Young Bradman

8 Bowral more plains around what became Goulburn. The auctioneers were correct – partly; for some of the year, the Highlands were cooler, and at any time might have more extremes of weather than Sydney. Even in midsummer, February 1926, the temperature reached 101ºF, ‘the highest recorded for a long time’, the local Southern Mail reported, yet two days later the district had a slight frost. Old residents recalled something similar 50 years before. Summers were about as hot as Sydney’s; in January 1919 the thermometer at Bowral post office reached a season’s high of 98 ºF. The highlands did have more varied weather than the plains. In December 1918, a lad at nearby Robertson was lost in fog for four hours on his way home from school, and some of the searchers nearly lost themselves. A heavy midwinter frost in July 1924 burst several water pipes. For the years 1920 to 1926, Bowral had between 26 and 37 inches of rainfall, roughly the same as Sydney, and far less than the Southern Highlands of Scotland. To an Englishman, the summer in Sydney or the Southern Highlands will feel much the same: hot. Graham Gooch was astonished on his first visit to Australia in 1978: ‘You can be warned, but until you experience days like we did in Sydney and Adelaide you cannot understand the effect of such heat.’ In May 1925, after another Australian tour, JW Hearne said that the climate of Australia or the West Indies might take weeks to get used to; or you might never ‘overcome it at all’, and it affected your cricket. It’s wrong to assume that Australians thrive in their climate, just as it’s wrong to suppose that the Russians saw off Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 because they mind cold winters less. No-one likes the heat and cold. In his serialised life story in December 1930, Bradman described the long train journeys to inter-state matches – 16 hours, Sydney to Melbourne, and Undated postcard view looking south from Gibraltar Point to Bowral. The railway cutting across the picture from the left was long the effective boundary of the town.