Young Bradman

6 Chapter one: Bowral If I had my chance of being born again, I would rather be born an Australian than a western European. Bertrand Russell on a visit to Australia, 1950 If Bowral made Bradman, the railways made Bowral. Around 1860, after gold discoveries brought a boom to Australia, land was surveyed for a railway from Picton, south of Sydney, to Goulburn, about a fifth of the way to Melbourne. A 1925 obituary of Bowral farmer Robert Loseby, one of the last ‘of that dauntless band of pioneers’, recalled how ‘Mr Loseby remembered seeing Bong Bong Street covered with fallen timber as it was being cleared’, and the town laid out in half acre allotments. By 1866, Bong Bong Street and Boolevey Street, two of the main streets in Bowral to this day, were standing, and the railway from Sydney to Bowral station was ‘expected to be open in a few months’. Bradman’s family was already around. His mother’s mother Sophia Jane Whatman was born at Lower Mittagong in 1846, a few miles from Bowral. She was ‘a pioneer resident of the district, who, with her late husband, was one of the earliest farmer settlers at Glenquarry’. When Mrs Whatman died in 1926, aged 79, she was living with Robert Whatman, one of the surviving four of her nine children. The others were George Whatman of Riverbank; a daughter, at Glenquarry nearby; and Emily Bradman, Don’s mother. Whether by coincidence, the next month the Bowral estate agent Davis and Westbrook sold Riverbank, a 106-acre farm; the estate agent that Don was working for. It was a small world. During Bradman’s youth the ‘sturdy pioneers who accomplished such herculean tasks half a century ago’, to quote a 1918 obituary in the local press, were dying. Those ‘very early days’ of settlement were passing out of memory, much as memories of the 1939-45 war were going as the last veterans were dying in the early 21 st century. While Bradman may have been too young to take notice, that mid-Victorian pioneer generation made its mark on the adults he grew up with. In a 1988 taped interview for ABC, Bradman recalled how his wife-to-be, Jessie Menzies, came to board with his family for a year; ‘after that her two sisters would be old enough to go with her’; that is, to accompany her to school in Bowral: My mother and my wife’s father started school together at the same school in the 1870s, and their parents were friends before that. This set up a family connection that has endured now for well over 100 years and it has been a tremendous stabilising influence in the whole of my life. The story of Bradman’s district ought to go back further still. Some names in the district, such as Bong Bong and Mittagong, are Aboriginal. Well into Bradman’s youth, old timers could remember the original owners of the land. George Willis recalled in 1926 how ‘blacks used to come to Berrima [another town near Bowral] for their blankets … when the railway tunnel was being made I often saw blacks climbing trees. They put their toes in