For cricketers in Australia nothing but the best will ever do. From my first visit there to the shocking humiliation suffered by Andrew Flintoff’s team thirty-two years later, visiting teams, English or otherwise, usually finished second. Only those mighty West Indies sides of the 1980s flew there expecting to win.
Almost invariably English ones have travelled to the wide brown land with greater hope than expectation. The triumphs of Andrew Strauss’s side in 2010/11 are likely to be the last games that I shall witness in Australia at first hand. If so I can count myself especially lucky to have seen them in a dual capacity as BBC commentator and MCC President. Combining those two roles in Melbourne was both enjoyable and demanding during the match in which England secured the Ashes by means of bowling Australia out for a wretched total of ninety-eight in the first innings.
Judy and I were wonderfully well entertained by senior members of the other MCC in their spacious, comfortable committee room which, like all the expensively refurbished members’ area, combines impressive modern facilities with clever use of old photographs and pictures to remind everyone of the long sporting legacy of the ‘paddock that grew’. The cricket and sports museums below are models, imaginatively displaying the visual memories of cricket matches going back before the first Test in 1877, not to mention the 1956 Olympics and the internecine contests of what was once just the Victorian Football League but is now the AFL, incorporating Rules Football clubs from every state.
The fact that the MCG, like several of the other major cricket grounds in Australia, is now staging sport all the year round, makes the financing of these sorts of facilities so much easier than it is at Lord’s. The MCG museum was given a small matter of $25 million of public money, enabling it to celebrate not just cricket and football but all the other sports at which Australia has excelled over the years: tennis, both codes of rugby, athletics and many more. There is a special area dedicated to racing, with the actual skeleton of the famed hose Carbine at its centre, and a model of Phar Lap’s heart, which was weighed after the great horse’s death at 6.3 kilograms. Outside the massive Coliseum are superb statues of some of the great champions of the past, including one of Dennis Lillee in the final leap of his bowling action. These life-size bronzes confront the masses who walk along the Yarra river to the ‘G’ on big match days, across a purpose-built bridge that takes them past rowing boathouses, the Rod Laver Tennis Arena and yet another new stadium with a futuristic roof like a bubble-cover that caters for soccer and Rugby League. There is in Melbourne all that sporting life affords.
Melbourne without its sport, indeed, would be like a river without water and much the same goes for the whole country, but they do not all play. One still sees examples of those who have missed the boat: the occasional miserable looking ‘Abbo’ in some cities and one or two pony-tailed inebriates on the streets of all of them, but the ‘good life’ – something of a misnomer in some ways – has expanded to most, or so it appears. Prosperity is evident both from the burgeoning spread of skyscrapers in all the major cities and in the vastly increased volume and sophistication of the wine industry.
Wine vies these days with sportsmen and women, Rolf Harris, Clive James and a clutch of brilliant actors as the first thing an Englishman thinks of in connection with Australia. I remember John Arlott bringing his own supply of vintage Bordeaux to the Centenary Test in 1977 and challenging an Australian with whom we were sharing a pre-dinner drink in his hotel room to taste the difference between it and the local red that had been proudly produced but reasonably politely rebuffed. According to Frank Tyson, Arlott had, on his only previous visit, asked for the claret he had ordered to be poured as his second course approached. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Arlott’, he was assured. ‘We’ve kept it nice and cool for you in the freezer.’
It took me some time to be convinced that New World wines could be the equal of their French, Spanish or Italian rivals and I remain a dilettante in these matters but it seems to me that cross fertilisation of Europeans and dedicated winemakers in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in particular has actually resulted in far less plonk everywhere. All the Europeans have had to look to their laurels, as English cricketers once did, pushed into higher standards by those who gradually discovered the right grapes for their region and worked assiduously to produce wine of the highest quality.
Australia has any number of wonderful wines these days, helped in the case of white grapes by the screwcap taking over from the cork. Once it seemed that Aussie Chardonnays, heavily influenced by the oak in which they were matured, tasted much of a muchness. Now there are any number of superbly produced local wines subtly peculiar to their terroir, like Barossa Valley Shiraz, Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon, Clare Valley Riesling and Hunter Valley Semillon.
The only problem is they cost so much. Australia’s dollar had risen on the back of the mining boom by 2010/11, even as the pound had fallen after the international banking crisis. I was glad that I personally was not paying the expenses on my fourteenth visit to Australia in all. It was a shock for British visitors to be asked to pay £5 for a bottle of beer but almost as much of a surprise to discover how well the England team had prepared for success and learned from past mistakes.
So telescoped have modern Test series become that the most recent series for the Ashes was all over in seven weeks. My first three tours between 1974 and 1980 were each of three months duration. In all, I must have spent nearly three years of my life in this land of wide open spaces where the topography is generally reflected in the bold, brash, open-hearted attitude of its citizens, no matter the fact that the vast majority of them live in cities.
Australians are not used to losing at sport because they are so very good at it. The Federal and State governments all spend far more on sporting facilities than in Britain, where public money cannot by law be given to private clubs. The media give it a higher priority than almost anything else and everywhere you go in the cities you see fit young people running or cycling. Curiously, you also see more fat slobs wobbling ponderously along pavements than you would in the average English city. Obesity has become as much a problem as it is in the USA or Britain. Get behind one of the walking tombstones on a crowded pavement and you can be as surely restricted in your progress as if you were in a car in a traffic-jam.
More than most it is a country of contradictions. There is the obvious contrast between the vast, weather-beaten natural interior and the gleaming modern coastal cities, with their skyscrapers dwarfing those that remain of the old, dignified stone civic buildings from the 19th century. But, hidden in the suburbs, road after road is full of architecturally unappealing bungalows. The same discrepancies apply in Australian society, which is outwardly casual but actually authoritarian. You will be photographed you are told by a clear notice in every taxi. You may not eat, drink or abuse the driver. This is merely a statement of what anyone would consider to be civilised behaviour but an Australian ‘cabby’ is not be confused with his counterpart in London, especially if, as is often the case, he is newly arrived from Ukraine, Vietnam, Eritrea or the Punjab and has not the faintest idea of the whereabouts of your destination in Warabarree Road.
The curious accents that emerge from such as these, as they strain for strine, can be hilarious. There are those who can even spot a trace of lingering Welsh in Julia Gillard, the lady who, in true New World fashion, rose from nowhere to become prime minister in 2010, demoting the first of what will probably in time be several prime ministerial Kevins. Certainly her cabinet must have been the first to have a Kevin as Foreign Secretary and a Wayne in charge of the economy. The naming of children is, I suppose, an outward sign of a nation that now does things its own way, not in the way of its fathers and mothers, but it is unfortunate that parents who were christened Robert or Catherine (or Ranjiv or Boris for that matter) after relatives of previous generations of their family, should feel the need to call their fair dinkum daughters Rayanne, Brunella – or some such invented first name beloved of Au
stralians. English parents have unfortunately followed the trend since Jason and Kylie hit British television screens.
Like Britain, Australia has become increasingly multi-coloured and multi-cultural and, despite the problems that has brought for the poor and poorly educated of the big cities, both nations are the better for it. There is no end yet to the mad waste of wars in the world, but, gradually the wolf is learning to live with the lamb, the leopard to lie down with the kid.
I read those words from Isaiah on my last visit to Australia at the request of John Shepherd, Dean of Perth Cathedral, who has asked me to read a lesson at either the Advent or Christmas Carol Service whenever I have been in his home city. It is always a pleasure because not only does the building become more beautiful each time I see it but so also does the music, nurtured lovingly by John and his wife, Joy, the head of a renowned Perth girls’ school. The present musical director, the organ recitalist Joseph Nolan, has raised standards to exquisite levels and made it more easily possible for the fortunate congregations in a faraway city to experience that sense of the infinite that is the essence of faith.
Australia is a melting pot but her citizens tend to speak with one voice when the Poms are in town, as I was reminded when I walked out of the Brisbane Cricket Ground, the famous Gabba (actually Woolloongabba), after Australia had had much the better of the first day of the 2010/11 series against England. Reacting perhaps to the sometimes insulting, sometimes witty goadings of England’s self-regarding Barmy Army, masses of chunky male Queenslanders were talking to themselves or their mobiles in voices of loud triumph, like crows over a corpse. Fuelled by their gassy and expensive local beer, their favoured adjective, often repeated, began with ‘f’. But, typical of Australian discipline, they were happy to wait for minutes at a time at road junctions while equally chunky female police officers in their blue and grey uniforms controlled the moment that they could flow across the road, like collies with a huge flock of sheep. My own instinct was to use my initiative about when and where to cross. It was, however, this Australian discipline, respect for authority and the general willingness of ordinary folk to help their neighbours that made the dreadful floods of 2011 far less damaging in terms of human life than they would have been in almost any other country.
Over the years Australian discipline and esprit de corps have generally proved superior to English individuality on the cricket field. Strangely their biennial contests (now becoming dangerously more frequent because of short-sighted administrators who have made themselves dependent on the television income and believe, mistakenly, that they cannot do without it) were once seen as battles between dyed-in-the-wool English professionalism and free-spirited Aussie initiative.
In recent times both countries have come to the conclusion that the key to winning is to apply preconceived plans based on thorough analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition. England have successfully followed the Australian formula and, at the present time, are doing it better with a superior group of players, but fortunes will ebb and flow as they always have, which is why series for the Ashes fascinate so many.
From the first series that I reported England teams always set out more or less believing that they possessed the players to buck a trend that had been so evident since the end of the First World War. Even without Geoffrey Boycott and John Snow, the leading performers in Ray Illingworth’s victorious team four years earlier, Mike Denness’s 1974/5 side apparently had a sufficient number of world-class players – Edrich, Amiss, Greig, Knott, Underwood, Willis (and later Cowdrey) – to have at least a decent chance of retaining the Ashes that had been defended, albeit narrowly, in 1972. But two nasty surprises lay round the corner. Dennis Lillee recovered from his apparently career-threatening back injury and Jeff Thomson appeared like a bull from the bush. Australia won 4-1.
Without their best batsman, but most divisive character, Geoffrey Boycott, they had little answer to Lillee and the hitherto virtually unknown Thomson, the twin forces that hit them like one of Queensland’s occasional whirlwinds at Brisbane, battering down the front of their house from one end and lifting the garage from its foundations at the other. Nor was it just ‘Lilian Thomson’. Several other exceptional players, in particular the Chappell brothers, Doug Walters, Rodney Marsh, Max Walker and Ashley Mallett, made this a formidable team.
Tony Greig’s century at Brisbane lives in the memory for its audacity and bravado; John Edrich showed limitless depths of courage and doggedness when he led the team in Denness’s place at Sydney, making fifty and thirty-three not out with broken ribs; and Denness, Keith Fletcher and Peter Lever in particular enjoyed sweet revenge in the final match at Melbourne when Thomson was unfit and Lillee injured himself. But most of the series was dominated by Australia.
The excitement of seeing for the first time the grounds of which I had read and heard so much was great and I learned from commentating for ABC Radio with the wise, balanced, if occasionally temperamental Alan McGilvray. He got into a savage temper one day when I had asked the producer, the benign, efficient and understanding Alan Marks, to change the rota to enable me to fit commentaries round my many short reports for the BBC. To my surprise he suggested that it was an Englishman ordering mere colonials around, which revealed the chip that in those days still sat only a little below the surface of even the best bred Aussies.
I had the privilege of meeting Harold Larwood in retirement when I made a pilgrimage to his modest bungalow in the Sydney suburbs during that tour, accompanied by the future Telegraph cricket correspondent Mike Carey, a Derbyshire man but one who understood the traditions of the neighbouring county. We found the chief hero of the Bodyline tour – the great Nottinghamshire fast bowler who had humbled Bradman and made Douglas Jardine’s ruthless strategy successful – living more like a pauper than a prince. North Sydney is very hot in summer and the street that became home for the last forty-five years of his life was a long way from the glamour of Sydney Harbour; more like one in the mining village in Nottinghamshire where he had started. In old age the wiry, muscular little terror of the 1930s looked shrunk and bony, like an old bird. But he was happy to talk and obviously very content with his wife Lois and their daughters. He allowed me to interview him for radio and we saw on the mantelpiece the famous ashtray inscribed To Harold from a grateful Skipper.
It is to me an alarming thought that almost as many years have passed between my first and most recent visits to Australia as had between Larwood’s triumphs in 1932/3 and my meeting with him forty-two years later.
No city has changed more in Australia since the 1970s than Brisbane. Then it was a country town, with very few restaurants, no coloured immigrants and no night life. Now there are skyscrapers, a superbly developed waterfront, Indian taxi-drivers and a fast growing population of Chinese. In 1974 I stayed at the featureless, bare and basic Travel Lodge at Kangaroo Point. On recent tours I have stayed beside the river at the graceful Stamford Plaza hotel, travelling to ‘work’ each day of matches as often as not by ferry. The service runs like clockwork from point to point on either side of the river, much more cheaply than taxis and much more pleasurably for passengers, despite the sweaty uphill walk that awaits the Gabba-bound spectator when he or she alights beyond the sheer limestone cliffs.
The Gabba, once a quirky cricket ground with its own distinct flavour, is now a modern, functional but characterless stadium, efficiently catering for 40,000 spectators. The notorious sticky wickets of the days of uncovered pitches no longer make batting a lottery but because of its sub-tropical climate there have been low scoring Tests at the Gabba decided by as little as a couple of slip catches caught or dropped. 1990/91 comes to mind. Graham Gooch, England’s captain then, specialist batting coach now, suffered a poisoned finger and missed the game. Allan Lamb took over and attracted criticism for being lured to an out of town casino by Kerry Packer when he was not out overnight. Australia won by ten wickets in three days but batting was so difficult, even for those who went to bed e
arly, that none of the first three totals in the match reached even 100.
Tropical storms can still dictate the character of the cricket. In 1974/5, just as Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson were about to begin their fearsome alliance, a typical Brisbane storm caught the part-time curator with his covers off and his metaphorical trousers down. He was no less a local figure than Alderman Clem Jones, Lord Mayor of the city, who could be seen with his wellies on rolling the consequent quagmire of a pitch only a couple of days before the sun came partially to his rescue. But not, of course, to England’s.
Three years later I was back in Australia after the long tour of India. It was a brief but immensly enjoyable visit, not least because everything seemed so modern and comfortable after the relative hardships and subtler attractions of the subcontinent. The reason for the visit was the staging of a Centenary Test in Melbourne to celebrate the anniversary of the first official Australia v. England Test, at Melbourne in March 1877.
This time Greig and his team arrived for a ‘warm-up’ game in Perth after the team triumph in India, designed to get them used to the utterly different cricketing conditions of Australia. I saw the start of the game but then went off by myself to Canberra where the Queen was to open the Australian Parliament. Wholly unaccustomed though I was to such events, Bob Hudson had sufficient faith in me to suggest that I should cover the event for BBC World Service.
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