Young Bradman

23 Beginnings Don Bradman went shooting with his brother Victor. Whatever the make- up of Bradman’s pastimes or whether he excelled at them quite the same as cricket - and he said he enjoyed all sport - the picture is of a lad free to grow, physically and psychologically, without the cramping of poverty, or cityscapes, or adults forever telling him what to do or think. Which brings us to ‘the most famous water tank in the world’ as the ABC interviewer Norman May put it; where Bradman self-taught his ball skills. Few have asked why the house needed such a large (800-gallon) tank. ‘Well, we had no town water supply in Bowral in those years, we depended entirely on rainwater for everything,’ Bradman told the ABC in 1988. By the 1910s, Bowral did have a reservoir, except that in January 1919 water was rationed because it was so short. Householders’ supplies in wells, or tanks, ‘were fast diminishing’, the Southern Mail reported in January 1919. In December 1918, Bowral held an ‘indignation meeting’ about the lack of water, more embarrassing because, as the mayor told citizens, much of the town depended on the ‘tourist traffic’. City people presumably expected piped water. As early as October 1898, the local press had called the water supply a ‘vexatious question’. Small towns with dirty water got diseases. In the Queensland outback town of Cloncurry in December 1928, people died of typhoid fever. Three cases of typhoid made the news in Bowral in February 1919. Another gripe was lack of electric light. Miss Constance Smith, headmistress of the Church of England Grammar School, complained to the Southern Mail in December 1918 how ‘we are as a municipality absolutely behind the times, lacking essential, not to say modern conveniences of daily life’. She urged Bowral to wake up, but what was really needed was active local government. As so often, councillors (and voters) did not want to spend money. Bowral had a scheme for piped water in 1912, shelved because of the First World War. To become the greatest batsman of all time, Bradman had to drink rainwater and have his house’s ‘night soil’ or septic tank removed by a ‘sanitary contractor’, because the town’s adults were such stingy sticks-in-the-mud. In the 1988 interview, Bradman laughed to recall (after so many times?!) the game he made as a boy to amuse himself after school, if he did not do some gardening, chop some wood or do the vegetables for his mother, ‘or something like that’: Yes, a golf ball, and I used a small stump, threw the golf ball at the brick tank stand, with one hand, and then held the stump in the other hand and as the ball rebounded, I gripped the stump in two hands and tried to play a shot. ‘How often could you hit it?’ Norman May asked. ‘Oh, more often than not,’ Bradman replied. As a sign of just how remarkable Bradman was, or made himself, try it yourself. Or, you can watch online ‘Hungry for it’, a 30-second commercial by Cricket Australia, made in 2007. It shows Michael Clarke in shorts and short-sleeved Australian green top. He’s playing with golf ball and stump, in the carport of a typical Australian bungalow. We’re not told he’s doing the modern equivalent of what Sir Donald Bradman did; in fact we’re not even told it’s Michael Clarke. You know all that already, the