Young Bradman

5 Foreword Why another book about Sir Donald Bradman? Even before his physical death, the world had done his story to death. On his 90 th birthday in 1998, I sat on a beach outside Brisbane and read the supplement about him in the daily newspaper, the Courier Mail . In Britain only the Queen, and in those days the Queen Mother, might have the same. The English musician Joe Jackson closed his memoir, A Cure for Gravity , as his band was bringing out their first album, and about to become famous. Once his story became part of the public record, he felt it became less interesting. We ought not to assume that famous musicians, actors, sportsmen and the like, are interesting, just because their work is. Besides, once Bradman became famous in England in 1930 – and that alone is the subject of a book, Bradman and the Summer That Changed Cricket , by Christopher Hilton – he became more experienced and assertive and, quite reasonably, guarded his private life. The less guarded Bradman, the early years of ‘the boy from Bowral’, may give a clue to that man he became; and tell us how he became such an extraordinary batsman. Even if not, the story has its own interest, as a rise against the odds; an adventure, to use Bradman’s own word, to become one of the six or seven best known batsmen, to be picked for the 1930 tour to England. For Bradman’s success was not inevitable; if we assume that it was, we don’t give him credit, nor does credit go to the few but crucial people who either didn’t stand in his way or went out of their way to help him. Steve Waugh, one of the more thoughtful of the last generation of Australian cricketers to have met Bradman, in his 2013 book The Meaning of Luck wrote that if he could take one journey in a time machine, ‘I would choose to watch The Don in action.’ Ideally, Waugh said, he would watch from ‘the Hill’, the old grassed bank of the Sydney Cricket Ground, as Bradman batted against England. We should not deny an Australian the sight of English bowling flogged; yet surely it would be more intriguing to see a lad walk out to bat, before anyone, except perhaps himself, knew who he was. Note; to better understand the geography of the Bowral district, the first chapters are best read with a map, easily called up online. Recommended is a beautiful four inches to the mile, 1942 map of ‘Wollongong’, that you can view on the National Library of Australia website: at http://nla.gov.au/ nla.obj-234121360/view. You pronounce Bowral as ‘Bow-rul’; in 1895, a town newspaper complained visitors were wrongly stressing the second syllable. Bill O’Reilly in the ABC taped interview with Bradman in 1988 pronounced his home village of Wingello as ‘Win-jello’.