Rare Thing
TWO TEACHERS SAT in Geraldton’s Queens Hotel on a Friday afternoon in 1964 for one of their regular after-school meetings. Rudy Rybarczyk, of Allendale Primary, was telling Bob Bryant, of Geraldton Primary, about Kim Hughes. This boy was new in town and ten years old, so undergrown that the knee rolls of his cricket pads came up to his thighs and his box toppled out of his shorts. Not that he needed protective equipment. He barely seemed to own a defensive repertoire. This boy Kim swung ominously from the beginning, balls cannoning off a blade fifteen centimetres too long for him. He played that way for fun, not to dominate, bringing others in, cheering them on, making sure everyone got a hit. One lunchtime he bowled to the supervising teacher: a short ball, a foot outside off. The teacher reached out and flicked it past square leg.
‘Mr Rybarczyk, when a ball is that wide outside the off stump you do not pull it behind square.’
‘But I hit it for four, Kim.’
‘Well, you won’t hit the next one for four.’
Lunchboxes were emptied and play began swiftly most days. Allendale could not afford cricket nets. Children played on the school oval’s concrete pitch. For Friday sport a couple of coir mats—luxury—got rolled out. Allendale and Geraldton Primary were renowned on-field enemies and Bob listened half-believingly to Rudy’s stories at the pub. This boy will represent Western Australia before he turns twenty-one, said Rybarczyk. They bet a carton of Swan Lager on it.
Kim Hughes was born on 26 January 1954 and the symbolism of this stayed with him. A proud Australian, born on Australia Day, he’d say again and again. He wore wristbands the colour of wattle blossom in his first full Test series. He beseeched the entire team to sport baggy green caps in Antigua in 1984. That brainwave was cottoned on to by Allan Border years later and became official policy under Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh. Waugh felt it lifted his men’s spirits and ‘gave us an aura’; Kim’s men lost by an innings and floppy sunhats were making a comeback by Jamaica. When Alan Bond’s Australia II won the America’s Cup—‘the greatest day of my life’—Kim drank more than he intended over lunch, bought miniature flags on the way home and sat down in front of two replays of the race. His two-year-old twins, Simon and Sean, sang as he watched: ‘Good onya Bondy, good onya Bondy.’
Stan and Ruth Hughes arrived as newlyweds in Kudardup, home of 161 people and a one-teacher school. Stan was the teacher. Enlightening two dozen students of various sizes across seven grades in the intricacies of the universe must have been worrisome. Stan handled it with jolliness and a soft touch, though he’d sometimes cane the boys. ‘He tapped me on the hand once with a ruler,’ remembers Julia Matthews, who was nine, ‘and I dissolved into heaps of tears. Because he touched me in anger. And because we all adored him.’
Thirty-six kilometres away at Margaret River, the nearest hospital, Ruth gave birth to Kimmy, as everyone in Kudardup knew him. He was their first child, although Ruth was soon seen as a kind of second mum to Stan’s students. She brought in milk and cocoa. When Stan took the boys for craft sessions, she taught the girls sewing. Lessons were usually held in the poky schoolroom, Ruth wheeling Kimmy across in his pram, the girls cuddling him and changing his nappy while mum wielded knitting needles. Other times they’d go to the Hughes family’s little house, a minute’s walk away, and gasbag with Kimmy in the middle.
About 250 tumbledown one- or two-teacher schools flecked Western Australia’s miles of orange dirt. These schools fostered an intimacy treasured at the time and long since withered. Big children watched over little ones. Girls learned to dance with their fathers. Everybody went out together. In Kudardup they’d hold cabaret nights, six or eight to a table, all bringing their own food. They’d sway to Frank Wake’s band—a piano, a violin, a saxophone—in nearby Karridale, at the old timber dance hall, later wrecked in the 1961 bushfires. ‘To dance on that floor was like dancing on ice,’ remembers family friend George ‘Pud’ Challis. ‘A beautiful, beautiful floor to dance on.’
Stan was king and court jester of that dancefloor. ‘Harmony Hughes’, they called him. He liked to dance, party and smoke, even if he rarely seemed to buy his own. ‘George, my boy, have you got a smoke on you?’ was his standard greeting to Pud Challis. Stan was fond of a drink, too. ‘On Monday mornings we used to love it,’ says Julia’s cousin Yvonne, ‘because Sunday was football day and Stan did the football. And of course he was feeling so hungover on Monday morning that we always got to do nature walks. We’d take off all day in the bush. He was a fabulous teacher.’
Coach, captain and centre half-forward at Karridale, Stan was enjoying a sizzling streak: four flags in six seasons in assorted country competitions. Long before that he played forty games for Subiaco, an emergency selection in 1942 when poliomyelitis left giant-leaping regular forward John Hetherington a paraplegic. War enlistments restricted the Western Australian National Football League to under-18s. Stan was sixteen, a schoolboy tennis champ and cricketer at Wesley College—and a virtual one-man forward line. Picked for Subiaco’s last five games that season, he booted 25 goals while everyone else managed 21 between them. It was enough to colour in his son’s daydreams. From the instant he could kick, hit or throw, Kim’s heroes were footballers.
Two young brothers for playmates, Don and Glenn, were soon followed by sisters Robyn and Christeen. One-teacher school families led lives enriching but transient. Teachers got moved on every two or three years, the Hugheses hopscotching their way round the state’s south-west triangle, from Kudardup to Ballidu to Pinjarra and finally Geraldton. The tiny school at Ballidu, where streets were named after varieties of wheat, had chewed up something like eleven teachers in a rush. Pud Challis remembers Stan telling him two troublemaking brothers were to blame. On Stan’s first morning he was sitting at his desk. One brother rose unannounced, sauntered towards the window, then turned to his classmates and winked. It was a silent pact to break the new guy.
Stan’s response was surefooted. He hauled both brothers away. He tossed off his jacket. He said he’d show them who was boss of Ballidu Primary School. ‘And George, my boy,’ he told Challis, ‘I gave those pair the biggest thrashin’ they ever had. After that I never had one iota of trouble.’ Years later a motorbike pulled up outside the Hugheses’ Pinjarra home: the same two lads, grown up and clean-cut. They had come to thank him. Getting belted by Stan Hughes, they said, was the luckiest break of their lives.
Kim’s footballing passions were by then booming and twofold. He barracked for Subi and pretended to be Austin Robertson, their deadeye drop-punter. It mattered not that Subiaco’s last premiership was in 1924 or that Robertson kicked with his right foot, Kim with his left. Technique wasn’t what made Kim swoon. It was Robertson’s charisma, his main-man status at Subiaco. When Kim was eight Robertson headed the WANFL’s goalkicking charts, a feat he’d repeat seven times in ten seasons. Kim stitched the number 16—Robertson’s number—on the back of his jumper. ‘I just wanted to be Robertson . . . Robertson was my hero.’
Football was not the only thing going on in Kim’s head. When he was nine he rode the streets of Pinjarra on his bicycle, a packed lunch on his back, collecting recyclable bottles. He stopped when he had enough money for his first bat: two pounds, ten shillings. It was a Bradman-autographed Slazenger. He wouldn’t let anyone else use it. He would oil it then pinprick it so that the oil oozed right in. He took this task seriously. He was determined to make the bat last.
•••••
LETTER WRITERS to the Geraldton Guardian made childhood sound a desolate existence in a wheat-growing, sheep-farming, mineral-rich port city of twelve thousand. So many hooligans, so few playgrounds. No bowling alley, no skating rink, no modern theatre. Just socials and dances—hick ones, and not to everybody’s taste. ‘Most teenage girls have illegitimate children through having nothing to do,’ speculated one correspondent. Boys, when not knocking up girls, hit balls on streets. That meant trampled gardens, snapped wires, shattered windows and the mind-twisting banging of balls on walls, a curse of modern mothers who in going to work had lost grip on their sons. One gentleman motorist calling himself ‘Hard Luck on Cricket’ despaired: ‘Only this week I had to dodge the “stumps”—two petrol drums in the street—and then the ball hit the windscreen. Luckily it was a tennis ball . . . Is there not a law about playing cricket?’
More irritating than cricket on Geraldton’s streets was Aboriginal children pissing on them, the subject of a 1965 report to the town council. Mr W. Gillam, senior health inspector, found: ‘This is an age-old problem and one of the main causes of complaint by all people interested in the assimilation of colored persons into modern white society. There does not appear to be a ready solution and until the native himself is made to understand and obey the white man’s laws, there is little chance of him enforcing the same law on to his children.’ One unusual aspect of this report was that the Guardian mentioned it. ‘Coloreds’ or ‘natives’ were seldom portrayed in the life of the town. When they were, they were social nuisances or fluffy nonentities. A December 1966 headline—‘Happy Time for Colored Folk Last Monday’—was typical.
The letter writers obsessed with bored youth were almost certainly fuddy-duddies, their corrugated brows not to be taken seriously. Randolph Stow, poet and novelist, was born in Geraldton in 1935 and went to Geraldton Primary. A salty wonder infuses his descriptions of childhood. Seashells, sandalwood, sunflowers, ant-orchids, surfboards, gulls, sandhills—‘and brief subtle things that a child does not realise, horses and porpoises, aloes and clematis’. In Sea Children, a poem about Geraldton, Stow wrote:
For the children the sea was deeper, and the dive longer, the things to be found in the tangled weed richer and stranger: coral, writhing, alive; a hairclip formed like a bow, or a coloured bead —rare things . . .
For the Hughes children, arriving for the 1964 school year, newfangled curiosities were on offer too. ‘The Wild One’—Johnny O’Keefe—defied a sore throat to pack out the Radio Theatre for Geraldton’s inaugural rock concert. Locals stamped feet to ‘Shout’ and scratched heads at the abrupt finale, ‘Advance Australia Fair’ starting up as O’Keefe fled the stage. 6GE disc jockey Warren Kalajzich was plotting his successful assault on the national continuous announcing record: sixty and a quarter hours. The annual Sunshine Festival entered its sixth year, a log-cutting competition and sheepdog exhibition among the attractions.
Stan’s new job was a big one—headmaster at Allendale, with a full roll-call of teachers—but not so lucrative that the father of a young family could relax on weekends. One mother, new to town, warmed to the gentle, funny man, a roll-up ciggie spinning somersaults out the corner of his mouth, who shifted her family’s furniture from the back of a truck. She was startled on Monday morning to discover that the moonlighting furniture removalist was headmaster at her children’s new school.
Breadwinning aside, sport came first, second and third in the Hughes household. Chasing golf balls was the limit of Stan’s on-field exploits. But the passion of his speeches, hair aflutter, cigarette ablaze, rallied fans, children and bemused passers-by round three-quarter-time huddles at Brigades, the football club he coached. Stan was a thinker, not a ranter, with a vision that went beyond humping the ball long and a measured yet quietly insistent manner of asserting himself. He coached the town’s representative side, unbeaten all season. Not to be outdone, Ruth shone at tennis and was women’s champion at Geraldton Golf Club. Before bedtime, Kim and the little ones would help get mum ready. ‘They’d all polish her shoes,’ remembers Marianne Murray, Year 1 teacher at Allendale. ‘That was the feeling: a real happy family. They didn’t let egos go to their heads. They bounced off each other. Kim had huge family support to be whatever he wanted to be.’
On tour in 1980, drizzle drove Kim indoors and on to a squash court in Nottingham. Spin bowler Ashley Mallett volunteered to join him. Mallett cannot be certain of the first-set scoreline. He thinks Kim won 21–0. It’s possible Mallett scored once when Kim flashed and missed.
‘I think we better play fair,’ said Kim.
‘How’s that?’
‘I’ll play left-handed.’
Mallett wasn’t sure whether to be amused or affronted: ‘Look, I don’t want to take advantage of you.’
Kim won 21–2 with his left hand.
Signs of a precocious sporting versatility were evident in Kim as a ten-year-old. He was no runner: a temporary design flaw. Little legs, as they were then, could generate only so much steam. Saturday mornings consisted of hockey for one of Allendale’s two sides. Kim was listed among the best afield most weekends, dazzling in a losing grand final and pocketing the team’s best-and-fairest prize. In tennis he was classy enough at ten to reach the under-12 boys’ semi-finals at Geraldton’s annual tournament. ‘Whew, Kim’s playing tennis,’ fellow junior cricketer Geoff Gallop tut-tutted to himself. ‘He’ll bat with a cross-bat. He’ll lose his technique.’
Had his racquet endangered his kicking motion, Kim might well have retired it. For he remained adamant that nothing would block his path to Australian Rules stardom. He, Don and Glenn—who had graduated from crawling and aped whatever Kim did—were full-time hangers-on at the end of Stan’s arm whenever he took the men of Brigades for practice. Training was twice a week at Maitland Park or the Recreation Ground, and the Hugheses came clad in Brigades colours, gold with blue trim, three daffodils in a field of beanstalks, hoping to be noticed, until one of the beanstalks would beckon them over for a bit of kick-to-kick.
For a ten-year-old, slight of build, getting your name and initials in a cricket scorebook was trickier. Matches were recorded in Geraldton as early as 1866. After the turn of the century rival sheep-shearing stations would play each other on hillsides, with dirt pitches and bats chiselled from pick-handles and corkwood trees. By the 1960s, philosophical differences over whether cricket matches should be afternoons of simmering combat or of beery frivolity triggered a split. A breakaway Social Association began playing on Sundays alongside Geraldton’s regular club competition. The volume of cricket had never been higher. It meant nothing to Kim. Under-16s was still the only junior league in town. Kim’s bulging quiver of strokes was seen to best effect on the street with friends or in the backyard at 20 Christie Street. They played, in a nod to the pioneers, with a tree trunk for a wicket.
It was around this time that Kim read Don Bradman’s The Art of Cricket, published in 1958. It seems a reasonable guess that he skimmed whole chapters. ‘No batsman should attempt to pull a ball which is over-pitched or of good length—this is courting disaster,’ was one Bradman sermon that did not sink in. ‘It is unwise for a batsman to specifically make up his mind before a ball is bowled where he will hit it,’ was another. Some of The Don’s devotion rubbed off. Kim fixed a ball to a string and hooked it up to the clothesline. Hour after hour he hit that ball. ‘Prac- tising with the ball on the string,’ Kim believed, ‘was a great help.’
The first solid memory anyone claims to have of Kim batting in an organised match was at a carnival involving neigh- bouring townships. Kim went along to watch. What happened next will be familiar to readers of cricketing folk tales and biographies. One of the home team’s players fails to show; ten sets of eyes scan the horizon in desperation; boy prodigy is reluctantly invited to make up the numbers; boy prodigy astounds all present with his bravery and hard hitting. Kim’s story deviated from the script only in that someone hollered for an abdominal protector to be sent out. Kim had tried one on earlier; it was too big.
This was a nuisance that soon became a hindrance. He was eleven when he started playing for Bluff Point No. 1 in the under-16s. He would later rue his oversized pads and the box that fell out when he ran between wickets, ensuring he was run out as often as all other methods of dismissal combined. Newspaper archives prove he was not alone. One weekend, Bluff Point’s 90 against Postals was pockmarked by seven run-outs. The Geraldton Guardian’s first mention of K. Hughes, cricketer, was on 27 November 1965. Bowling his accurate but slower-than-very-slow-mediums—‘donkey lobs on the stumps’ is how Kim described them—he captured 3–2 as Postals tallied 73. Bluff Point made 57, 23 of them Kim’s, as opener.
Five days later a short notice announced Junior Country Week trials: nine o’clock, the next two Saturdays, on Geraldton High School oval. Any lad under sixteen was welcome, the paper added. ‘The competition gives country boys a chance to play on top-class turf wickets in Perth over a week in January.’
Kim was grateful for his upbringing on ramshackle pitches in unpampered surroundings. That was where he developed his flair. Years later he remarked: ‘I see so many youngsters being taught how to play cricket on turf. The ball pops here and there and dad’s saying: “Son, get in behind the ball.” He doesn’t want to get in behind it because he’s going to get hit.’
Bluff Point under-16s played on malthoid wickets hard, straight and true, wickets not unlike the ones Reg Sewell would have encountered in the thirties. Sewell, in the eyes of old-time resident Con Culloton, was the prince of Geraldton batsmen. Culloton told how one day, against highly fancied Naraling, Sewell and opening partner Jimmy Wells set off in chase of 180. They got there unscathed. Sewell made every run bar four. From the first over he had the Naraling fieldsmen spreadeagled. By the last he was still thrashing boundaries, only now he was doing it with half a bat, the other half having splintered and fallen away in his hands and Sewell having declined a replacement because the game was as good as won.
Suddenly Reg Sewell had some competition. Kim Hughes, aged eleven, littlest and youngest of all who flocked to the high school oval, was named in Geraldton’s squad of thirteen for Junior Country Week.
•••••
HE TOOK A DAY to make an impression. He was twelfth man for the opening match with Morawa–Mullewa–Carnamah at Abbett Park, close enough to Scarborough Beach that you could breathe in the seaweed. On a sweltering afternoon Kim zigzagged by the sidelines, biffing a ball and overdosing on Coca-Cola. Geraldton won by five runs. Coach Jeff Carr drove half the players back to their accommodation. The rest returned in the sleek ministerial car of Les Logan, cricket enthusiast and staid, no-nonsense Country Party member for the Geraldton region. The game was so gripping, the sunshine so sapping and Kim, so little, had guzzled so many soft drinks; and as Les Logan’s black car whirred along Stirling Highway, Kim quietly chundered. ‘Everyone understood,’ Carr remembers. ‘And Les wouldn’t have been too upset. He would have put the car in the government garage and someone would have cleaned it for him.’
They were away nine days. Before Kim went, Ruth discreetly rang Ian and Marianne Murray, who had left Geraldton for the city. ‘She was very anxious that Kim be looked after and that his clothes were washed and that his whites were whiter than Omo-white,’ says Ian. Marianne reports that she appeased Ruth’s laundry concerns. ‘His mother was worried because he had never left home before. She asked us to keep an eye on him. He didn’t really want an eye kept on him—he’d have been horrified.’
They stayed at Crystal Palace guesthouse, near Perth’s old town hall, and played on fields greener and neater than any they’d seen: Hale School, Perth Oval, Claremont Oval, the WACA Ground. On their weekend off some headed for the beach. Others watched a grade game. Smoking was the main harmless mischief. For every cricket-mad boy in every dust-caked dot on a map, Junior Country Week was first rung up a tall ladder. It was no place to slip up.
The standard was competitive. Sheffield Shield players sometimes umpired. Geraldton’s vice-captain Geoff Gallop, future premier of Western Australia, recalls Tony Lock giving him out lbw. They won five, lost one and finished B-section runners-up. Fast bowler Gary Margetic and allrounder Peter Scott showed promise. Kim radiated something more than promise: an unbreakable self-confidence. Coach Carr didn’t dare tamper. ‘Kim had a straighter bat at eleven,’ says Carr, ‘than I ever had.’
Gallop showed a straight bat too. With Kim, though, a straight bat was a springboard for vivacious self-expression and the savaging of bowlers’ reputations. Gallop’s straight bat was his start, middle and finish. ‘I was a blocker’—and, at a pinch, a stopgap leg-spinner. Gallop’s fantasy was sports commentary. His first break came on Sunday afternoons as a thirteen-year-old scorer for Geraldton’s A-grade competition. He’d keep records, collate averages, rank star performers and present his handi- work to the ABC. There he met Englishman Bill Phillips, head of the ABC in Perth. Phillips favoured British minimalism—‘Stiles/Ball/Charlton’—over the verb-spattered verbosity of Australian football commentators. He set Gallop exercises. A British Open wrap. A WANFL preview. Gallop remembers:
I’d write it out, go into the ABC on a Saturday morning, tape it, and then he’d play it back to me. He’d talk about the commentator’s role and what emphasis you put on things. I thought I was pretty good. I was seriously thinking about becoming a sports commentator. Then my academic career got the better of me and I didn’t do it.
Kim’s destiny seemed clearer to Gallop than his own. ‘The mental picture I have,’ says Gallop, ‘is of a very small guy coming out and hitting the ball all over the place. Confident. He’d get twenties and thirties—that was Kim’s little thing—then he’d get caught at mid-off.’
Twenties and thirties eluded Kim that first week in Perth. Some of the West Australian’s most anticipated column inches all year out bush were the daily potted scorelines during junior and senior Country Week. Kim, an eleven-year-old among fifteen-year-olds, was not expected to figure in dispatches, and didn’t. ‘And yet,’ says Carr, ‘he was matching it with them.’
He sprouted a little in time for Junior Country Week 1966–67, legs lanky enough to secure him third place in the boy’s high jump at Allendale Primary’s annual sports day. He top-scored with 31 against Narrogin. But Geraldton lacked one sturdy opener to partner Peter Scott. They lost twice and slid out of contention. Carr arrived at Hale School for the final match with a proposition: how did Kim fancy opening?
Kim paused. He wasn’t at all sure. His thirteenth birthday was a fortnight away. The opposition attack looked sharp.
Carr persisted. None of their bowlers are any nastier than Margetic or Scott, he promised. ‘And Kim said “all right”—a bit reluctant, but “all right”.’
Merredin hoisted a respectable 8–171. Kim confronted the first stern test of his cricketing life. Hopes were that straight bat of his might hold perpendicular for half an hour while Scott made merry at the other end. The impressive thing was the way Kim stuck to the plan. Scott was there at the finish, 94 not out, but it was the teenager-to-be who had team-mates buzzing. He made 34 in a century partnership. In retrospect, the arresting detail is that he was comfortably outscored. He did the team thing. Blazing instincts were spurned and a barricade built.
Gallop believes a state selector, Allan Edwards or Lawrie Sawle, was in attendance. A whisper went round: ‘They’ve come to watch Kim. He’s the one.’ Sawle cannot remember this. Carr can’t either, though he doesn’t rule it out. He does recall being at the WACA Ground that night with the late Les Logan, who was tweaking the lapels of any cricket administrator with any selectorial influence and rhapsodising about Geraldton’s new boy opener.
In the schoolyard Kim was head boy in Year 7. He suffered little of the stigma that sometimes dogs the headmaster’s son. But, then, Stan wasn’t a crusty or unpopular boss. He dispensed with formalities, empowered his teachers and personally helped troubled children. Stan’s friendliness was as renowned as his dancing was infamous. He’d be first to fire up the record player and challenge the ladies to step up, a trait enshrined in a rhyme, Twinkletoes, written by staff for the end-of-year booklet:
A sportsman keen is Stanny Hughes
And keen on manly fitness,
Who follows all the sporting news
I think you’ll all bear witness.
We all say, ‘Liar’, when he says,
‘Too old! I can’t stay with ’em.’
For we have seen the twinkling toes’
Reaction to hot rhythm.
Kim’s own twinkling toes would eventually fetch him even greater infamy. For the moment, his tonsils were as noteworthy as his toes. He was an enthusiastic singer in the school choir. ‘Kim probably wouldn’t like to hear this,’ says Rudy Rybarczyk. ‘But he actually had quite a good voice, a sweet voice. His brother Don had a really good voice. They must have got it from their mother.’ Friendly rivalry could be a foggy concept between Western Australian country schools. In Geraldton’s mid-year eisteddfod it was an oxymoron. Ambition was fierce and practice relentless: twice weekly initially, four times a week by the business end, all during school hours. Five-year-olds longed for the day they would reach senior classes and qualify for choir selection. The emphasis changed later, until participation was the thing. In Kim’s day, victory over Bluff Point or Geraldton Primary sparked semester-long celebrations.
Choirmistress was Joan Gliddon, Kim’s Year 6 teacher, a former violinist with Perth Symphony Orchestra. To get to school every morning she travelled through low-lying scrub and past two Aboriginal town camps. Wonthella, the suburb Allendale served, was on Geraldton’s barren outskirts. Gliddon was conscious on arrival in 1961 that academic standards were ‘not considered very high’ and that many of the children’s schooldays would be over at fourteen. ‘The main aim,’ she felt, ‘was for them to leave with a reasonable knowledge of how to speak, read and write English, and to have an understanding of figures and elementary maths. I set about achieving this.’
Rudy Rybarczyk took Kim for Year 7. These things stood out: his confidence, his competitiveness—‘second best was never really good enough for Kim’—and his conversation. ‘He wasn’t afraid to debate social issues with you, even as a twelve-year-old. It might be on a Monday morning, when you talked about the weekend’s events. But he would never step over the mark. He always had that element of respect.’ As head boy, Kim would volunteer to look after Mrs Murray’s Year 1s. He had a head for maths and a love of composing short stories. A Car Crash, which Rybarczyk has hung on to all these years, went like this:
The screeching of wheels and smell of burning rubber broke the dead silence on a cold winter’s night. It was a mass of broken glass and jagged bits of tin. People rushed frantically to and fro, trying to put out the blazing fire; for twenty minutes this went on until it began to smoulder out very slowly.
Then through the action-packed air came a whining sound of an ambulance, rushing through the gloomy streets. With a sudden jolt, the ambulance halted beside the mangled bits and pieces of iron. In a second, the ambulance officers were carrying away the blood-stained body of an elderly man in his early sixties from the scene of the accident.
The mess was later swept away by gigantic sweepers.
The macabre detail and fatal twist seem at odds with Kim’s usual sunny optimism. But the staccato rhythm of the sentences would become a trademark of future press conferences.
•••••
KIM FINISHED PRIMARY SCHOOL, the family moved to Perth and within two years he was facing Dennis Lillee in the nets for the first time. Ambulances and gigantic sweepers may not have been far from Kim’s thoughts. He was fifteen, dressed in shorts and a pathetically thin thigh pad. ‘I don’t know why I wore it.’ Lillee was nineteen. He had the breeze at his back, a new cherry in hand. His legs were going at full tilt. The ball pitched short and Kim saw it fizz by. He didn’t sight it clearly enough to profess to have left it. So fast was it flying that the ball embedded itself—stuck—in the wire mesh. ‘So I knocked it out and gave it back to him with a great big smile and he thought I was being a little so-and-so,’ Kim recalled. ‘And the more I smiled, the quicker he bowled.’ Thirty years later, telling the story of that first ball from Lillee, Kim said: ‘I vividly remember it.’
Tiffs over drinks-waiter duties were then undreamt of. Lillee was on the verge of first-class cricket, his crackle and pop having put a pile-up of club openers off their breakfasts. Kim was in the state colts squad, whose weekly sessions in the WACA nets coincided with senior squad practice. He played for Floreat Park under-16s. His 555 runs at 46, including his first century, outscored everyone else in the competition in 1968–69. His donkey lobs made asses of more batsmen than seemed plausible. Twenty-eight wickets at 6 apiece shaded future Test bowler Wayne Clark’s 27 at 10. Two years before Garry Sobers’s 2000 runs–200 wickets Test double, Kim contributed 70 of Floreat Park’s 154 then took 4–3 to singlehandedly rout Perth in the under-16 grand final.
He made his first-grade entrance the summer after. He was close to full height—5ft 111⁄4in—but had an adolescent’s scrawniness. Floreat Park, sister club of Subiaco, played only as high as B-grade, where Kim rustled up an opening-round 40. He was summonsed to appear in the Subiaco nets and slung into Des Hoare’s first-grade XI that weekend. There was no hoo-ha. Journalists, preoccupied with Mt Lawley’s barnstorming No. 3 Bruce Duperouzel, seemed not to notice Subiaco’s dimple-cheeked No. 4.
Kim breezed on to Rosalie Park at 2–54, soon 3–56, in dawdling pursuit of 230. Two Sheffield Shield squad fringe dwellers, Trevor Bidstrup and East Perth ruckman John Daniel, spearheaded Mt Lawley’s attack. Richard Wilberforce was batting up the other end. Kim made a bystander of him. Gazing out from the tiny audience, disbelief rising, was practice partner Graeme Porter. Kim was square cutting Bidstrup and Daniel with the same belligerence he showered on Porter’s Sunday morning throwdowns. ‘Daniel was a big strong fellow who did a lot of bowling,’ Porter remembers. ‘And Kim played him easily, with real command.’
Out for 36, Kim waited two Saturdays for his next dig, a duck against Fremantle. Next day, a colts knockout stoush at Fletcher Park, he exploded off the mark with three fours and a six. Watching transfixed, long-serving Fremantle secretary Bob Ballantine pronounced Kim a Test prospect—the first person to say so publicly, though Kim’s coach Frank Parry had said it privately a hundred times. ‘High praise for a fifteen-year-old,’ noted Jack Lee, unshakeably pro-West in every word he ever wrote. ‘But I have seen rasher predictions fulfilled.’
Back in first grade Kim strung together 42 against Nedlands, 31 against University and 75 against Claremont–Cottesloe. Jack Lee’s monthly round-up in Australian Cricket charted Kim’s ascension: from ‘Subiaco’s pride and joy’ in the December 1969 issue, to ‘batting prodigy’ in January, and ‘star of the future’ by February. The memory of Kim’s 31 has stayed with University’s leg-spinning allrounder Graham House, who dismissed him lbw:
That was my introduction to this young whippersnapper everyone was talking about. All the senior guys in my team seemed jealous. He looked a lovely player. But he was a pretty cocky little fella and I think that got up the noses of the older guys, who expected him to show more respect. They tried a bit of sledging. He’d have a couple of words back and almost laugh at them. Then bang! The next ball would go for four.
Kim went to Melbourne in January for the inaugural national under-19 carnival, later a hothouse for myriad Test players. The 1969–70 crop lodged at Scotch College in Hawthorn for $25 each. Kim was youngest—something he was getting used to—in a WA side captained by Ric Charlesworth and starring Mike Fitzpatrick, future Rhodes scholar and big cheese in Australian football. ‘Kim was the prodigy, our best batsman, in some ways the hope of the team,’ Charlesworth remembers. ‘He was the most gifted junior cricketer I ever saw. No one was even close.’
It rained a lot. Pitches were substandard and Kim’s output mediocre: three failures, a 20 and a 25 against Victoria’s crack attack of Rod Hogg, Brendan McArdle and Ray Bright. ‘Kim was wild,’ says Charlesworth. ‘He was away from home. Maybe things were pretty strict there.’ Charlesworth suspects Kim’s thimbleful of runs gave him some grief. If so, he rebounded quickly.
His next innings was his first against Lillee. Perth made 145. Evening fell, bringing two late Subiaco wickets. ‘Kim just had to survive,’ Geoff Gallop recalls. ‘And Lillee was absolutely belting in at him.’ Gallop, on university holidays, had ventured down for a look at his old team-mate. ‘I remember thinking: God, Kim. No helmets back then.’ Kim made 40, thrusting his neck behind the line for every one, in a matchwinning stand with George Young. ‘Lillee used to come off the longest run-up I’ve ever seen,’ says Young. ‘I would have been petrified. And I was five years older. Imagine how Kim felt.’
Kim felt he’d achieved something. So far his runs were more eyecatching than plentiful, his fame narrow enough for Saturday afternoon’s Daily News to report that ‘Tim Hughes’ was 33 not out against Midland–Guildford. The paper never repeated that mistake. By second edition Tim was Kim and not out 63. Subiaco’s 2nd XI, playing on the adjoining field at Rosalie, virtually downed balls and bats. ‘As soon as Kim came out we were watching him,’ says second-grade captain Con Tsokos. ‘It was unbelievable. We could see the bat going, the shots flowing.’
It was Kim’s seventh first-grade game, his first since his sixteenth birthday. Rosalie Park’s pitch was the rottenest in town and Midland’s attack the most dreaded. Respected quicks Stan Wilson and Mike O’Shaughnessy had three past and future Test players for back-up: Bruce Yardley (bowling swingers), Keith Slater (offies) and Norm O’Neill (leggies). Dropped twice early, Kim batted flawlessly thereafter. He went to bed that night 104 not out. Hitting his hundredth run was as emotional for Kim as his Centenary Test ton a decade later. For Keith Slater, whose mate Des Hoare had been ‘driving me mad telling me how good this young bloke was’, it was awe at first sight:
Midland ruled the roost in those days and anyone who made runs against us we rated pretty highly. Stan Wilson was frightening at grade level. But Kim handled it with aplomb. He was technically as correct as you could possibly be and his temperament was quite incredible. He had a lovely outward confidence. He wasn’t over the top; he just believed he had the game to do the job. And he did. It was obvious to everybody there that this was something a bit special.
Midland’s captain-coach Tony Mann was away on state duty that first Saturday. Earbashed at training about the amazing child-batsman emu-stepping his way down the wicket at Stan Wilson, Mann resolved to have a go himself when ‘the little bugger’ resumed batting. Mann’s third ball spun; Kim pushed forward. ‘He never was prepared to accept that spinners could bowl,’ says Mann. First slip O’Neill caught him for 112.
Smalltown Perth’s sporting obsession exceeded its sporting accomplishments in those days. Overnight Kim became a big shot: by reputation, and by batting inclination. The following weekend he was mixing with the cream in a sixteen-man double wicket knockout, a fundraiser for Perth’s Test match appeal. He and partner Ian Brayshaw beat Ross Edwards and Bob Massie to the $80 first prize. Kim topped Subiaco’s averages that blissful, freewheeling summer. George Young accompanied him in several bountiful partnerships. ‘We were mesmerised by this kid who could belt the ball so hard to so many different areas of the ground,’ says Young. The boy’s square cutting gleamed brightest. ‘Third man, gully, point—whoever—they never got within cooee.’ Almost as impressive was his refusal to get riled, however clodhopping the provocation. Young recalls:
On-field sledging was rife and Kim grew up against some shrewd old customers, wily people who had played district cricket for twenty years. They loved having a crack at a young bloke like Kim, and I wasn’t much older. They jumped at the chance to upset us. But Kim didn’t retaliate verbally. He copped it sweet and put it on the scoreboard. Most batsmen would be happy to fend them off, but Kim, he took them on, even at fifteen. He took ’em on and nine times out of ten won the battle.
Backyard battles at 10 Clanmel Road, Floreat Park, were intensifying too. Youngest brother Glenn was increasingly the aggressor, hissing and hectoring as he ran in. Beamers were as legitimate as bouncers. Mum Ruth often stood as umpire and peacemaker. They played with a tennis ball and a gum tree for stumps. Here a fourteen-year-old Kim is said to have announced to his family, a touch pompously, if these were indeed his exact words: ‘I will one day wear the green and gold Test cap and walk the hallowed turf of Lord’s.’
Stationed close on the leg-side were a picket fence and a flowerbed. Hit the fence on the full or land one in the flowers and you were out. Kim’s cuts and cover drives blossomed accordingly. The family dog, a black cocker spaniel, was the boys’ most loyal spectator, and sometimes an obstacle. The dog would plonk himself down mid-pitch. This was not the last time someone would get in the way of Kim’s yearnings on a cricket field, and for those who delight in coincidences, the cocker spaniel’s name was Rodney.