Young Bradman

14 Bowral Guardian , Stephens called Bradman ‘a great ambassador for Australia’; it was ‘rubbish’ to say Bradman had a swelled head or was unsociable. ‘He is the same Don that I knew as a lad and quite unaffected by fame. He has a big responsibility on his shoulders, is inundated with requests and invitations and cannot possibly accept them all.’ By then big-city life had changed Bradman; he could no longer respond as familiarly to everyone as to Stephens. Rather than go into Bradman’s adult life, which has been so well gone over anyway, what matters is that Bradman’s path was the same for many ambitious and gifted Australians and others; indeed, billions will have done it by the end of Bradman’s century and ours. It has been the same throughout history. Christ had to go to Jerusalem; scholars went to Oxford or Cambridge; artists went to Paris, writers to London, engineers to North America. In so many Australian stories the characters either leave the city for the bush (the novels Voss by Patrick White, and Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey) or the other way round (as in the film Crocodile Dundee ). Or, instead of a physical move, the characters yearn for the other place, to be truly themselves in it. Even for her novel set in the bush, My Beautiful Career, Miles Franklin had to send it to Sydney in search of a publisher. For her novel My Career Goes Bung , set after My Beautiful Career , she goes to Sydney. Towards the end, the heroine, who has never left Australia, says: ‘I know London much better than I do Sydney.’ As in Bradman’s story, we have this trinity of bush, then city, then the world. Miles Franklin implies that the pull of England was cultural; the language, the face of the monarch on the pennies. While true enough, economic reasons counted too; people left small towns for larger places for the sake of their careers. Australian cricketers sought to make it to England for the same reason as journalists aimed for London and artists aimed for Paris; there lay the market for their talent, and the jobs (or better jobs and more respect in Australia on their return). To make your fortune, you had to go to them; the cricket grounds of England would no more come to you than the art dealers or newspaper editors would. In his autobiography, Bradman claimed to have ‘normal boyhood days’. While that looked true enough – sports, fishing, school – Bradman left out the changes to his world as he was growing up. Some were trivial, like the milk shakes and ‘American soda fountain drinks of all flavours’ in Mrs Triggs’ refreshment room on Bong Bong Street, next door to the Empire Theatre (in fact a cinema and skating rink; the moving pictures alone were a revolution in culture). Bradman saw the historic change from horse-drawn to motor transport. In January 1918 Bowral cricket team caught a ‘trap’ leaving from the post office (‘at one o’clock sharp’) for a match at Berrima. Only a few years later, as scorer, Bradman was ‘having to sit on a wooden kerosene box in the back of a lorry shod with hard rubber tyres’, as he recalled in his 1950 book Farewell to Cricket . In November 1926 for instance, Don and his brother Vic’s names were first in the list in the local newspaper of the Bowral eleven to play at Moss Vale (‘leaves Whatman’s Garage 1.30 pm sharp’). Motors did more than speed travel; they shrank mental distances too; and gave new work, and took