SPECTATOR SPORT
Good to go down the road
Frank Keating
IT WAS A good time for a short trip to Australia. Their sporting seasons are on the cusp. Still hot, but their summer is turning up its toes. Sydney's rugby league and Mel- bourne's Australian rules football were bursting in like lions, just as cricket was amiably sauntering out like a lamb with a one-sided Sheffield Shield final at the Syd- ney cricket ground, in which Queensland once again failed to win the thing after 66 Years of trying.
For all the brash new attitudes of Aus- tralians and the arrant republicanism of my namesake, the vibrant place can still be warmly redolent of romance for British Sporting folk of a certain generation — cer- tainly those of us weaned on winters spent under blankets in the dormitory tweaking the cat's whisker on a crystal set to hear through the squeal of static and the seashell-shush the Ashes cricket broadcasts When England were 'MCC', the boundary fence was 'pickets', and they put the 'wick- ets down' before the innings total — as in 'three for 650, Barnes not out 200, Brad- man not out 201'.
A friend drove me down to Wollongong last Sunday week to watch the rugby giants Of Illawarra take on Manly. Red meat stuff in the Steelers' Stadium alongside the ocean, a packed crowd baying in their shirt- sleeves of primary reds and greens and blues and yellows — the opposite grand-
stand a pointilliste's dream in the thundery heat haze.
And beyond it, you kept catching a glimpse of the surfers roller-coasting the white horses and, past them, at anchor like sleeping black slugs, the great coalboats waiting their turn to load up to the gun- wales and head off to Japan and the Orient.
Only a mile or two up the coast still stood the little fisherman's cottage at Stanwell Park where the writer Lawrence and his Frieda attempted — yet again — to set up home 'away from it all'.
No, what gave me the buzz that Sunday, as the grand new road cut its swathe through the greeny-black forest, was that we kept catching a glimpse of, and some- times actually crossing, the railway line south from Sydney towards Goulburn, where it turns right for faraway Coota- mundra. And increasingly, as we neared Wollongong, the signposts on the road diverted us towards Bowral. For I first learned the names of Coota- mundra and Bowral almost on my mother's knee. Well, certainly my dad's. For the Don was born at Cootamundra — and he played his first real cricket when the family moved west to Bowral.
Do short-trousered schoolboys still know that? Do they even know, in this world of instant, indigestible, hype and hollow hoorays, who Don Bradman actually was? Or rather, is?
It was on this very railway line that Brad- man pere brought his 12-year-old tot up to Sydney for the first time — where they watched Macartney, the 'Governor-Gener- al', hit England for a luscious 170, and then went to choose a new bat for the boy at a city sports store. (After inspecting dozens, little Don chose a 'Roy Kilner autograph' made by the Yorkshire firm of Wm. Sykes). It was down this same railway line that a cocksure 19-year-old bowler of Irish extrac- tion, Billy O'Reilly, travelled to play for Wingello against Bowral. He laughed when the Bowral stationmaster told him he had better watch out for 'our Don', four years his junior. The Irish boy carried no scoffing grin when he caught the train home that evening. The pocket-sized schoolboy with the 'Roy Kilner' bat had laced him for 234 not out in two and a half hours.
Seventy years on, it was good to go down the road to Bowral . . .
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