Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

82 When the players sailed from Liverpool on the troopship R.M.S . Samaria, they were only the second Australian team to visit India, after a private one led by veteran Victoria and Middlesex allrounder Frank Tarrant in 1935/36. The sea voyage following the taxing fixture list in England provided welcome relaxation best illustrated by one of Carmody’s snapshots of Miller sun- bathing on deck, palpably happy with his own enviable physique. When they arrived in Bombay to be welcomed by former England player, Kumar Shri Duleepsinhji, they had a foretaste of the ‘amazing publicity’ from ‘a fanatical cricket public’ that awaited them in the weeks ahead. Unaware in advance of their schedule, the Australians were soon dismayed to discover they were to travel to places scattered far around the sub-continent. Keith’s collection of faded photographs reveals a tourist’s India of garlanded greetings, elephant rides, ornate temples and wide-eyed waifs smiling at the camera. But these images are as inadequate as the essential statistics in the 1946 Wisden in conveying ordeals of climate, illness and travel in a vast country with confronting disparities between wealth and poverty and restlessly on the verge of political upheaval and partition. The reports from Sydney Morning Herald staff reporter William Marien, travelling with the team, describe the ebb and flow of the contests, the style of batsmen and bowlers and occasionally the atmosphere of volatile crowds. But Sismey’s manuscript provides the best insights into the external challenges surrounding on-field events. The Victory ‘Tests’ and the Long Road Home Keith Miller in peak condition aboard RMS Samaria in 1945.