Young Bradman

148 better than men have ever done in earlier ages – is never something that an individual can do but always something that men have to create together. It was a clumsy, preachy ending. Priestley did have an excuse; he and his country had come through a war of survival, and were asking themselves: for what? The choice that Priestley set out – whether man should put himself first, or community – was false; the argument has always been over the balance between the two, or simply who takes the credit. Climbers of Everest need others to fetch and carry; astronauts die if thousands do not do their jobs properly. On the cricket field, you never play only for yourself, or only for the team; everyone does some of both; some more than others. For all the reasons that make us who we are – personal preference, fashion, customs, the law – the balance never stops swinging. Nor will the argument ever stop, as in the public debate in Britain in the 2010s about ‘social mobility’. It was striking that the names have changed but the idea has not; Victorians spoke of the ‘great families’, the satirists of the 1960s ‘the Establishment’, and the 2010s the ‘one per cent’. In each case those with power and wealth could arrange things – the rules of business and taxation, selection and recruitment at universities and into professions, what was culturally prized – so that they could pass their advantages to their children. The historian Manning Clark in a telling analysis suggested that the sort of boys who bullied him in ‘the Long Dorm’ were ‘the types who rule Australia’ – and the United States, and apartheid South Africa, and Communist Russia. Whatever the political label, ‘they wield the wet towel’. To join their ranks, in whatever capacity, you had to be as strong as them, or otherwise impress them. Was a boy born in this world in 2008 more, or less, able than in 1908 by his own efforts to join the ‘one per cent’. The answer will depend on how the long- term trends of mechanisation, and now computerisation, treat an original like Bradman. The 21 st century seemed set to be an age of digital data, that could measure the masses, and the individual in the mass, as never before. It could leave the individual crushed, or set free; or it could largely depend as before, on your skin colour, name, money and brain. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in a 1961 memoir A World on the Wane saw the ‘paradox of civilisation’: … we know that its magic derives from the presence within it of certain impurities, and yet we can never resist the impulse to clean up precisely those elements which give it its charm. We are doubly right but that very rightness proves us wrong. For we are right to wish to increase our production and cut manufacturing costs. But we are also right when we treasure some of the imperfections which we are doing our best to eliminate. Society sets itself, in short, to destroy precisely those things which give it most flavour. That applied to the small family businesses on Bong Bong Street in Bowral and a thousand towns like it, and a boy who made his own fun rather than buying it. A window opened, around Sydney before 1930 – indeed, because of the Depression it closed as soon as Bradman climbed through it – just as a window opened in Elizabethan England for Shakespeare and in the Quattro cento for Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Before The Himalayan Men