BOOMERANG EFFECT A VERY DIFFERENT WORLD RETURNS TO A FAMILIAR PLACE.

The U.S. Olympians who traveled to Melbourne for the 1956 Summer Games might as well have been going into outer space. Thirteen years before Apollo 11, the athletes were convinced the moon would be easier to reach than Australia.

``I didn't know what planet I was on when we arrived,'' said shot putter Parry O'Brien of the U.S. Olympic squad's journey halfway around the world.

From Los Angeles it was a two-day journey on a propeller plane that buzzed across the Pacific Ocean, hop scotching land masses to refuel like a bee pollinating plants. Along the way the U.S. team crossed the international date line and lost not just one day but a few years.

When they finally staggered off the plane, wobbly-legged, they felt as though they had stumbled into a time warp. They stepped into a strange land where television and refrigeration and the racial integration of teams remained very much of a novelty.

The language was the same but even that sounded different.

In myriad ways, it will be Melbourne once more when the Olympics return to Australia for the second time next month. The U.S. athletes who travel to Sydney can count on being treated well by the local populace, seeing heated demonstrations and feeling the heat from faraway flash points.

The biggest difference will be the size and scale of the stage. The 1956 Summer Games carried a price tag of $20 million; the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney have accrued a half-a-billion dollar bill.

To appreciate what's ahead for the U.S. Olympic team, it's instructive to take a look back.

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Melbourne had won by one vote (over Buenos Aires) the right to host the 1956 Olympics. It was the first Games to be held in the southern hemisphere and, as such, it expanded people's mental map of the world in a way that seems quaint in our jet-propelled, Internet-powered world.

The first Olympics to be held in Australia was also the last Games not to be televised to a global audience. They took place at a time when the world was expanding so fast it seemed to be coming apart at the seams.

Politics crashed sport's Amateur Ball in Melbourne and the Cold War heated up.

Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq boycotted the Games to protest the British and French stratagem in the Suez Canal area. Communist China withdrew when it learned Nationalist China (Taiwan) was sending a team.

The Soviet Union participated in the Summer Games for only the second time and turned the Olympic pool into a bloody mess, mimicking their military compatriots who had rolled into Hungary a month earlier to quell anti uprising.

Some Hungarian Olympic team members had gathered in Budapest before traveling to Melbourne and they were there when Russian tanks rolled into the city. According to one published report, three members of the country's Olympic team were among the thousands of Hungarians killed during the fighting that ensued.

U.S. athletes, before leaving for Melbourne, were briefed by FBI and State Department officials on what to do if someone from the Hungarian Olympic contingent approached them about seeking political asylum. So O'Brien, a USC standout, knew exactly what to do when a Hungarian coach asked for his help in gaining asylum during the track and field competition.

O'Brien passed on the phone number the State Department had provided and wished him well. The coach was hardly alone; more than half the Hungarian Olympic delegation refused to return to Hungary after the Games.

``I don't think anybody regretted helping these people,'' O'Brien, who dominated the shot competition with the five best puts, said recently by telephone. ``The way we understood it, to go back to Hungary and life under a Soviet-imposed dictatorship would have been to face prison or death.''

Before the Games began, a U.S. senator had urged that Russia be banned from participating, reasoning that a victory by a Russian athlete would, ``endanger the peace of the world.''

The Netherlands pulled out of the Games because of the Soviets' aggression. In announcing the Dutch withdrawal, the president of that country's National Olympic Committee asked plaintively, ``How can sports prevail over what has happened in Hungary?''

Once the Games were under way, Hungarian emigrants living in Australia let it be known they were wondering the same thing. ``There were demonstrations all over the place that were organized by Hungarians living in Australia,'' O'Brien said. ``Sentiments were running very high against the Russians.''

The politically charged atmosphere spilled into the swimming pool during a water polo semifinal that pitted Hungary against Russia. The first elbows were thrown almost as soon as the ball was dropped in the water. Before long it began raining seat cushions.

O'Brien, who attended the match, recalled, ``There were Hungarian emigrants in the crowd and they were chanting and throwing seat cushions into the water. They had to stop the game four times.''

The game was stopped for good before the match clock ran out with the Hungarians leading, 4-0. Hungary proceeded to win the gold with a victory against a Yugoslavia-Croatia team.

Forty-four years later, of course, Yugoslavia and Croatia are united only in their enmity toward each other. The Sydney Games figure to bear some scars for all the blood shed in the tinderbox that is the Balkans.

Too, discontent that long has been smoldering in Australia could flare into full-scale demonstrations during the Olympics. Australian Aborigine Evonne Goolagong, a two-time Wimbledon champion, recently led a march on Sydney to protest the plight of the Aborigines, Australia's original, dark-skinned settlers.

Rafer Johnson traveled to Melbourne in 1956 as the 20-year-old world record holder in the decathlon and to Sydney, on business, earlier this summer. The UCLA graduate was struck by one thing then and now.

``It's obvious you don't see many people of color,'' said Johnson, who is of African-American descent.

That didn't color his Olympic experience at all. Johnson said he was treated extraordinarily well wherever he went in Melbourne. He remembered walking through parks and having people greet him and give him food straight out of their picnic baskets.

``The effort and enthusiasm of the citizenry was incredible,'' Johnson said. ``You could tell it was a great thing for their national pride to have an Olympic Games.''

His mother also attended those Games after Johnson's hometown of Kingsburg, in central California, raised the money for her air fare. She was billeted with a Caucasian family in a Melbourne suburb. Neighbors reacted to her presence by slamming their screen doors shut and closing their windows whenever she came into view.

Rafer Johnson hadn't known any of this until earlier this summer when he had dinner in Sydney with one of the daughters of the couple that had hosted his mother. The woman cut short their reminiscing because she wasn't feeling well and last week - Johnson's voice cracked as he got to this part of the story - she died. The friendships built during an Olympic fortnight are such that Johnson felt as if he had lost a member of his family.

Johnson and the daughter had kept up a correspondence throughout the years, one result of his 1956 Olympic participation that he values more than the silver medal he won in the decathlon.

``People think it's just the Olympic Games,'' Johnson said, ``but there's so much going on away from the competition. What people don't realize is the tremendous bonds that are established.''

Forty-seven thousand volunteers are expected to help roll out the welcome mat next month in Sydney. Their aim is to make the faraway land seem like home, no matter where that happens to be. They are cut from the same soft, cotton cloth as the 400 Melbourne housewives who in 1956 volunteered to be on-call moms at the Olympic Village so all the athletes might feel more at home.

Forty four years after he competed in Melbourne, Johnson's daughter Jenny Johnson Jordan will compete in Sydney in the beach volleyball competition with partner Annette Buckner Davis. For Australia and for one American family, the Olympics are as interlocked as the Olympic rings. They have come full circle.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo: (1 -- color) American Olympians Milton Campbell, center, and Rafer Johnson, left, pose with their medals with Russia's Vassily Kouznetsov at the 1956 Melbourne games

(2 -- color) The Sydney 200 Olympic sponsor Goodyear Blip soars over the Sydney Olympic Stadium in Australia.

(3) Hungarian water polo player Ervin Zador, right, shows the result of a bitter match between Hungary and the Soviet Union in 1956.

Associated Press