Young Bradman

56 Chapter five: New South Wales … the greatest masters in painting, as in everything else, begin by doing work which is no way superior to that of their neighbours. Samuel Butler, Alps and Sanctuaries (1881) According to his 1930 serial, New South Wales picked Bradman to play South Australia in Adelaide in December 1927 – ‘and I left my native state for the first time in my life’ – before he moved to Sydney. He said he ‘left home’ in September 1928. A profile in a Melbourne newspaper in December 1927 – when Bradman had become famous enough to have his first pen- portraits outside Sydney – told readers that he had lived in Sydney since the start of that summer. Bradman presumably knew his own life; we can explain the confusion if moving to Sydney and leaving home are not quite the same thing, as for any university fresher. In November 1927, a Bowral newspaper was reporting that ‘ex-students of Bowral High School now resident in Sydney have formed a club’ and in late October went to the Empire Theatre beside Central railway station to see ‘Twinkle’, a musical comedy. The report listed four ladies and nine men including Bradman. Some at least – Kath Shimmels, Henry Ballans and Thomas Roberts – were taking a two-year teacher-training course at Sydney University. We can speculate that they like Bradman had yet to make their own friends or identity, and they kept in contact with Bowral enough for them to know who else from their small town was new in the otherwise anonymous city. Bradman had made the physical move, which became definite only before the 1928/29 cricket season. In that 1927/28 season, if Bradman had flopped, he might have returned home without ever properly leaving. Studio portrait of Don Bradman, 1928.