Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

Prologue For much of the 1990s – a period when he was fully employed as a hockey coach – Ric Charlesworth was working his way through a part-time BA degree at the University of Western Australia [UWA]. In 2002 I felt a touch apprehensive on discovering he’d enrolled in my third-year course on the history of the United States since 1945. As a Perth resident since 1973, I was well aware of the range of his activities and the achievements that made him a local hero and recipient of numerous awards. As author of the commissioned history of the Western Australian Cricket Association [WACA], I hadn’t interviewed him but written about his defensive batting style, so much at odds with the dashing qualities that had seen him voted the outstanding Australian hockey player of all time. I’d added that, according to West Australian and Australian batsman, Ross Edwards, Ric’s caution was no surprise to anybody who’d seen his father bat. I also had academic colleagues who spoke of the self-confidence, bordering on arrogance, of the younger Charlesworth. On meeting him for the first time, my concerns were partly dispelled by his assurance that he hadn’t minded my references to his batting – though his mother had been a little upset. More important, it quickly became apparent there was no need to fear he might intimidate fellow students with the breadth of his knowledge and experience of the post-war world, as sometimes was the case with rather less credentialled mature-age undergraduates. His tutorial group of eight or so certainly benefited from occasional insights derived from his decade in national politics. But he was always thoughtfully communicative, rather than domineering, in discussions with a group that included one girl who’d been at school with one of his daughters. On a couple of occasions he told all of us of his satisfaction on being able to include arguments from his essays in letters published in The Australian newspaper, drawing parallels between American failures in Vietnam and the evident imminence of the invasion of Iraq. Important to me personally, writing at that time the commissioned history of Australian Rules football, were his extra-curricular comments about his role as coaching consultant 5