Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

Chapter One 1952-1969 Richard Ian Charlesworth was born on 6 February 1952, the youngest of four children: he had two brothers and one sister. He shared his official birthplace of Subiaco with most people born in Perth because the city’s only major maternity hospital was in that inner-city western suburb. His young life unfolded a few miles further west in Dalkeith, frequently described, along with its immediate neighbours – Claremont, Nedlands and Peppermint Grove – as ‘leafy’. Since every street in suburban Perth is tree-lined, the cliché is meant to suggest that the trees are bigger, the area well-established and among the city’s most affluent. Without denying that his dentist father was raising the family in comfortable circumstances, Ric remembers a street of mainly undeveloped housing blocks, rather than the mansions with blue panoramic views of the Swan River adorning the real estate pages of the local press in the early twenty-first-century. He recalls a childhood of open-air, barefooted play on the river foreshore, with snakes lurking in the scrub more dangerous than the Swan’s usually placid waters. Ric’s great-grandfather, Oscar, was a young man in a family of Charlesworths who emigrated from Derbyshire – the surname derives from a village near Glossop – to New South Wales in the 1860s. 3 Oscar moved to Western Australia, working on the land, before dying tragically in a mill accident at Pinjarra in 1900. Ric’s family cricket pedigree dated back at least to his paternal grandfather, also called Oscar, and to an uncle, Milton, a country cricketer. Ric ’ s father, Lester, was born in the Western Australian goldfields, at Kanowna – by the twenty-first century a ghost town – near Kalgoorlie, but grew up in Perth and attended Perth Modern, a selective state school that numbered some of Western Australia’s most distinguished figures among its alumni, including one prime minister, one governor-general, the first governor of the Reserve 10 3 P.H.Reaney and R.M.Wilson, A Dictionary of English Surnames [Revised Edition]. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1997.