Young Bradman

40 School and district years economy was, and then oddly we heard no more about it, we only hear about how ideal Australia is for sport when its sportsmen are doing well. Many visitors noticed. Bruce Harris in his book of the MCC tour of 1936/37 wrote of the Australian mania for games, ‘cricket included’. He reckoned that Australians were keener about the game - so often, English commentators were trying to explain defeat to English readers - and gave it ‘deep and theoretical study’. Australians, hardly surprisingly, have agreed; so have no end of English players who have wintered in Australia. Rod Marsh felt blessed and lucky (‘there are so few complications about being a cricketer in Australia’). As early as 1896, KJ Key, the captain of Surrey was calling Australian cricket ‘perfectly marvellous, considering the small population, the absence of professionals, who devote the whole of their time to the game, and the small number of matches played’. More generally, visitors such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell hailed Australia in 1950 as a land for the young and energetic, again in contrast to ‘the old country’, England, and Europe, stuck in the past. In 1891, England and Wales had 29 million people; Australia, three million. Yet already the two countries’ cricket teams were well matched. Australia, with far fewer people, had to find talent beyond cities: and did, fromGeorge Bonnor and Charles Turner in the 19 th century to Glenn McGrath, Mark Taylor and Adam Gilchrist of the great teams around 2000. A sample of Australian elevens before Bradman’s time shows how men from the bush became more important. In the first two Tests of 1877, seven of Australia’s 14 had sailed from the British Isles, and another, Spofforth, died there. Just as Australia in the 21 st century was drawing on ready-made nurses, vets and engineers and the like, so its first cricketers were made in England. Of Australia’s 12 in the three Tests of 1891/92, all were Australia-born; only Charles Turner came further from a state capital than Bradman later did. Yet of New South Wales’ 1,132,207 people according to the 1891 census, barely a third, 34.1% or 386,400, lived in Sydney. Gradually, the social geography of the team became more like the nation. Of the 14 players of the 1911/12 series, ten had a metropolitan background; Hanson Carter the wicketkeeper came from England, and three from the bush, notably Warren Bardsley and Charles Kelleway. Those three were still around in the 1920/21 series, when seven of the 14 were metropolitans. A state capital could see its metropolitan talent any Saturday. Sydney, and Adelaide and Melbourne, brought cricketers from the country to the city once a year from the 1890s, in ‘country weeks’, and in Australian football; and tennis by the 1900s. By the 1920s ‘weeks’, eight teams of cricketers from all parts of New South Wales played each other and Sydney teams at the main grounds. Australia embraced competition. In the chapter on sports in a 1954 ‘profile of Australia’, The Sun-burnt Country , the cricketer-journalist Jack Fingleton and the scriptwriter Rex Reinits pointed out that ‘the best way in which anyone can realise to the full whatever talent he may have is in competition with others a little better than himself, and the tougher the competition the more effective it is bound to be’. In 2003, when English