Young Bradman

18 Beginnings leaving Jindalee, neighbours held a dance and collected enough money to buy George Bradman a gold locket and his wife a gold brooch, to say goodbye. One friend singled out ‘the great loss Mr Bradman would be to the neighbouring cricket clubs’. A ‘Central Southern Cricket Association’ first met in Cootamundra in October 1907; and agreed fixtures for four clubs (more, later) to compete for a cup. By 1909, George Bradman was attending association meetings for Stockinbingal. After moving to Bowral, George Bradman carried on administration; by 1912 he was one of five vice-presidents and one of a selection committee of three at Bowral club; in 1915 he was re-elected as secretary and treasurer of Berrima District Cricket Association, which likewise arranged member clubs’ matches. As for how good a player George Bradman was, in the summer of 1911/12 Bowral’s captain was his brother-in-law, George Whatman, who headed the batting averages with 479 runs at 34. George Bradman made 122 runs at 10.17, and was the seventh most used bowler. What matters more is that in his father and mother’s brothers Don Bradman had men who played cricket regularly and took it seriously; the stalwarts of so many clubs in every generation. At Bowral’s main social event of the year, a ball in aid of the local hospital, George Whatman and another man went in costume in 1910, as ‘cricketers’. A notice in the Southern Mail in December 1918 about a meeting at Bowral Town Hall, about ‘re-organising’ the club, had ‘G Bradman’ beneath it. George Bradman gave up playing in his forties; from 1917 and as late as 1925, on summer Saturdays he was shooting for Bowral Rifle Club, usually well; he was the second best shot for the last quarter of 1917. While that might look like a nod to the war, in fact George Bradman had been a shooter as a young man; at his home at Jindalee in 1894 he and his father Charles took part in a ‘hare drive’ to rid land of the pests. Early in his autobiography Bradman called his father ‘a carpenter by trade’. Again, while that appears true enough – in February 1919, Bowral Municipal Council accepted a tender from George Bradman for ‘double gates and repairs at gasworks’ – Bradman told less than the full story. If he did so for a purpose, we can guess why. How Bradman presented his father’s and hence his own background appealed to two powerful and long-lived ideas in Australia. First is the ‘Aussie battler’. It’s telling that while British politicians in the 2010s had to come up with the clumsy phrase ‘hard working families’ that they pretended to care about, Australia already had this word ‘battlers’. It evokes someone at one with the land, strong enough to make a living no matter what. Some will do better than others, but everyone has to face the climate and landscape - drought, bush fires, flies. In truth most Australians are now urban flip-flop wearers who only see a kangaroo grazing on a golf course, or a dead one in the gutter that they pass in an air-conditioned car. That the ‘battler’ self-image has become so absurd, may help explain hatred of ‘the tall poppy’. As that includes intellectuals, they do go on and on about it. In her 2010 book about Sydney, the novelist Delia Falconer complained about the suburbs of her upbringing (‘unstoppable in their drive to make everything the same’) and the ‘war against difference’,