Young Bradman

10 Bowral Bean divided Australian men into two: healthy ‘country’ (tanned, quick- witted, practical) and less healthy city types (soft, regimented, more at home with machinery). Life is never so neat. Bowral, 80 miles from Sydney, was not the city; yet it was not ‘bush’ as much as Goulburn, 130 miles from Sydney; or Cootamundra, roughly double that, where Bradman was born in 1908; let alone Bourke, in the far west of New South Wales, double that (and ‘back o’ Bourke’ is an Australian way of saying ‘ really far away’). True, you could feel the difference between bush and city. When in Australia in 1922, the writer DH Lawrence contrasted Sydney (‘a great, fine town, half like London, half like America’) with the bush (‘forlorn and lost’). The historian Jill Ker Conway and her mother, from a sheep farm in the far west of New South Wales, an overnight train journey away from Sydney, hurt their feet on the city’s ‘hard pavements’. Yet of all the memoirs of Australia in Bradman’s time, of cities or bush, few noted – as Jill Ker Conway did in her memoir The Road from Coorain – the places in-between city and bush. They have given Australia her share of cricketers and other leading men: the Australian captain Mark Taylor, for example, who grew up in Wyalong (‘Life was good and simple there, the way it is in country towns’) and Wagga (‘the perfect mix of town and country’). Australia is hardly the only country to have provinces that send great men to the city to seek their fortune: Shakespeare went to London from Stratford upon Avon, Samuel Johnson from Lichfield. Presumably with English readers in mind, Bradman in his 1930 book The Story of My Cricketing Life likened Bowral to Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire. A better comparison might be Buxton; if not within easy commuting distance, the Peak District town is near enough to Manchester, as Bowral is to Sydney, to enjoy at a weekend, or on an occasion. The midsummer horse races south of Bowral at Bong Bong in 1925 for example drew hundreds of motor cars and ‘society folk’ including the governor of New South Wales. Even those born into the ‘country’, such as Bradman’s parents, lived on a spectrum, part-city, part-country. Some things would reach even the most remote miner and shepherd, eventually; newspapers and letters in the post; tinned food. Some entertainments, needing a big and regular crowd, would stick to the cities, such as Test matches. Most things were in between; travelling actors, photographers and others ventured to any town with a worthwhile market. A Sydney dentist attended the Grand Hotel in Bowral one day a month, in the 1890s; by the 1910s, films for Bowral’s cinema came by train. Visiting English cricketers would play elevens (or more) ‘up country’. In December 1891 Lord Sheffield’s eleven beat ‘24 of Berrima’ in a two-day match at Bowral, on their way from Sydney to Melbourne. On the morning before the match, the captain WG Grace stood on the doorstep of the Grand Hotel, where he had arrived the day before. With a catapult he shot across Bong Bong Street at a bottle. ‘He missed the bottle three times, and then passed his weapon to [Gloucestershire teammate Goldney] Radcliffe!’ the Bowral Free Press reported. Did Bradman, whenever he passed there, one of the town’s main commercial corners, know its place in cricket history?! The Free Press mischievously claimed that not a hen in