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On Monday 9 February 1970, Glenn Donald McGrath, destined to be cricket’s most successful fast bowler, arrived in the world. It was a time of insufferable heat in the New South Wales outback, and a time of darkness for Bill Lawry’s Australian team, which was touring South Africa. The future pace bowler should probably have been kicking and wailing. Instead Bev noted her son – born with his head resting upon his arm – appeared to be at peace with the world. In later years McGrath would joke that his arm being positioned behind his head at birth was a sign he was born ready to bowl.
‘He was a good baby, all my three children were, so I was pretty lucky in that respect,’ Bev says. ‘I was only 20-and-a-half when I had Glenn and while I was fairly young, I never regretted it because Glenn was the only one of my three kids my father, Don, saw before he died, so that was special. He was a proud grandfather, too. My dad loved cricket and while he didn’t see what Glenn grew up to become because he died before Glenn turned two, it was really good he got to spend that time with him.’
Kevin McGrath, a hard-working 24-year-old share farmer, was sweating as he paced up and down the waiting room at the Dubbo Base Hospital. He wasn’t perspiring from nerves at the prospect of the new responsibilities that awaited him. He was excited about becoming a father. Instead he was sweating buckets because the state’s far west was gripped by a fierce heatwave, and even though the hospital’s ceiling fans were at full bore, they couldn’t shift the heat that hung over the room like a thermal blanket. The unrelenting nature of the heat forced many in Dubbo to desert their homes at night to try to find some relief – and sleep – on their front lawns.
But Bev defied the heat to remain relaxed through the final stages of her pregnancy. Indeed, before going to the hospital at midnight for the birth, she’d whiled away the hours by playing a game of quoits against Don in the back yard of his house in town.
Kevin and Don were filled with anticipation when they laid their eyes on the baby boy for the very first time.
‘It wasn’t like it is today because fathers weren’t allowed in the delivery room,’ says Kevin. ‘So I waited outside with Bev’s father and I remember feeling very excited about what was happening. We saw all the babies lined up in the nursery and Don and I looked at them lying in their cribs and not knowing which one was Glenn. We were saying, “Oh that’s a nice baby. There’s a nice baby.” We knew the nurse in there and she waved to us and showed us where Glenn was. He was on his own away from the rest. Who knows, he must’ve been annoying the other babies just like he used to do the other cricketers!
‘The nurse wheeled him over to the window, Bev’s father and I looked at the little fella, then we looked at each other, then we looked back at the little baby, and I can still remember Don saying, “My, he looks like a skinned rabbit!” His legs and arms were that skinny! As it turned out he grew into “Pigeon” as a cricketer because of those skinny legs.’
While their son’s arrival was the most significant event to have occurred in the couple’s young lives, the world didn’t stop that day, as the local paper – The Daily Liberal – duly noted. McGrath was born as a total fire ban was enforced throughout the region. As if to emphasise the stupidity of ignoring the warning, the paper ran on its front page a photograph of a Jubilee Street housing commission house that was razed in the early hours of the previous Saturday morning. Family loses possessions in house – two hurt, screamed the headline.
The Liberal also reported that a major retail company planned to open a store in Tralbagar Street, and the editorial welcomed the promise of more jobs and added prosperity in the area. A local grazier was bound for India as a member of a three-man team to develop a sheep-breeding program there. Two 18-yearolds hooked a 45-pound cod while drifting down the Macquarie River in their small boat. The battle that was described could have been lifted from the pages of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. A local identity declared the whopper to be the biggest he’d seen in his 40-odd years of fishing the local rivers and estuaries.
There was plenty for The Daily Liberal to say about the Far West Cricket Council’s competition: Dubbo pace bowler Bruce Warwick had been selected to play for Country Firsts against City at the SCG; minor premiers Nyngan had been bundled out of the finals series by Gilgandra; and the Rugby Union XI had been hammered by Paramount. Kevin McGrath’s cousins Graham and Eric Shanks were mentioned after Graham belted 81 for South Dubbo against Coalbaggie and Eric scored 60 before being run out.
While Bev lovingly nursed her newborn child, Bill Lawry’s Australians were reeling after the third day of the Second Test against the Springboks in South Africa. The AAP-Reuters cable, published in The Daily Liberal, pulled no punches:
‘Humiliated and humbled, Australia can only look to Durban’s cloudy skies to save them from an innings defeat at the hands of the Springboks today. The Australians lost their last six wickets for the addition of only 109 and were all out for 157. It was the fifth successive time that they had failed to top 200 in the first innings of a Test against South Africa.’
The Australians, ordered to follow on, languished 365 runs behind the home team’s massive total of 9 (declared) for 622, thanks to local heroes Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards, who belted 274 and 140 respectively. All hope of restoring pride in Australia’s baggy green cap rested upon the shoulders – and nerve – of Keith Stackpole (who’d compiled 55 runs) and Doug Walters (8) before rain stopped play. A chance meeting with Walters 18 years later would be life-changing for McGrath, but meanwhile The Daily Liberal’s correspondent wasn’t at all confident of a rousing, backs-to-the-wall victory. He finished his report on an ominous note: ‘Unless the rain gods answer the Australian prayers it may well be over before tea.’
Glenn McGrath, the skinned rabbit, was the latest of a proud line of Australian pioneers, soldiers, farmers and athletes. The McGrath roots stretched back to Francis McGrath, who farewelled his native Ireland 118 years before Glenn’s birth to migrate to the new world – New South Wales – aboard the ship Irene. A free settler, Francis paid £3 10s for his family to make the long journey. On his disembarkment at Port Jackson on 16 October 1852, a customs officer noted that Francis was 38, a Catholic, literate and had worked previously as a butler.
Rather than remain in Sydney, Francis and his family headed west, travelling across the Blue Mountains in search of opportunity. In 1864 he was made postmaster of Merendee, a flyspeck on the map between the bigger settlements of Mudgee and Wellington. Francis held that respected position until his retirement in 1882, when he endorsed his granddaughter to look after the Royal Mail. The founding father of the McGrath clan in the New South Wales outback died a year later after ‘falling over a precipice’.
One of Francis’ grandsons, known as Jim, married Rose McLauchlan and bought a property named Stanhope near Cooyal, a bumpy 22-kilometre horse-and-buggy ride from Mudgee. While isolated, Cooyal had a grocery store, a hotel, a post office, two churches, a dance hall, a cheese factory and a butcher’s shop. Here Jim and Rose raised crops and three children, including Glenn’s grandfather, Carlyle, born in 1915 and known as Lyle. The family grew fruit and Jim built himself a blacksmith’s shed at the back of the house. (Jim’s niece Muriel M. Marks recalls his forge and bellows in her 1987 book Cooyal Stories.)
The family was devastated in 1921 when Jim died of Spanish Flu during a trip to Sydney aged only 37. He was one of millions of people worldwide to die from the strain of influenza which had been brought to Australia by soldiers returning from the battlefields of World War One.
Jim McGrath was buried in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery, the world’s largest cemetery in the nineteenth century. The final resting place for over 600,000 souls, it covers 300 hectares, the size of modern Sydney’s central business district. Not long after his retirement from Test cricket in 2007, McGrath made a pilgrimage to Rookwood to search for his great-grandfather Jim’s burial site. While he found the area, it was overgrown with thick weeds and ancient shrubs. There were no headstones, making it impossible to identify his ancestor’s final resting place.
For McGrath, finding the exact position of his great-grandfather’s burial is important. ‘I want to find the plot,’ he says. ‘It’s important because it’s to do with my roots, my sense of belonging and my heritage. That is becoming even more important to me as I get older.’
With the help of relatives, Rose McGrath continued to run the property. But the pile of rocks Jim had intended to use for the foundations of a new home on the sunny side of their property became her stones of sadness. The widow eventually found it too difficult to live alone and, after selling Stanhope to a relative, she relocated to Dubbo to be closer to her sister and to provide her three children with a high-school education. In 1943, Rose’s son Lyle joined the Australian army as part of the 209 Light Aid detachment. Lance Corporal McGrath saw action against the Japanese in the south-west Pacific theatre of war. The only Anzac Day story Glenn ever heard his quietly spoken grandfather recall was of the time he was at sea and the ship he was on took a direct hit from a torpedo. Lyle married Vera Griffiths in 1944 and they had two sons, Kevin and Malcolm (known as Malc).
Glenn always remembers ‘Grandad McGrath’ out on the farm. ‘He was a kindly man who liked to smoke his pipe. When I was little I tried to help him do things,’ he says. ‘There’s a photo of me as a toddler trying to change a tyre. He died in 2000 when I was playing English county cricket for Worcester.’
Lyle’s wife, Vera, was the boss of the family – ‘a real matriarch’, as her eldest grandson recalls. Now aged 93, she unfortunately suffers from Alzheimer’s.
Bev’s family, the Watts, were ‘good breeders’. Glenn’s great-grandfather James fathered 17 children. His grandmother Marjorie Hawke was one of 16. Bev’s father was christened Baden Powell Watts, but later changed his name to Albert Donald Watts – incorporating the name of his idol, Donald Bradman – after copping too much stick from his army buddies for being named after the bloke who founded the Boy Scout movement. Don volunteered for active service during World War Two and endured horrific conditions in Papua New Guinea, transporting supplies and ammunition as a member of the 3 Australian Pack (Horse) Transport Company. After suffering repeated bouts of dengue fever and malaria, which was reputed to have killed more diggers in the tropics than the enemy’s bombs and bullets, he gained an honourable discharge in 1944.
‘He’d suffer from bouts of malaria when we were kids, because it comes back,’ Bev remembers. ‘We really didn’t know how bad it was for him until after he died. One thing about Dad was he didn’t complain much.’
One of Bev’s lasting memories of her father is of his passion for gardening. His tomato plants grew close to 20 feet high. ‘You’d have to climb up on a ladder to get them and one slice was big enough to fill a dinner plate. I’ve never seen anything like them,’ says Bev proudly. (She thinks her father’s secret to growing the best tomatoes in the Western Districts might have been the thick trail of sugar he’d pile in the furrow as he planted the seeds.)
When Glenn was ten, his grandmother Marjorie suffered a stroke. He vividly recalls how this event dramatically altered the family structure in the course of a single school day: ‘I was in Year 5 and I remember walking out of the classroom and getting picked up. My grandmother had suffered a stroke and I remember how upset everyone was. She lived for another 23 years and it wasn’t easy for her. That kind of thing makes an impression on you, especially when you’re only a kid.’
Back at Dubbo Hospital that hot February day in 1970, Kevin looked on proudly as Bev cradled her newborn son in her arms. The only promises they could make Glenn on that first, special day were simple: he’d be loved and he’d be well cared for. These were promises they kept, but McGrath knows it wasn’t always easy for them. He was a farmer’s son, and that meant struggle and hardship were as certain as drought and flood.