Young Bradman

152 Haigh made the shrewd point that we think of Trumper in terms of an image – bat behind head, left foot forward, launching a drive (ironically, in London, the famous photograph taken by an Englishman). Bradman, meanwhile, we think of in statistics. That means a statue of Trumper is more likely to be a success artistically than one of Bradman, even though, if only a handful of people are remembered from each century, Bradman, not Trumper, will be on a par with Shakespeare, Napoleon, Hitler, and perhaps someone whose work we do not yet truly appreciate, such as Magritte. The greatest men of politics speak to future centuries because of what they left behind, for good and bad. We and those ahead of us can still connect to Shakespeare’s work; anyone can take the part of his characters, and do not even have to wear hose and doublet (whatever they are). The fleeting nature of sport, like dance, does not allow us to connect with Sir Donald Bradman in the same way. And life is so short, the years of a sportsman’s physical peak even shorter, which brings us to the strange choice of words beneath the Sydney Shakespeare statue; the ‘we are such stuff that dreams are made on’ lines of Prospero’s towards the end of The Tempest , that question whether the palaces and temples and this world have any reality at all, and wistfully remind us of how our ‘little life’ ends in death (‘a sleep’). This would make uncomfortable reading for the young and sunny-natured in a young and growing city; uncomfortable, because true. These Our Actors Statue of Sir Donald Bradman, Adelaide, by night.