Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

130 Acknowledgements My most important debt is to Keith Carmody’s daughters, Jill and Kelly, for allowing me to write this book. Living in Perth, Jill has necessarily been more heavily involved than Kelly in Canada, although I met the two of them together when the project was agreed and I’m especially grateful to Kelly for enabling me to use Keith’s PoW ‘Log’, the single most significant document for my research with its invaluable insights into his personality. I much appreciate Jill’s readiness to be available for reminiscent discussions whenever asked and for giving me access to Keith’s photographs. The enthusiasm of her husband, Russell Stewart, has been vital: the results of his own exploration of the Carmody family tree saved me a considerable amount of research effort. The lengthy memoir sent to Jill by the late Bill Bullen of Daylesford, Victoria, contained some errors and omissions about Keith’s service record but was invaluable, both through Bullen’s own insights and because it incorporates material sent to him by several RAAF and PoW friends: Eric Stephenson, Ron Prentice, Gil Docking and, of especial importance, Peter Pearson. Keith’s niece, Sandra Burgess, kindly lent me a scrapbook about his career and those of other family members mainly prominent in Sydney rugby league, rather than cricket circles. I thank her also for her comments in a long telephone discussion about the Carmody family’s struggles in the 1930s. In another long-distance conversation, Keith’s nephew, Peter Bergstrom in Queensland, modestly insisted he could tell me nothing but still talked about the disposal of Keith’s remains, an event with uncanny similarities to the treatment of Ruth’s. I must thank again the Western Australian Cricket Association for commissioning me to write its history in the 1990s. I’ve used research from that project, especially interviews with a number of Keith’s contemporaries, many of them now dead, listed in the Bibliography. I’m especially grateful to Allan Edwards and his wife Aileen for allowing me to interview them yet again. Not only did they add to insights about Keith they’d provided years earlier but it was their contribution to my previous book in this series that indirectly led to this one: I met Jill and Kelly only because