Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

Ric was the youngest member at 20 – finished fifth. He had played in every match, gained in self-confidence and realised that ‘Australia was a long way from the centre of the world’. But he returned after eight weeks overseas to confront the major problems of combining already disrupted medical studies with a sporting career about to re-focus on cricket. 14 * * * * * UWA had always been flexible in accommodating the schedules of its elite sportsmen, especially Sheffield Shield cricketers undertaking tours to the distant eastern states. But Ric’s preparation for the supplementary exams he had been allowed in January – a programme already destroyed by his absence at the Olympics – was now threatened by just such a tour. Opening the batting with Bruce Laird for the Western Australian colts against the touring Pakistanis on 15 November, Ric’s 84 confirmed the good impression he’d made with University the previous season and brought him state selection for the first time. It would be February before Laird, a future Test opener, joined him in the Shield side. If cricket and a study schedule in disarray were his major preoccupation, he was also moved by the great events unfolding in the wider Australian community. Since the late 1960s the possibility of conscription to fight, and perhaps die, in Vietnam, hanging over the heads of young Australians, had been a major factor in Australia-wide street protests against involvement in an American war. In 1970, 10,000 marching in Perth were a tiny proportion of the 200,000 who took to the streets of cities across the country. 15 ‘During the 1970s,’ Charlesworth wrote in 2001, ‘politics was never central to my life but always a thing of fascination … for the university student of the time Vietnam was a defining issue.’ 16 Six days before his Sheffield Shield debut, he relished the election of Gough Whitlam’s ALP government, ending 23 years of rule by the conservative Liberal/Country party, most of them under Sir Robert Menzies, ‘British-to-the-bootheels’ but, like 26 1970-1976 14 Ibid ., pp 34-35. 15 Jenny Gregory and Jan Gothard (eds.) Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia . University of Western Australia Press: Crawley, 2009, p 668. 16 The Coach , p 42.