Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

14 Niemeyer arrived as emissary of a Bank of England nervous about the possibility of loan defaults. His report argued Australia had been living ‘beyond its means’ and needed to ‘accept a lower standardof living’. Despitehis offensive accompanying assumption that Australia existed simply to serve the British economy, most governments, state and federal, acceded to his demands as swiftly as Australian batsmen would bend to the barrages of Bodyline bowling. But the abandonment of public works programmes and reduction of civil service salaries and welfare payments added to the misery of the Depression years across Australia. The grievances in Western Australia so alienated the state that a referendum to secede from the federation was passed in 1933. Although it was overruled by Britain, a bitter sense of alienation from the rest of Australia remained when Keith Carmody moved there just 14 years later. In New South Wales conflict was both internal and anti-British. The premier J.T. (Jack) Lang refused to implement the austerity programme, proposing among other measures to withhold interest payments to British bondholders. On 19 March 1932 the horseback-galloping Francis de Groot, a prominent member of the fascist New Guard, burst through assembled dignitaries, his sabre slashing a ribbon about to be severed by Lang’s scissors to open the Harbour Bridge. Two months later the representative of the British Crown, Governor Sir Philip Game, dismissed the legally elected Lang from office. The year 1932 produced, as well as wild political confrontations in Sydney, new evidence to inflame the paranoia of at least some Australians about sinister external influences. The sudden death in America of the New Zealand-born racehorse, Phar Lap, led to the mistaken belief then, and for decades to come, that the winner of one Melbourne Cup and dozens of other major races had been poisoned. 7 The giant beast has often been linked with Bradman as a major source of solace to the Depression-battered Australian public. In 1932 the master batsman’s 99.94 Test batting average lay far ahead, but his record 974 runs in the 1930 Ashes series in England meant that Jardine had assessed the fast-bowling resources and devised the tactics needed to stall the tiny run- machine. Whatever role presumed assaults on horse and cricketer may have played in Australians’ sense of victimisation, the exploits of ‘our 7 Phar Lap achieved an unusual triple immortality: its hide mounted on display at the Melbourne Museum, skeleton preserved in the Museum of New Zealand, and heart stored in the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. Escape From Poverty