( ABC Radio Darwin: Jesse Thompson )

The package contained photos of remote communities taken through tiny aircraft windows, of sun-bleached, louvre-lined hospitals, and an elegant woman with a beaming smile at a ball.

It was sent by Mim McCutcheon, a recent interviewee in an NTAS oral history project, and also included rare material related to Darwin's little-known Olympic history.

"The other extraordinary thing that's in this package we received is a woven mat," Ms Hamilton said.

"On the front is stamped Philippine delegation to the 1956 Olympic Games, Melbourne."

Intrigued, Ms Hamilton and her colleagues soon got to work learning the stories behind the collection.

Katherine Hamilton was surprised to receive the donation. ( ABC Radio Darwin: Jesse Thompson )

Volunteers slept in shifts

In 1955, Ms McCutcheon stepped off a 13-hour flight from Melbourne and into a frontier town lined with palm trees, filled with single young professionals and recently scarred by war.

She arrived in Darwin as a haematology assistant but soon took an active interest in a handful of sports outside of office hours.

This is how she came to volunteer ahead of the 1956 Olympics, when she was tasked with keeping teams rested and fed as they landed to refuel.

The donation also contained slides taken in the Northern Territory in the 1950s. ( ABC Radio Darwin: Jesse Thompson )

That was the state of air travel in the 1950s: long-haul flights punctuated by fuel stops and also primitive communication.

"Because of the lack of communication, we didn't know, really, when they were going to arrive, whether it was the middle of the night, early morning or when," said Ms McCutcheon, now a very lucid 90.

She recalled an Ethiopian team arriving in a DC-3 aircraft fitted with wooden benches, only to find that the local hotels had been booked out by other teams.

"So I stayed up with them all night," Ms McCutcheon said.

Slides within the donation showed life in the Northern Territory in the 1950s. ( ABC Radio Darwin: Jesse Thompson )

Air conditioning was also a relatively new phenomenon. Luckily the airport terminal was fitted with the only air conditioner in Darwin, so volunteers were happy to work around the clock.

"We'd even sleep on benches because it was air conditioned, and sometimes [arrivals] happened in the middle of the night."

But these gentle scenes would soon be thrown into turmoil.

Shrieks echo through terminal

When the Hungarian water polo team flew out of Czechoslovakia (their own airport had been bombed), the players left under the impression the revolution had been won.

But days later Russian tanks rolled through Budapest once more and crushed the uprising.

The players and officials received scant detail of the events on their five-day journey to Australia. Among the rumours they encountered, according to Dr Blutstein, was that Budapest had been reduced to a crater.

A Japanese delegation landed in Darwin en route to Melbourne. ( Supplied: NT Library )

"They're travelling through the Middle East, Pakistan, Singapore — wherever they arrive, they get off the plane, immediately go and grab newspapers and see what's going on," he said.

"But of course they couldn't read the newspapers, so all they could see were photos of a destroyed city.

"As you can imagine, by the time they got to Darwin, they were absolutely emotionally drained and had no idea what happened to their families."

Ahead of their arrival, Olympic officials had asked crews on the ground in Darwin to inform the team of the unrest in Hungary.

Ms McCutcheon recalled: "When we heard the Hungarians were coming, there was a little bit of a panic: 'What are we going to do?'"

The Olympics memorabilia piqued the archivists' interest. ( ABC Radio Darwin: Jesse Thompson )

As the players disembarked, local Hungarians reportedly gathered near the quarantine barrier to sing the national anthem.

Miklós Martin, a player who had a firm grasp of English, quickly found a newspaper and shared the news.

From the second floor where she was working, Ms McCutcheon heard the shrieks that echoed through the terminal.

"Lots of crying, lots of yelling, lots of screaming, lots of carrying on — lots of restraining them from running out to get on the plane again to go back," she said.

"That's what we were trying to do, to calm them down and get them to sit down and talk.

"There was no Hungarian ambassador in Darwin, obviously, so it was very hard."

The Soviet team was served an elaborate menu during its 10-day journey to Melbourne. ( ABC Radio Darwin: Jesse Thompson )

Dr Blutstein said the extent of destruction in Budapest had been overestimated and he believed the men's families had been spared.

But Ms McCutcheon said keeping the team company nonetheless made for a deeply disturbing night.

Miraculously, officials at the airport convinced the team to continue on to Melbourne where the match would be played.

"Several of us wanted to return," a team member told a Northern Territory News reporter at the airport.

"But officials at the Prague airport told us to stay with our aircraft or we would be in concentration camps very quickly.

"What could we do? We came to Australia."

An Olympic ticket declined

The Hungarians won the spiteful match against the USSR 4-0 and would go on to win the final against Yugoslavia 2-1 and claim gold.

But there was no doubt the events leading up to the Olympics meant their lives had been irrevocably changed.

While some returned to Hungary, others defected; some floated the idea of staying in Australia, fearing for their lives if they returned.

What did Ms McCutcheon think of the events that unfolded?

The Hungarian team won the violent clash 4-0. ( Supplied: Public Record Office Victoria )

"I didn't even know anything about it because there was no television," she bluntly recalled.

"Darwin's a long way from Melbourne and we were just going on with our lives."

In fact, she'd been offered a ticket to the Games.

The Ethiopian team with whom she'd sat up all night asked her to chaperone them through Melbourne. Her boss objected, so Ms McCutcheon stayed put.

However, she doesn't regret taking a distant seat from the history-making events in which she played a part.