Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

13 for shoes left for repair. Family members were forced to wear uncollected shoes. Sandra had no doubt that Keith’s father’s heavy drinking made matters worse. She spoke openly about a male Carmody addiction to alcohol that would many years later claim Keith and, much sooner, his brother, Noel. As an adult, Keith’s older brother Harry (John Henry James) was also a heavy drinker. But in 1931, at the age of 16, he was out of control as a petty thief. Six months probation in May for illegal use of a car was extended to 12 months in July when he repeated the offence. In September the Children’s Court committed him to the Gosford Farm Home for delinquent boys after he stole a motor- cycle, a sentence soon commuted to two months’ home detention and a three-year bond of £20 plus ten shillings compensation. 6 These financial penalties must have weighed heavily on impoverished parents, a situation that may explain family anecdotes that Keith spent some of his childhood in the care of an unnamed, perhaps slightly more prosperous, ‘Auntie’. The period and circumstances of this removal from the family have been impossible to determine. But more definitely, the same informants reveal that he soon lived much longer with his sister Dorothy and her husband, Bill Bergstrom. They doubtless provided a more secure environment than his parents had done but, as a builder, Bergstrom also struggled in the dire economic conditions of the 1930s before filing for bankruptcy at the end of the decade. * * * * * * * The collapse of crucial exports of wool and wheat to Britain was the main underlying cause of Australian unemployment reaching some 30% by 1932. That year also saw the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Construction throughout most of Keith’s childhood had raised hopes of numerous jobs for men in the Mosman and Neutral Bay areas. Those hopes weren’t realised or ever realistic. Far from being a pioneering attempt to stimulate the economy through public works, the project had been a product, and near casualty, of Australia’s long-term reliance on funding major infrastructure through government loans largely raised in the City of London. Sir Otto Niemeyer, despite his Germanic name, had personified British condescension toward Australian ‘colonials’ some three years before Douglas Jardine revelled in a similar role. In 1930 6 These details are taken from his later digitised RAAF service record in the National Archives of Australia: Series A9301, Control symbol 15712, Barcode 4561634. Escape From Poverty