Young Bradman

11 Bowral the district could sit on all the ‘duck eggs’ made by locals in the match – 19, including one by Richard Whatman, a brother of Bradman’s mother. As inventions and fashions changed life, first in the cities, the goods and services flowed inland, like rivers in reverse. Bowral was at one end of a global supply chain; you could buy in its shops or order from Sydney by catalogue (if you could afford it) a German piano, a Kodak camera, Lipton’s tea. Country people shared in the culture of the English-speaking world; Bowral’s reading room had Australian newspapers, and from London the parliamentary record Hansard and the satirical magazine Punch . Country people, however, were always behind the times, as set by the city (and reported in their newspapers). Farm animals on footpaths – and trampling your garden, given the chance - were part of the scenery of small towns. A reader’s letter in a newspaper in December 1919 complained it was unsafe to leave a garden gate open, ‘on account of the number of horses, cows and calves that are constantly turned out and allowed to roam about on the Bowral streets by mean and selfish people, who thus try to save the cost of feed to themselves’. DH Lawrence, who stayed 35 miles from Bowral on the coast at Thirroul in 1922, inserted into his resulting novel Kangaroo the comic aside of a tea towel rescued from the horns of a cow. As cricket was played on a field, rural names came naturally. The British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, welcoming the Australian tourists at a lunch in London in April 1926, recalled the past player George Bonnor, ‘whose throw-in from the country was a thing no man who ever saw it could forget’. Bonnor – himself a man of the bush, from Bathurst – was View south on Bong Bong Street, Bowral’s main drag, 1998. The pale-coloured Grand Hotel is centre right, and the railway station a couple of minutes’ walk to the right. The Empire Theatre (‘established 1915’) is just visible down the street on the right hand side.