The Crumb-Eaters
THE FREMANTLE DOCTOR floated in from the south-west minutes before Kim did on 2 November 1975, his first day as a first-class batsman. Although the afternoon was cool he rolled his long white sleeves up past his elbows. The exposed arms looked puny, all bone, no meat. The New South Wales fieldsmen stared. He couldn’t be any older than fourteen. He won’t hold us up for long, they thought.
Lunch was forty-nine minutes away, Western Australia a squeaky 2–68. Straightaway Kim surged on to the front foot. The bowlers tried aiming shorter, flatter, fuller, wider. They should have tried nails and a hammer. Nothing would still Kim’s leaping feet. Once his feet landed there was no whirling backlift. Instead he blocked, or drove past the bowler for a couple, or pinpricked an off-side gap for one. Nothing went in the air or across the line and everything was hit off the front foot and the bat’s middle. It was risk-free and purposeful. He kept this going until lunchtime.
Since leaving Adelaide he’d joined North Perth as captain-coach. Few so callow have wielded so much clout at an Australian cricket club. Kim had his players running laps of Charles Veryard Sports Ground then sprinting twos and threes in full batting clobber. ‘Ironman training,’ the press dubbed it. His 61 in the state trial was sweetly timed in every way. Two days later Ross Edwards, doughty batsman and nimbler cover field, quit for work and family reasons. Years spent stooped over and dribbling hockey balls had caused a degenerating spine and stolen an inch off his height. ‘People think I’m a bloody good fieldsman but I’m not really,’ said Edwards the day he retired. ‘I cannot bend down so I throw myself to the ground, which looks spectacular.’
Kim played a Gillette Cup one-dayer against Victoria. He lasted two minutes for nought. He looked a more apt incumbent of Edwards’s boots when the Shield match began. Kim’s acrobatics in the covers were proclaimed a rare bright spot on a sedate first day, New South Wales declaring at 8–285. He went to lunch on day two 22 not out: flying without rushing. After an hour’s batting he was 32.
‘The best start to an innings I’ve ever seen,’ says Keith Slater, who was commentating on radio station 6WF. ‘It is printed indelibly in my mind. He was 32 after the first hour and he hadn’t hit one boundary. When you see something as perfect as that you get excited. And I got pretty excited.’
With the hour up, Kim introduced a new dimension to his play: visible haste. Drives and cuts still clung to the ground. But he was hitting them harder. Len Pascoe went for almost four an over; Gary Gilmour and Dave Colley for nearly six; Kerry O’Keeffe for seven. Fieldsmen revised their condescending first impressions. ‘We couldn’t believe the way he was playing,’ David Hourn recalls. ‘He was running down the wicket to Lenny and Gilmour and Colley. I’d never seen anyone do that. With fast bowlers you always stay in your crease. He was the first bloke I’d seen who jumped down.’
Portentous times, they were, nine days before Gough Whitlam’s overthrow, his government locked in a barney with the opposition over the release of treasury funds. Nothing the bowlers tried could block Kim’s supply. Captain Doug Walters gave himself a turn. His golden arm proved decidedly yellow. His eyes were a snapshot of shellshock. ‘I will never forget the look on Doug’s face,’ says Hourn. Walters staggered up to him.
‘Jeez, Cracker, do you wanna have a go?’
‘I’ll do my best.’
Hourn bowled chinamans. He was the owner of a wrong’un that verged on indecipherable whilst rattling nerves more than stumps, so steepling was its bounce. He’d never bowled in Perth. Spinning it wasn’t Hourn’s priority today. He was having enough trouble making the ball pitch. The kid wanted to turn everything into a full toss. ‘He just ran down the wicket at me. And if he couldn’t quite get to me, he’d simply cut me backward of point.’ Kim was dropped once, a hooked skyer, on 69. The bespectacled culprit Hourn—‘my eyesight was a bit like Devon Malcolm’s’—glimpsed it once in front of the old police building. He next saw it on the grass. At least one other stroke was cavalier: Kim pranced, knelt and walloped over mid-on’s head and on to the next morning’s back pages. Another lofted drive, straighter, took him to a hundred.
Graeme Porter, sitting with his father in the crowd, ranks it alongside Lord’s and Melbourne in a trilogy of Hughes masterpieces. ‘I doubt whether even Greg Chappell could have been so perfect,’ says Keith Slater. ‘When I’m explaining to kids how to start an innings I always refer to Kim Hughes’s first knock for Western Australia.’ It was the first of several Hughes–Hourn duels. ‘Amazing, amazing innings,’ says Hourn. ‘That century was and still is the best and most dynamic innings I’ve seen in first-class cricket.’
But, think—you bowled to the Chappells, to Viv and Barry Richards:
Kim was the hardest bloke I ever had to bowl to. Easily the hardest. He was intimidating. I bowled against Greg a couple of times and Ian three or four times. I was always far more nervous and pumped up bowling to Hughes. I played against Barry Richards once and he got 178, but he tended to play the ball on its merits rather than jumping down. With Kim, every ball was a challenge. A day of bowling to Hughes left me mentally and physically drained. I’d bowl quick as I could just to keep him in his crease. There was no way in the world you’d throw the ball up because you knew it would go for four or six. Maybe six.
The one sadness was the paucity of witnesses: a Sunday crowd of 5558, Test selector Neil Harvey among them. The local ABC showed a Four Corners re-run, The Drover’s Wife and The Sky Bike. They crossed to the WACA Ground at 4.15 p.m., eighteen minutes after Alan Turner caught Kim on the long-on boundary in the last over before tea. He’d stampeded Hourn once too often. ‘Nearly knocked Turner over the fence,’ says Hourn. ‘If he wasn’t there it would have been six and probably killed a spectator to boot.’ Ian Brayshaw, watching from the pavilion, remembers the cheeks of Turner’s backside almost touching the pickets. Six runs and Kim would have hit 103 in the session.
Out for 119, he made a masher, Robbie Langer, look a mouse in their 205-run stand. John Inverarity went up to him afterwards. ‘Congratulations, Kim. Well played. That was brilliant,’ he said. ‘But you shouldn’t have got out just before tea. Think of others apart from yourself.’
Inverarity, bound for a teaching job in England, had recently stepped aside to let Rodney Marsh captain. Inverarity says Kim’s team-mates were thrilled for him. But his dismissal required a fresh batsman to weather the session’s final deliveries. Inverarity wanted to remind Kim of his responsibilities to the team. ‘He was probably a bit surprised,’ Inverarity reflects now. ‘And it was probably a bit mean.’
•••••
A SESSION’S BATTING was all it took for Western Australians to know they had never produced another like Kim. For much of the last century, Fremantle Harbour or Perth Airport was the first sight the world’s cricketers had of Australia. For many, their biggest surprise will have been their lack of surprise. They discovered a place of sand dunes, freeways and spotless streets. Blowflies in your mouth were a commoner phenomenon than rain on your shoes. They noticed the warmth, seabreeze and scintillating light, as if a chandelier swung from every stringybark. On arriving at the WACA Ground they marvelled at the glassy outfield and bouncy pitch, hard and white like limestone, the superabundance of brawny fast bowlers. Only one stereotype of Australian geography, meteorology and cricket lay unturned. Where were all the audacious batsmen?
In the eighty-three years between Western Australia’s first-class entry and Kim’s debut, only three homegrown batsmen managed as many as half a dozen Tests. Ross Edwards’s twentieth and last Test ended two months before Kim turned up. Barry Shepherd, burly and pugnacious, played fourteen. Inverarity, grasshopper-lean and cautious—‘Inforeverity’, E.W. Swanton christened him—played six. Jack Lee blamed insufficient competition. ‘Our West Australian batsmen lack that killer instinct,’ he theorised as late as 1971. ‘The complete and utter dedication necessary in other places cannot be developed in the more leisurely atmosphere of Perth.’ That was as simplistic as saying exposure to too much sunshine fried batsmen’s minds. Living in a beach-going suburban pleasure paradise never lulled Nugget Coombs, Polly Farmer, Edith Cowan, Rolf Harris, Bon Scott, Bob Hawke or Dennis Lillee into being happy with mediocrity. And yet it was as if Western Australians had been batting in black and white. Kim’s arrival was as dazzling to the senses as the switch to colour TV.
‘He was a precursor to the modern game,’ says Tony Mann. ‘In WA we had blokes like Inverarity and Charlesworth, dour batsmen who eked out their runs. Then Kim said, this is how I’m going to play. Bang, bang, bang!’ Mann knows something of Western Australia’s cricket pedigree. His father was the creator of Houghton’s white burgundy—‘You can exist without table wines,’ Jack Mann contended, ‘but you cannot live’—and a champion bowler of underarms, a variety which lingered longer in Perth than most centres. Overarm bowling was more typical fare by Jack Mann’s wrist-twitching pomp of the twenties and thirties. Batsmen underperformed against both. Swan River Colony was founded in 1829 and cricket first mentioned in 1835. Fifty-four years went by until Bill Bateman of Fremantle hit the initial century. Another forty-four years elapsed before Ernie ‘Slogger’ Bromley was picked for the fourth Bodyline Test. He’d moved to Melbourne months beforehand in the hope a selector might notice him.
John Rutherford is the 79-year-old keeper of the dominant themes of Western Australian cricket’s first 125 years: isolation, disadvantage, prejudice, poverty, extortion, bitterness, resentment, jealousy and hate. On Mondays he minds Merredin’s old railway station museum in the state’s wheatbelt. In the course of four hours one July afternoon not a single tourist passed through to distract him from his memories or his irritation, which time has not quite extinguished. He was the first West Australian to win Test selection while playing for the state. But even within Western Australia, getting noticed was never a cinch for Rutherford.
At eighteen he came to the city from Bruce Rock and asked state captain-coach Keith Carmody to take a look at him. It was 1948, the year after WA’s Sheffield Shield admittance. Carmody was busy coaching ten-year-olds. Ten-year-olds he could do something about; it was too late to fix Rutherford. ‘You’ve got so many faults it’s not even funny,’ said Carmody. So no, he wouldn’t take a look at him. He had no objection to Rutherford watching from behind the nets, and this Rutherford did daily for three months, until one day he and Carmody were the only ones there. ‘All the other kids were flying kites or had gone swimming out at Scarborough,’ says Rutherford. Carmody had nothing to do. So he tossed Rutherford a few balls.
‘You’ve got one thing,’ he said at last. ‘You’ve got ball sense. If I throw this ball you know where it’s going to finish up. But as for hitting it, you wouldn’t have the first idea.’
Rutherford instinctively thought ‘get rooted’. Instead he said: ‘Give me the first idea.’
A ball hung from a cord. Carmody demonstrated how to hit it off the front foot, then went whack off the back. It rocketed round the loop and slammed into the back of Rutherford’s head. Carmody sent him away to find his own ball and cord. Come back in a year, he said. Rutherford was studying for a science degree. He attached a ball to a tree. He woke at six, batted an hour, breakfasted, batted twenty minutes, went to lec- tures, came back for lunch, batted ten minutes, returned to lectures, batted two hours, ate his tea, then batted an hour until the light went. He did this for a week.
‘Got something to show you.’
Carmody winced. Rutherford persisted. He grabbed a bat and began swinging. Front foot. Back foot. ‘Jesus,’ said Carmody. ‘You have learnt in one week what I thought would take you a year.’
Rutherford was opening in first grade when summer came and for Western Australia by 1952–53. Shortly before selection of the 1956 Ashes squad he played a Test trial at the Sydney Cricket Ground: Ian Johnson’s XI versus Ray Lindwall’s XI. ‘Had to have someone from Western Australia, didn’t they?’ says Rutherford. ‘So I polished my bat, got on the plane and over I went. I got there and there was no bastard to meet me.’
No one was drinking at the pub near the players’ lodgings either. And no one thought to alert Rutherford to the practice net that had been arranged. He cabbed it to the SCG. Bradman, a selector, enthused about how wonderful it was to see him: ‘This could be a very important match for you.’ Bradman had a list. ‘I’ll put your name down here and you’ll get a hit. Just join in.’ Rutherford trundled a few. He breathed it all in: the theatre, the occasion, the two hundred swarming spectators. And without a word the players decided practice was over. ‘Didn’t give me a hit. Oh no. The bastards didn’t want to waste their time bowling to me.’
What Rutherford did next says something about the character of the early West Australian cricketers. He put on his pads and gloves and perched unblinking on a practice strip. ‘I would have stood there till the next day,’ he says. ‘I’d still be there.’ The other twenty-one players were vanishing into the pavilion. Only Len Maddocks glanced over his shoulder. He ascertained that Rutherford had missed out and sought to set things aright. ‘So my practice before taking the first ball from Ray Lindwall next morning,’ says Rutherford, ‘was to have the No. 2 wicketkeeper roll me up a few leggies.’
Resolve stiffened, Rutherford ground out 113. His rivals for an Ashes berth, Les Favell and Sid Carroll, made 4 and 2. Late on the final afternoon Johnson gave Rutherford a bowl. Neil Harvey was 96. Rutherford feels certain the intention was to embarrass him: for Harvey to bring up his century off Rutherford. Harvey didn’t get past 96. Rutherford knocked him over.
‘Hey! You’re not supposed to be taking wickets.’
‘That’s right. Isn’t it a funny game?’
Rutherford could not now justifiably miss the Ashes tour, and didn’t. The Board of Control’s original cost-shaving plan, he says, was for him to skip the warm-up games in Tasmania and get scooped aboard as the Himalaya left Fremantle. Word reached Rutherford that Alf Randell, WA’s lone board delegate, had claimed Rutherford, a schoolteacher, wouldn’t wish to miss classes. ‘When I heard this I was ropeable,’ says Rutherford. He complained to a very high-up board official. The very high-up official, it transpired, was no big admirer of Western Australians. Rutherford’s recollection of their conversation goes like this. The very high-up official said: ‘We have forty opening batsmen in Victoria who can do the job better. But for some unknown reason the Australian selectors have picked you.’ The next thing the very high-up official said was:
I’m going to give you some advice. First thing is, no word you say is worth a cracker until you’ve been in the side at least five years. And God help us that doesn’t happen. The second thing is that in the meantime you should just eat at the crumbs that fall from the masters’ table.
Rutherford took his protest to Bradman and Johnson, the captain. He joined the team from the outset. As they stepped off the plane in Launceston, Rutherford remembers everybody being introduced one by one.
First, Keith Miller. ‘Good to see you back here, Keith . . .’
Ray Lindwall. ‘Oh Ray, I remember the day when you . . .’
Len Maddocks. ‘Oh Lenny, good to have you on our soil, absolutely tremendous . . .’
John Rutherford. ‘John who?’
Rutherford was a statue of obstinacy. It was becoming his regular pose. ‘The name’s Rutherford.’
‘You’re not here.’
Silence. ‘Well, it looks to me like I am.’
‘Look, go and get yourself a ticket back to Perth or Fremantle or wherever you’ve come from.’
Board chairman Frank Cush informed Rutherford he couldn’t stay at the team hotel. No beds were left. Rutherford asked for the pavilion keys. He’d doss there and be first at the ground when he woke. Not allowed, said Cush. ‘Go down the wharf. There’s some places there you could possibly get in.’ Luckily, an eavesdropping Harvey ordered an extra bed up to his and Maddocks’s room.
Bamboozled by the curving ball, Rutherford struggled once in England. He did play what he considers the innings of his life in Southampton. As Rutherford tells it, Johnson was holidaying and Miller escorted all bar five players to London to see The Pajama Game. Miller’s promised early-morning return didn’t eventuate. Only five Australians were present with play against Hampshire due to start. It was a case of bat first or face pandemonium. The coin spun and Lindwall grunted loudly—but indiscernibly. The coin landed. ‘Tails it is,’ swooped Lindwall. ‘We’ll bat.’ Hampshire captain Desmond Eagar objected. Lindwall, says Rutherford, asked Eagar whom people would likelier believe: ‘Ray Lindwall, or you?’
Rutherford opened with Ken Mackay under instructions to survive until reinforcements arrived. The problem was that curving ball. Ten weeks in England and Rutherford still hadn’t acclimatised. Derek Shackleton was starting it outside off and finishing on leg. Rutherford kept nicking into his pads, balls ballooning off them precariously. ‘Six times I was missed in the leg trap’—fingernail chances, but chances. Somehow he made it to 30, mission completed, then finally fell caught. Miller and his merry men entered the pavilion at the same time as Rutherford.
‘That was a shocking shot, Rutherford,’ said Miller. ‘When I get out there I’ll show you how you should have played that.’
Rutherford just looked at him. ‘I thought, you bastard.’ As for his cherished 30, he still remembers reading Lindsay Hassett’s description of it as the worst of Rutherford’s many bad innings in England. ‘Hassett didn’t have a clue. If I’d got out . . .’
The Australians sailed the long way home, Rutherford substituting for Colin McDonald in Bombay for his one and only Test. Again he made 30; again acclimatisation was a problem. He swept Subhash Gupte and momentarily forgot the heat. ‘Stupid me ran four,’ says Rutherford. ‘It was the last running I did. I had double vision. Double vision.’ He faced up, hazarded a pull at what appeared to be two balls, and bottom-edged to the keeper. There was no second innings or chance.
Western Australia’s first Test tourist found advice non- existent and anti-WA chitchat rife. Incompetent Perth umpiring was the topic of general bewailing one rainy day in England. That got Rutherford really steamed. ‘Whenever we go over there,’ someone said, ‘we’ve got to get Rutherford out three times.’
A very high-up board official, who Rutherford had met before, led him aside. ‘John,’ he said, ‘I tried to save you from this.’ Then, those familiar words again. ‘I tell you, nobody’s interested in anything you say—and also, you should eat at the crumbs that fall from the masters’ table.’
Rutherford waited for him to finish. ‘You better get used to the way I speak,’ said Rutherford. ‘Very soon half the Australian XI will be made up of West Australians.’
‘And that,’ replied the very high-up official, ‘only shows how stupid you are.’
•••••
BASTARDS, as John Rutherford calls them, gets spat out a lot when Westralian cricket folk talk about eastern staters, another favourite phrase. When Bob Simpson endured a fallow few weeks upon moving to Perth in 1956–57 he was tagged the ex-New South Wales player. ‘As soon as I started getting runs,’ Simpson recalls, ‘I became the West Australian. Then when I went back to Sydney it was New South Wales batsman Bob Simpson failed today when I failed, and ex-West Australian Bob Simpson when I succeeded.’ It shocked him at first. Simpson had grown up among a people who considered themselves part of Australia. ‘Around that time in WA they were talking about setting up a separate country. I put it down to the isolation. I got used to it.’
Rutherford’s calamities were not the lot of every sandgroper to make it big. Keith Slater, selected in the Test twelve against England in 1958–59, got greeted at the airport and ushered to the MCG for the last day of Victoria–New South Wales. Richie Benaud spied Slater before the old players’ pavilion and stopped setting his field. Play halted for five minutes while Benaud shook Slater’s hand and chaperoned him into the Victorian dressing room: ‘Look after this guy, he’s over here to play for Australia.’ Slater felt adrift because so many team-mates were strangers. Otherwise his anxieties were the typical newcomer’s. For example, only after playing once and being twelfth man twice did he know not to address wicketkeeper Wally Grout as Grouty—‘or he’d punch you in the face. You could call him Griz or Wal but not Grouty.’
‘Griz’ was short for ‘Grizzler’, a tribute to Grout’s incessant geeing-up of bowlers and fielders. Grizzler summed up several West Australians too. Grizzliness was not unwarranted. They were denied Sheffield Shield status until twenty-one years after Queensland and fifty-five years after South Australia. Champions that first season, they remained part-time underlings for the next eight. To go full-time they had to pay the extra travel costs of the other states in trekking west annually instead of biennially. This arrangement—The Subsidy—swallowed up to 10 per cent of income and reigned from 1956 to ’66. It might have folded sooner had the WACA’s voice amounted to more than a squeak. Alas they, like Tasmania, occupied one of thirteen seats round the board’s table, meaning a one-thirteenth helping of profits and one-thirteenth of a say in proceedings.
The players were loosely aware of the financial particulars. But to see the implications they had only to look in a mirror. Eleven squirming vegemite scarecrows stared back at them. In Garth, his charming biography of fast bowler Graham McKenzie, Ed Jaggard paints a gruesome picture:
Caps were described by one player as ‘inverted saucepans with cardboard inside the peaks’ . . . Sweaters were fine knit rather than the distinctive cable knit of true cricket sweaters. The blazers came from another era. Black, trimmed with wide gold braid, these monstrosities could be spotted a kilometre away . . . Representing Western Australia wasn’t much fun.
Western Australia’s inaugural 1947–48 triumph—they won on percentages, playing half as many games—was part mathematical quirk. Certainly it was an aberration. They inhabited the bottom three for the next seventeen seasons. They played as if awestruck. And cricket is a hard game to master on bended knees. Switch off your radios, commentator Ron Halcombe used to exhort the citizens of Perth: ‘Nothing is happening!’ Barry Shepherd’s captaincy brought a turnaround. When Shepherd picked and clubbed Benaud’s top-spinner he didn’t give the embarrassed smile that Benaud detected years earlier as a west coast tic. Instead, Shepherd growled: ‘Take that you bastard.’ Opponents became bastards from the east. A woe-is-us mentality turned into a them-and-us obsession.
Cricket was not alone in this transformation. ‘Bastards from the east’ was the catchcry when people rang a commercial TV station after hours and got a recorded message because the programming funnelled out of Sydney or Melbourne and everyone had gone home. Reporting on the Perth Royal Show was less about fairy floss than pointscoring. ‘You’d ask an expert whether our pigs were as good as the ones from the east,’ journalist Norman Aisbett once explained. ‘And if he said Perth pigs were better it was a guarantee of getting your story in the paper.’
Comparing swine and swearing at the phone were petty pastimes. In cricket, resenting the bastards helped win matches. It was a positive force. And it became almost intrinsic. Men like McKenzie, Inverarity, Edwards and Charlesworth learnt it from their fathers, who’d played in the lickspittle pre-Sheffield Shield days. It was bequeathed from team to team. The Subsidy was a powerful cudgel. Captains of the fifties and sixties could thunder: ‘We’re paying for these bastards. Now let’s make them pay.’ The Subsidy had dwindled to $572 in total by its final year. In retrospect, they were 572 dollars well spent.
Rutherford’s premonition became fact sooner than even he envisaged. Six of Australia’s eleven at The Oval in 1972 were West Australians. At Lord’s, Bob Massie and Dennis Lillee looted all twenty wickets. They were not just eating at the masters’ table. They built and laid it. But those 572 dollars and all they stood for had not been forgotten. In Anthony Barker’s WACA history, Lillee vouched: ‘Playing for WA was an all-consuming passion. I’d have died out on the pitch for the team. I never believed in saving for the second innings, for the new ball, for the next day, for a tour that might be coming up.’
The captaincy passed from Tony Lock to Inverarity. ‘You gave your all for WA,’ said Lillee, ‘but then you gave a little bit more for Inver. Teams under him were very, very passionate . . . I’ve never known team spirit in any team, ever, like that.’ WA won the Shield ten times in eighteen years. Ruling the roost did not stop them rueing the east. Decades after ‘us’ had caught up with and overtaken ‘them’, Western Australian cricketers still felt furious and indignant.
Other states dreaded the six-hour flight westward. It wasn’t just the likelihood of defeat. It was the lack of banter. If your ball landed in WA’s net it got kicked away not tossed back. John Rogers left behind his life as a New South Wales selector and University of NSW captain-coach to become the WACA’s first general manager in 1979. He discovered a foreign country. The New South Wales way was the rugby way: compete hard, get along afterwards. ‘Western Australians,’ says Rogers, ‘play cricket in an AFL fashion. The opposition are the enemy. You don’t fraternise beforehand, you don’t fraternise during, you don’t fraternise after.’ A gut grizzliness simmered on through the eighties. ‘Daryl Foster fostered it,’ says Rogers. ‘Non-drinking academic that he is, he got all the blokes in the palm of his hand. He fostered this thing of them and us.’
On his first day in Western Australia, Foster rumbled cross the Nullarbor in a white Falcon with a vinyl top and a back seat loaded with cots and prams. He was headed for Perth to study physical education. ‘We’re playing a Shield game there this weekend,’ were Northcote team-mate Bill Lawry’s last words to him. ‘Come down.’ Foster parked outside the WACA Ground:
I talked my way in as the thirteenth Victorian man and got in for nothing. The Farley Stand was still there, the old wooden one, and I heard this roar as I went in. Good grief, I thought, this sounds like a footy game. I rushed up the embankment and saw seven or eight thousand people. Lawry had just been dismissed—caught somebody, bowled McKenzie—and as he left the middle they yelled and screamed the whole way: ‘You’ve had it, Phantom.’ So it was there. I’ve noticed it all my life here. I think it drives success in Western Australian sport. I won’t say I didn’t foster it—but it was certainly latent.
Lackadaisical gatekeepers have gone the way of the Farley Stand. Secession whispers are the preserve of nutty conservative politicians, proffered half-heartedly, like a great-aunt with her tray of Iced Vo Vos. Even isolation isn’t what it used to be. Thanks to the internet, Perth really feels three thousand kilometres from anywhere. Before, it was like going to Venus, and almost as hot. If obscene house prices and a couple of AFL teams are badges of nationhood, Western Australians could even be considered quintessentially Australian. West Coast Eagles’ 1992 premiership victory might have been the moment when resentment died. Because it’s hard to feel smug and resentful. Interestingly, in the sixteen years since, Western Australia have won the Sheffield Shield competition only twice. Smashing eastern staters still gives people pleasure, but it’s a fleeting pleasure, a frisson, not the overpowering obsession it was in John Rutherford’s world.
When Kim Hughes entered that world, extortion was a thing of the past. Disadvantage and prejudice were getting increasingly difficult to prove. Bitterness, resentment, jealousy and hate lived on.
•••••
KIM GOT PAID $16.25 a day in his first match. Extortion wasn’t stone dead after all. It was $3.75 more than the previous season’s allowance but still only 36 cents a run, once you added his second-innings 60 to his 119. Money was tight all right—too tight not to mention. During Kim’s next game, against Queensland, Eric Beecher’s Cricketer magazine surveyed the top dozen players from each Shield state. Fifty-eight out of sixty reckoned the financial rewards were insufficient. More than two-thirds feared those pittances could persuade them to quit cricket. Kim’s feelings were probably more tangled than most.
‘I have always played the game because I’ve loved the game,’ he’d later philosophise, ‘not because of how much money I can make out of it.’ But there was something else to consider. He was fourteen when he saw a gaggle of girls burst through the quadrangle at City Beach High. He asked his friend who was the one with the luscious blonde hair and the skirt down to her ankles. That’s Jenny Davidson, the friend said, and pretty soon they were catching the bus to dance classes at Gilkisons and Jenny’s anxious father was pacing a hole in the porch. Playing for Australia was Kim’s dream. Yet he wanted to support a family some day. It would not be the last time that dilemma intruded.
The Queensland game is one he still dwells on. Jeff Thomson was menacing as a sasquatch, so quick as to be mathematically unexplainable. Scientists calculated that when Thommo let rip his ultrafast one the batsman needed 0.3 seconds to analyse it plus 0.3 seconds to execute a stroke. Yet the ball arrived in 0.438 seconds—leaving him minus 0.162 seconds. On Roy Abbott’s WACA pitch it didn’t feel that long. Abbott was a former insurance clerk, cattle-station hand and prisoner of war on Crete. Sent to the WACA by the Commonwealth Employment Office for three months’ casual work, he stayed thirty-three years. He lived at the ground, in a cottage, first to rise and last to shut the gates after trotting meets, stirring in darkness when it rained unexpectedly to lay down the covers with wife Tina. Nothing about Perth was so otherworldly as the pitch Roy built. Hard, true, rearing and—in certain bowlers’ hands—dangerous. Abbott and Thomson were a duo whose deadliness rivalled Lillee and Thomson.
‘You’ll kill ’em today, champ,’ was Frank Parry’s message as Kim passed him at the bottom of the stairs, thirty minutes before stumps. Bruce Laird’s first words were less heartening. ‘Now Kim,’ said Laird, ‘someone’s gunna get hurt here.’ Kim took guard on leg stump. He pulled away; keeper John Maclean was back on the sightscreen. Why wasn’t he getting into position? Quickly Kim twigged. Maclean was in position. He survived both and saw neither of Thomson’s first two balls. A straight one rattled his bat and rolled into a gap. Kim took off. A guttural roar resounded. ‘Geddback.’ Another lesson: no singles would be run tonight. Kim faced every ball of Thommo’s four overs. Laird took genial Geoff Dymock.
There was a second century that summer against the touring West Indians. Kim made a first-ball duck then watched 23-year-old Vivian Richards massacre 175. Ball left bat like a thunderclap. Three in a row off poor Bob Paulsen cleared the long-on fence. Balls cascaded over but nowhere near a thankful Charlesworth in the covers. Richards replicated such bowler battery on a hundred occasions. The significance this time was the effect on an impressionable youth. That’s how I want to play, Kim decided, and in the second innings he bolted to 102 in a couple of hours: dancing, driving, sweeping, pulling. Richie Benaud, taking his first look, thought Kim ‘most promising’. Shrewd old Percy Beames, in his final season on the Age cricket beat, asserted: ‘Hughes is a batsman with possibilities.’
Possibilities were undone by rashness more often than not that first season. He’d play around a medium pacer’s straight ball. Or he’d misread a googly, apparently uninterested in watching the bowler’s hand. Occasionally it worked. Joined by Brayshaw at 6–62, hunting 150, on a last-day Adelaide turner, Kim swept two foxes in Mallett and Jenner theatrically, repeatedly, almost obsessively. First slip Ian Chappell thought Kim desperate, his tactics doomed. But although he wasn’t watching the hand, he was judging the length. Every sweep stayed down. Every boundary jabbed Mallett’s blood pressure up. Western Australia won easily. Afterwards Chappell met Kim for the first time in the South Australian dressing room: ‘I was left with the impression that here was a young man who didn’t lack confidence in his own ability.’
The life of a full-time cricketer appealed. A hoped-for winter of county or Lancashire League cricket in 1975 wasn’t to be. But Edinburgh-based Watsonians were keen for the 1976 season. A Wiltshire gentleman, an agent, who sent the club handwritten briefings about potential imports on Basildon Bond notepaper, recommended him. Watsonians captain Brian Adair liked the sound of this Kim Hughes whose destiny it was to play for Australia. His wife Mona had struck up a regular correspondence with another antipodean swashbuckler, Keith Miller, as a schoolgirl. Mona was bewitched after seeing Miller play. Miller responded, intrigued, for he’d seen Scotland during the war and assumed the Scots cared little for cricket.
They agreed terms: £1000 or so for the season. Or so Adair thought. Kim’s promised letter of confirmation didn’t arrive. Adair heard no more of it. In a meeting one day a call came through. Watsonians’ new Australian had touched down. Could someone please fetch him? Adair didn’t bust his neck to get there. The lad could have said something. ‘I found him sprawled on the roundabout at our little airport,’ Adair remembers. ‘He was clad in a denim suit and open-necked shirt. Blond hair.’
Adair drove Kim to his new home, the boarding house at George Watson’s College. He was surprised when the jetlagged new pro chose practice ahead of bed that first evening. The wicket was muddy and slow, batting torture. The rain broke long enough for practice to proceed. And when he got home, Adair told Mona he had just seen an amazing batsman. Kim’s confirmation note showed up six weeks later. He’d sent it sea mail.
Jim Hubble was the last first-class West Australian to embark on a Scottish dalliance. Hubble brought an ankle strain. He saw the rain, the practice pitch marked out of ordinary grass, the waterlogged run-up and the miracles expected of him. He repacked his bags and flew home. Kim and Watsonians looked assured of bonnier times. Kim went with an open mind, a spirit of adventure and the two qualities that helped wherever he went: a desire to be liked and a determination to see good in people. His first game was at Selkirk, in the Scottish borders, with a field of cows for a sightscreen. Kim didn’t grouch. He adjusted. Almost bowled for nought, he sped to triple figures then enquired whether it was the done thing to retire. Carry on, everyone trilled, carry on.
One night at practice he used the edge of his bat only. He invited anyone game to penetrate his defence. Wally Hammond used to perform an identical trick in pre-season nets at Gloucestershire, not that Kim realised this or knew who Wally Hammond was. The result was identical, too. Like Hammond, Kim didn’t miss one.
Team-mates were enchanted, opponents perplexed. Was that a Welsh accent? Kim saw Dublin, where he and another player bet on themselves being first to kiss a girl when they stepped out of the hotel. Nuns were the first females encountered. The bet’s outcome, says club historian Stewart Oliver, is still unknown. Kim guest-skippered against Malahide. ‘A day he will never forget,’ reported the Watsonian. He hit a century then watched seven catches go kerplunk, his crinkled brow showing ‘the strain the club’s captains usually feel’. In all he souvenired five hundreds and 1711 runs—club records, both. A sublime 79 for the wandering Irish Leprechauns against Keith Fletcher’s Essex was another highlight. If only winter would never end.
‘He was one of the nicest and most exciting cricketers Watsonians have ever had,’ says Adair. ‘He was always asking for advice on all manner of subjects. There was a very close bond between us, even though I was forty-one to his twenty-two. He must have seen me as a father figure.’ Only one batting peccadillo is today remembered: ‘He’d decide what he was going to do to the ball before it was bowled.’
For the last game at Forthill, Adair sent himself and Kim in first. Sentiment swayed that decision. They proved inseparable: 232 they put on, another club record, Adair’s contribution 41. ‘My role,’ he says, ‘was to count to five and run like hell on the sixth.’ Kim’s unbeaten 218 took under three hours. Watsonians, a humble club of ex-George Watson’s pupils that had won nothing since the 1890s, achieved the double: East League and Masterton Trophy champions. Presented with a Royal Stewart tartan kilt at the end-of-season dinner, Kim wore it proudly. Forty of his new friends farewelled him at the airport. Adair posted a letter to Australian Cricket Board secretary Alan Barnes, who was sufficiently impressed to run off fourteen copies, one for each board delegate. The letter read:
The Scots as a race are not given to extravagant praise, but . . . the attraction of his style brought a lot of spectators to our games. You are extremely lucky in Australia to have such fine, uninhibited and technically correct strokeplayers . . . Kim behaved both on and off the field with exemplary sportsmanship, and his conduct was at all times a credit to Australia and the Australian cricket authorities. In these days when the manners of cricket players leave a lot to be desired, it is encouraging to see a fiercely competitive player acting properly.
Dicey wickets made Kim watch the ball and play with bat nearer pad. Being his team’s greatest hope educated him in the art of building, not frittering, an innings. These changes Kim detected in himself. After falling cheaply against out-of-towners one sodden afternoon he was quick to check it didn’t count towards the official averages—as if the cold hardened him, briefly. A year later he rejoined the team on their trip to Corfu. He loved it, reminiscing long after his Test days were over: ‘Sipping ouzo and coke on the side. Twirling your arm over and having a bit of a dash. That was life.’
And that was the real legacy: a place and people he would return to again and again. ‘Possibly the best six months of my life.’
•••••
SIX OF KIM’S most cherished months were soon followed by five of his most sought-after days. The afternoon before Christ-mas 1976, in the scramble to catch Zaheer Abbas’s spooned pull, Jeff Thomson and Alan Turner bumped shoulders. Thomson dislocated his, five agonising centimetres separating bone from joint, with no guarantee that lightning would strike from it ever again. At the Parry household’s Boxing Day shindig the mood was festive. For that was the day selectors Harvey, Ridings and Loxton held their phone hook-up to discuss Thomson’s replacement for the Second Test.
Kim joined the team on a Thursday night and batted in the MCG nets on Friday. He was bareheaded and wore mitten gloves. Next morning, New Year’s Day, he landed the twelfth man’s job, catching Asif Iqbal off Gilmour. A dressing room run-in between a glass shard and Ian Davis’s foot meant he substituted again on a perfunctory fifth morning, Australia eyeing three last Pakistani wickets. Stationed at mid-off in Lillee’s first over, Kim tumbled on his right shoulder in a futile and ungainly effort to catch Imran Khan. Out snapped the collarbone: a minor version of Thomson’s injury. Team physio Barry Richardson prescribed a week’s rest. It was as drab an international audition as that. Retelling it to the Melbourne Cricket Club years later, Kim sprayed a sprinkling of poetry to go with his graceless motion:
Dennis went back to the sightscreen, pretending to push off from the wheels. Well, Bay 13 were screaming, chanting ‘Kill, Kill, Kill’. Dennis steamed in and they built up to a crescendo. As he let the ball go you could hear the air being sucked out of the MCG. I wanted to kill someone. There was that much adrenalin pumping through me, I just wanted to do something. And I did something. I crashed into the ground and injured my shoulder.
The post-Chappelli era was two Tests old. Already Greg was running a grey-socked kind of outfit compared with Ian’s polka-dotted banditti. In the game where Thommo maimed himself they looked keener on escaping defeat than inflicting it. Marsh and Cosier sidestepped a victory chase of 56 runs in 15 eight-ball overs. An Adelaide audience more accustomed to patting cats than howling catcalls was outraged. It wasn’t the Australian way. It certainly wasn’t Kim’s way. And it wasn’t Kim’s 39 average after fourteen first-class matches that people craved. They craved his class, his cheek.
It was a confounding summer, 1976–77, the game caught between flux and gridlock. Western Australia ditched black caps for gold caps to evoke pizzazz. The Perth Building Society tossed $10,000 into the players’ pot. A step towards ‘adequate and full sponsorship’, Rodney Marsh called it. Yet when Kerry Packer offered the Australian Cricket Board half a million a year for the exclusive TV rights he elicited smacked gobs, then a shrug, and finally a brush-off.
Kim’s position mirrored Australian cricket’s. In one corner sat those who delighted in his fluidity; in the other, those who wished to dam it. A week in October illustrated his conundrum. It started with a 40-over grade tussle conducted more like a car-chase scene. South African superbat Barry Richards, in his first home game for Midland–Guildford, slugged a 100-ball century. Kim retaliated with a 102-ball century, beating Richards to the man-of-the-match prize. Five days later WA’s Shield team gathered at Adelaide’s Arkaba Court Motel for their pre-game meeting. Captain Marsh kept Kim behind afterwards. Team honchos Lillee, Brayshaw and Foster stayed seated too. Together they itemised the golden chances blown during Kim’s debut season: his dill’s hoist off Geoff Attenborough; the Malcolm Francke googly that hoodwinked him; the Alan Hurst half-tracker that clean-bowled him. Each time he’d been well set.
‘You need to bat for periods,’ said Marsh. ‘Bat for drinks, for lunch, for drinks again, for tea.’ Marsh stressed the importance of planning. A sensible plan for you, he suggested, would be to score centuries in 240 minutes. Lecture over.
‘Right,’ said Marsh, wrapping up. ‘You bat for drinks . . .’ Kim nodded.
‘You bat for lunch . . .’ Another nod.
‘And finally you’ve been batting 240 minutes. How many are you?’
Kim looked at the ceiling. ‘Eight hundred.’
It’s possible Kim was playing for laughs. The way Brayshaw remembers it: ‘A wicked grin creased his young face.’ It’s plausible, too, that he was signalling, in the guise of a jest, that he wouldn’t be heeding Marsh’s advice, that his plan was to have no plan. Only Kim knows. What we know is he batted once that game. He cantered to 59 then got out trying to loft Terry Jenner over the Victor Richardson Gates.
An unconquered 137 in 167 balls against Pakistan, spiriting Western Australia to a late-evening victory, did not comply with Marsh’s specifications either. It was opportune, though: four days before Thomson’s shoulder went bang instead of its customary whang. ‘Rarely has a batsman of his limited experience been seen in a more majestic performance,’ wrote the Australian’s Phil Wilkins. ‘The timing and power of his drives and cuts had to be seen to be believed, but he also hooked and pulled with the confidence of a champion.’ Kim’s loudest backer was Keith Slater’s Sunday Times column, once you flicked past the girls in unfeasibly small bikinis marvelling at Perth’s improbably warm sunshine to find it. Slater’s glee rose week by week. Forget normal runs-on-the-board policy. Kim wasn’t normal: ‘He should be selected for Australia immediately . . . I believe Hughes will be Australia’s next great No. 3.’ Slater rated Kim his country’s most exciting batsman since a young Norm O’Neill, and that was as exciting as could be.
Kim’s next innings were under a green cap, not gold. His dislocated collarbone excused him from Third Test sub-fielding duties. But he went on the two-Test tour of New Zealand. Greg Chappell, thwarted 1–1 by Pakistan and not satisfied, introduced early-morning fitness runs. Chappell’s own unscripted dashes after willowy-bottomed streakers in Christchurch and Auckland provided a forgettable tour’s two unforgettable images. With Kim, he followed Marsh’s interventionist approach. Try batting long periods, Chappell recommended. Acquaint yourself with conditions. Wait for a loose one.
This time, Kim obliged. His first official knock for Australia was an hour-long 22 against Northern Districts. A second-innings 76 showcased more of his several personalities. He ran out Rick McCosker by half the pitch, loitered two hours over twenty runs, then hammered boundaries left, right and straight to set up a declaration and victory. He collected eight runs in his next four innings and was a spectator at both Tests. Back home, Adelaide’s David Hookes was racking up hundreds like he was tying up shoelaces, five in six innings over that same month-long stretch. Home was a place Kim thought about a lot.
‘He was green and homesick,’ tour manager Roger Wotton recalls. ‘He was the junior of the squad and he was made to seem as such . . . They were pretty tough blokes to be involved with, Lillee and Marsh and Chappell.’
That was not all. ‘He was very much in love. He was missing his girlfriend, obviously.’
Kim’s non-cricketing exploits both impressed and bewildered. Mike Sheahan, later an Australian Rules reporter of lordly influence, watched a post-practice kickaround at Christchurch’s Linwood High School and fantasised: ‘If young Hughes ever drops cricket for football . . .’ A night of shaggy-dog poker naivety intrigued the New Zealand Herald’s Don Cameron. Kim delved into his pocket. His hand reappeared full of $10 notes, a rolled-up wad of them—‘thick enough,’ Cameron noticed, ‘to choke a donkey’. But he kept putting his faith in two pairs. The journos kept taking his money. Cameron felt a pang or two. At breakfast, Cameron had no chance to explain before Wotton cut in: ‘Serves him right. Cocky bloke. Thinks two pairs will always win.’
Popular and respected, Wotton was nonetheless on his one and only expedition as manager. For he had a day job—state member for Burrendong in rural New South Wales—and Country Party leader Leon Punch wasn’t pleased. Six weeks in New Zealand while parliament was sitting, Punch fumed, equalled untold masses of votes squandered. ‘Well,’ says Wotton, ‘he’d be surprised how many bloody votes it won for me. I supplied a few locals with tickets and got great publicity in the bush papers. That won me more votes than sitting in parliament listening to boring debates.’
Sprucing up player appearances is one achievement Wotton lays claims to. Recent unofficial dress policy had been that anything clingy, stripy or spotty which didn’t lend itself to being tucked in was a winner. For Otago’s centenary dinner, Wotton requested that everyone don coats: ‘Well, they came in all sorts of coats. But at least they wore them.’ He also advocated that wide-brimmed sunhats with the green underside replace the mismatched terry-towelling beach gear that adorned most heads.
The team flew home and to Melbourne for the Centenary Test against England. Hookes filled the slot that could have been Kim’s. On cricket’s most glittering stage in a hundred years, Hookes booked his place in larrikin folklore with five gunbarrel fours off five Tony Greig off-breaks. Approximately 55,300 fewer spectators saw Kim hit 33 for North Perth. The Test ended with Kim’s selection in Australia’s seventeen-man Ashes squad. Eight days later he and Jenny––charming, vivacious, unfailingly supportive––got married. Swing bowler Mick Malone was best man. Four weeks were all the newlyweds had together. Four and a half months in faraway England beckoned.
Wotton would have liked to be on that plane but there was no way. Six weeks he could get away with. To go to England he’d have to quit parliament. Len Maddocks went instead. In retrospect, Wotton is glad it wasn’t him. Overseeing the 1977 Ashes tour turned out to be the most joyless, thankless, pointless job any Australian cricket manager ever had. The signs were there in New Zealand, nothing too foreboding, nothing you could really point at, just a couple of shadowy presences, Austin Robertson and John Cornell, in the players’ ears and up their nostrils. David Lord, of Channel Seven and David Lord’s World of Cricket Monthly, noticed it too. Players kept ducking into an alcove beneath the Eden Park grandstand, where Robertson and Cornell were sitting. ‘They were disappearing two by two, like Noah’s ark,’ says Lord.
There was nothing so unusual about Robertson hovering around, Wotton supposed. Journalist, wasn’t he? Ex-Daily News man? The players all seemed to know him. Presumably he was writing something. More mysterious was the omnipresence of Cornell, an unmistakable figure even without the surf lifesaver’s cap he wore as dunderheaded Strop on The Paul Hogan Show. And another funny thing—although Wotton kept seeing Cornell, they were never actually introduced, never exchanged a word. ‘Every time I walked into a room,’ Wotton remembers, ‘Cornell was just leaving . . .’