The Australian Media

“The Australian press – publish and be damned.”

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore Senior Statesman

“The Press Gang, during the heat of the contest, boasted a fighting force of 30 strong. Some knew little about modern cricket tactics, but knew all about the collecting of news.”

Arthur Mailey, 1933

IN ANY country the media can play a crucial role in moulding public opinion. In the early 1930s, other than the “wireless”, which was still in relative infancy, the printed form was the only source of news, views and opinions. This was true of any country at that time, but was perhaps particularly so for a nation like Australia where a population of only six million occupied a land mass the size of the United States. Vast distances meant that only those within daily travelling reach of the coastal fringe cities could actually see for themselves cricketing developments as they unfolded. Everyone else was almost entirely reliant upon what they read in their newspapers and as sport was a national obsession, the local press had a ready-made and avid market for almost anything they cared to print.

The Australian press can be one of the most inflammatory and personally vicious in the world and although mainly broadsheet in size the style and quality is largely tabloid. Describing the Australian press in his book, The Lucky Country, Donald Horne wrote: “There are no ‘quality’ daily or Sunday newspapers of the standard of those in London, New York or western Europe, and no journals of record and opinion as independent, as strongly established, as well-staffed and as well provided with contributors as the ‘quality’ periodicals of Britain and western Europe.”

Mention was made in chapter three – Australia and Sport – of the national anger when Britain finished ahead of Australia at the Beijing Olympics of 2008. At the commencement of the 2012 Games in London the Australian media, both print and TV, revealed itself once more as parochial, adolescent and jingoistic and it went into overdrive to denigrate and belittle the event. Detailed attention was given to anything and everything that could be criticised. Anyone with a double-barrelled name was a target for derision, countless television interviews were conducted with people who’d had to move and so too anyone who had anything to complain about and yet again the media resurrected the word “Pommie” to refer to British medal winners.

In every event where both countries competed the Australian commentators concentrated on whether the Australian competitor could beat the British one. Beating Britain was not a Commonwealth attitude because enquiries made with South Africa, Canada and New Zealand revealed that Britain was not regarded as any different from any other competitor – it was an attitude that was entirely Australian. When the final medal count showed Britain at third and Australia even further down the medal table than four years previously at tenth an attempt was made to compare the medal count on a per capita basis, but this didn’t improve things either because Olympic funding on that basis showed that Australia spent two and a half times as much as Britain. A degree of national honour was finally salvaged by claiming that any success achieved at London was only because Britain had learnt from Sydney in 2000.

But a glimmer of maturity did appear later with an article in one of the national papers reading: “Far more worrying than a failure to win is the state of mind of those who think their self-worth depends on it. Perhaps what we really need following the 2012 Games is an Australian Institute for Getting Some Perspective.”

Jardine’s ghost must have chuckled quietly.

The question may well be asked: “Well, what about the British tabloids?” Their excesses are well documented but in Britain there are also the balancing factors of more measured nationals such as The Telegraph, The Times and The Guardian. There is no equivalent restraining influence in Australia. Even the revelations of phone tapping by the erstwhile News of the World were blamed by one local paper on the British public for reading it. This subtle and sometimes not so subtle denigration of Britain is a regular feature in the Australian media whose London correspondents seem to feel that it is their job to find aspects to belittle or criticise as if this will make anyone in Australia feel better.

Constant targets are “warm beer”, apparently ignorant of the fact that for hundreds of years such beer has been brewed all over Europe to be cellared at 56°F, and the amount of rain in England, again forgetting that it is regular rainfall that contributes to western Europe’s prosperity. That is not to say that there are no mature, responsible, balanced and experienced Australian journalists, there certainly are, but the overall tenor of the local press is broadly as described. Australia’s largest city, Sydney, for instance, is served by only two newspapers, both concentrating on sensationalist local news and since this is the position in the 21st century, it is not difficult to imagine the major part played by the local press in 1932/33 in whipping up sentiment in public and provoking cricket crowd reactions through a combination of distorted accounts and total falsehoods.

To a much larger extent than any of the events on the field it was press distortions and fictions that caused the rumpus that ensued. As far as the Australian Cricket Board was concerned this may well have been quite welcome because the false stories and exaggerations helped to create a controversy that swelled the cricketing crowds even further and provided a boost to the ACB coffers. On top of that, the Board, being made up almost entirely of businessmen, may well have contained members with press interests.

A number of the English team who later wrote books about the tour or made reference to it commented on the role played by the Australian press in 1932/33 in fomenting public feelings through false reporting, distortion and fabrication, and these must have had an effect. Writing of that tour in his book, The Fight for the Ashes 1932/33, Jack Hobbs said: “Great campaigning by the lower sections of the Press helped to mould opinion against England. One yellow-press heading I remember was ‘England expects every man to bowl ’em out or lay ’em out’. Leg-theory became a first class news stunt quite outstripping the mere play.”

Hobbs was a very mild-tempered man, not given to colourful hyperbole or exaggeration and therefore it is not be unreasonable to take his description of a section of the press as “yellow” as a clear description of irresponsible and inflammatory journalism.

The first press invention appeared in Perth, just as the tour had started. According to Harold Larwood, a reporter for the Sydney Sun, Claude Corbett, asked Jardine to help him get a “scoop” for his paper, an afternoon tabloid, by giving him MCC team selections each morning. Larwood says that Jardine frowned for a moment at the request and then, with a wry smile said: “What damned rot! We didn’t come here to provide scoops for yours or any other bally paper.” Corbett then rushed off a piece for his paper accusing Jardine of being very rude and totally uncooperative.

When discussing this trivial incident with Harold Larwood, he said that Jardine’s real reason was nothing more than tactical in that he was not going to assist the opposition by telling them what his team was going to be some time before the actual match. Larwood said that he did not for one moment think it was intended as a snub, but he agreed when Walter Hammond had said “they had it waiting for him before he set foot in Australia at all” and therefore every opportunity was going to be grabbed by the press for all it was worth in order to justify their attitude.

MCC were 20 minutes late in taking the field for the first match against Western Australia and once more this was reported by Corbett as a calculated insult, saying that Jardine had deliberately kept the Australian crowd waiting simply because he had gone shopping. Asked about this, Harold said he was in the team for the first match but he couldn’t recall exactly what the reason was – probably a combination of factors – but it certainly wasn’t because of some silly shopping expedition. However once more their own version of events was being concocted by the press.

When the team arrived in Adelaide Jardine asked to see Corbett, in the presence of Plum Warner, to complain about his distorted stories. Jardine told Corbett he was about to reply to a letter he had received from an English friend living in Australia and in view of what he had said he asked Corbett if he wished to add any comment of his own. This episode has already appeared in print but not the full details of the language used by Corbett. Talking it over with Harold Larwood later, he said that the actual words used by Corbett then were: “Yes, Mr Jardine. There is something you can add. You can tell him from me that my comment is this: You can go and get f****d.”

It would have been unthinkable for an English reporter to have used such language to any visiting captain but faced with that style of retort it is perhaps not surprising that from that moment on Jardine felt it safer to keep the Australian press at arm’s length. Was this though a case of the sensitivity to criticism observed by Jack Hobbs? Was Corbett’s original reaction just another example of an ordinary comment being mistakenly perceived as some sort of aspersion or was it deliberately distorted to add colour?

Such had been the consistent press exaggerations that according to Australian authors Coleman and Edward in their book, Eddie Gilbert, one Queensland newspaper wrote: “The all-important topic of the day is not the war between China and Japan, the disappearance of Hinkler (an Australian aviator), Smithy’s flight across the Tasman (another aviator), or even the Depression, it is the overwhelming public opinion against England’s shock tactics.”

Those were the days before television and television replays and cinema newsreels were in their infancy, therefore what appeared in the newspapers was the only interpretation and source of information for the general public. The man in the street reading his local paper had no way of knowing whether what was published was accurate or truthful and would quite naturally have taken anything printed as gospel.

Many of these distortions or inventions were aimed at Jardine himself. In his book My Cricket Reminiscences Maurice Tate speaks of a press report that said he and Jardine had been involved in such a vicious argument that Tate had thrown a glass of beer at Jardine, and as Tate said in his book, had he done anything so outrageous, he would have been packed off on the next boat home, and quite rightly so.

The English team congratulated Tate on his accuracy because at the time of the alleged incident Jardine and Tate were 60 miles apart. The press also alleged that Tate had bruised knuckles because he and Jardine had come to blows on the staircase of an Adelaide hotel over Tate’s omission from the Test sides, another fiction.

Tate was disappointed at not being selected, and quite naturally so, but anyone who knew Maurice Tate – and clearly the Australian press didn’t and the public couldn’t – would have known that such a reaction or behaviour would have been totally out of character.

Tate went on to say: “We were all pleased that the Tests were over. There has never been a series that occasioned so much bad blood, much of it I am sure, stirred up by the Australian press and aided by the failure of their idol, Don Bradman, whom they expected to get a hundred every innings.”

The Australian media was trying to sow dissension in MCC ranks and also to prove that such dissension existed. The problem faced by the MCC team was that there was no means by which to demonstrate that these inventions were just that – inventions – and therefore such fictions only added, as intended, to the anti-Jardine fuel being stoked up by the local press. Statements could be made to the press in response but these would only be written off as a predictable management contrivance.

When discussing this with Harold Larwood, his comment was that although Tate might have been disappointed, having him as a back-up did make some sense. “In Australia’s summer climate you wouldn’t want your front-line fast bowlers having to play in every match,” he said. “And having Maurice available meant they could have a rest from time to time.” Tate was then nearly 37 and couldn’t have been expected to be as sharp as he was eight years earlier when he had taken 38 Test wickets in the 1924/25 series. In fact, outside the Test matches, he bowled 97 overs during the tour, compared with Larwood’s 55 and Allen’s 80, so he was clearly of value to the team.

However even in the 1928/29 series Tate’s 17 Test wickets had only been achieved at the relatively high average of 40.7, so four years later a younger man might have been a better longer-term choice. In 1946/47 a similar fate was to befall Bill Voce, whose Test performance then was 0-160 and also Alec Bedser in 1954/55. They were both then about the same age as Tate. Although he had taken 39 wickets in the 1953 Ashes series, Bedser played in only the first Test under Hutton, who then relied on the pure speed of the younger Tyson and Statham.

Other local press distortions included statements such as: “A touring side from that country has never before been so much at war with itself, and Jardine’s culpable lack of popularity as a leader must be the subject of some enquiry.”

The team presentation to Jardine at the end of the tour must have been something of an embarrassment to the journalist who thought up that one but it was just swept under the carpet as an inconvenience. In fact this presentation does not appear to have been reported at all in the Australian press but that is hardly surprising because it would have weakened the picture they had been painting. Harold Larwood said that the consistent and widespread Australian press fiction of dissension among the English team reached such a level that the night before the Adelaide Test a team meeting was held at their hotel.

The press inventions had been clearly designed to create discord in the English ranks, persuading MCC management to put a stop to them and at last issue a statement clarifying the true position of total team loyalty behind Jardine. However, this not surprisingly was not enough for one paper, which still said: “It can be stated definitely that some members of the visiting team are in conflict with the official management notification.”

Another produced a headline reading “ENGLAND IS FORCED TO CALL A MEETING OF REASSURANCE – OH, WE’RE ALL SO NICE AND HAPPY”.

Before the Brisbane Test there were press placards outside the ground with a banner headline “JARDINE’S DISRUPTED TEAM”. Nothing was going to put a stop to the Australian press fictions, so therefore the wisest course was probably just to keep quiet rather than respond to each ensuing allegation with a denial which would then be portrayed by the press as yet another lie.

Gubby Allen’s letters are referred to elsewhere, and some of his descriptions of his own colleagues are derogatory, but to be fair to the man one must assume that there were aspects reported to his parents that were reasonably accurate. Shortly before the third Test, he wrote of the Australian press: “The newspapers and general public in this country, though they have all been exceedingly nice to me, are simply dreadful and far worse than in England. They never leave Douglas Jardine alone for a minute and they publish the most unfounded statements which are extremely libellous but, of course, one can do nothing about it.”

This account from Allen is borne out by the comments about the press made by Tate, Hobbs, Mailey and Larwood but interestingly this significant factor has not been mentioned in other books written about the 1932/33 series.

In spite of a succession of Ashes wins by Australia in England, even the English tabloids never stooped to such levels or contrived such inventions in an attempt to upset the opposition but it is a measure of the lengths to which the press will go in Australia. However, the people of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide or Brisbane would not have known this. It was all grist to the inventive mill of the media when Australia were losing, but would they have taken this tack had Australia been winning? It seems unlikely.

The Nawab of Pataudi played in only the first two Tests in 1932/33. Once more, the local media produced their own invention and reported that the reason he was dropped was solely because he had declined to move into the leg-trap, as requested by Jardine during the second Test. The same allegation was made by Bill O’Reilly in his foreword to Philip Derriman’s 1984 book, Bodyline, where he says that Pataudi was dropped for “disciplinary reasons”. Of course, such an interpretation makes good copy but it is some way off the mark. Much has been made in Australia of what Jardine said when Pataudi said he would rather not move into the leg-trap. Jardine’s wry comment was: “I see his highness is a conscientious objector,” but as Harold Larwood observed, Jardine had a very dry sense of humour and he thought there was nothing malicious in the remark.

In the first Test, Pataudi had made a century, 102, but it took six hours to achieve, an innings reported by one London newspaper as probably the worst century in Test match history. In the second Test he made just 15 and five, falling on both occasions to the spinners. The left-handed Paynter was brought in for the next three Tests, mainly to counter the leg-spin of O’Reilly. In three innings and almost entirely due to the one century Pataudi ended the series with an average of 40.66 and Paynter had a series average of 61.33. In career figures, Pataudi played in only six Tests, including three matches for India, and ended with 199 runs at an average of just 19.9. Paynter, on the other hand, played in 20 Test matches, scoring 1,540 runs at 59.23. Only one English batsman, Herbert Sutcliffe, has a higher average at 60.73.

When talking to Harold Larwood about the Australian contrivance he said that although Pataudi was a good bat in county cricket he reckoned he was not quite up to Test standard and that everyone in the team understood the real reason behind Paynter’s selection in his stead. Pataudi’s Test statistics bear out this opinion and the change appears to have been vindicated. There have been other cases of batsmen who thrived at county level but never seemed to be able to make it in the Test arena. Don Kenyon, for instance, was a consistently heavy scorer in the County Championship, with a total of over 37,000 runs and 74 centuries, and yet, in eight Test opportunities, his batting average was only 12. The same, more recently, has been the experience of Graeme Hick, scorer of 136 centuries, but with a Test average of 31.

Regarding the efforts by the Australian press to portray Jardine as unpopular, Harold Larwood said they had heard of reports that the team didn’t like Jardine’s insistence that fielders always had to return the ball to the wicketkeeper. First of all, he said, it wasn’t a rigid requirement and secondly as a general rule he felt it was a sensible idea anyway and he recalled the team felt the same way. Larwood’s memory appeared to be confirmed some six years after his death by Jack Pollard’s book, The Bradman Years, which was published in 2001, where Pollard makes the same allegations about both Pataudi and fielding; both were complete fiction.

In his book on the series, The Fight for the Ashes 1932/33, Jack Hobbs stated that the barracking was fostered by a considerable section of the press, which seemed to attack visiting teams more and more each tour and that it had assumed large and highly unpleasant proportions. Also, he said, and this is a point that did not appear to sink in with the Australian authorities, it was not in the interests of Australia that sensational news about their barrackers should be spread around the world. Hobbs went on to say in a fairly clear opinion: “I have a feeling that if Larwood and leg-theory had been Australian, the crowds there would have laughed and applauded had our men been discomforted.”

Arthur Mailey, himself an Australian journalist and Test bowler, referred to the local press as “The Press Gang”. He wrote of the craving for news becoming so intense that the Press Gang moved off in mass formation to the smaller country skirmishes, took up positions, arranged observation posts and went 50-50 with whatever booty was captured. He reported how the Press Gang “gloated” over the Chairman of Ballarat who in a luncheon speech welcoming the MCC team blurted out something about the impropriety of the bodyline attack and that even in the sleepy town of Toowoomba there occurred a press rumpus over “filthy lucre” when all that was involved was some minor accounting discrepancy between MCC and the local authorities.

Mailey said the Press Gang boasted a fighting force of about 30. Some knew little about modern cricket tactics but all knew about the collecting of news. The intensity of the campaign was such that during the third Test at Adelaide 130,000 words were wired and cabled to all parts of the world. In those days that was a considerable volume. Such were the press exaggerations that while they were in Adelaide Larwood and Voce each received a letter written from Melbourne threatening to blind them.

To such lengths did the Australian press go that Larwood said he knew of a newspaper having reported Richardson as saying that even if he took guard a foot outside the leg stump, Larwood still fired the ball straight at his body. He commented that this type of reporting was typical of what appeared in the Australian papers and he doubted whether Richardson himself had actually said such a thing. “It was rubbish,” he said, “because you only have to think for a moment – if you’re running in to bowl fast and you have a clear view of a set of stumps and the batsman is nowhere near them you’d be mad not to aim at clean-bowling him. And if he was taking guard a foot outside his leg stump then he would have to be actually standing about two feet outside. What possible reason could I have for bowling at him if he was standing so wide of the stumps? Certainly if I sensed a batsman was planning to move to leg at the last moment then I would shift the angle at him to prevent that luxury but nothing more than that.”

This explanation seems totally logical and rational – unless the intention was to contrive an additional distortion with which to inflame the situation. It seems any contortion would be invented with which to arouse popular resentment. However like many old chestnuts Richardson’s reported comment continues to be quoted as fact today – even by The Cricket Society who have recently repeated this outlandish idea.

In 1980 there was some doubt as to whether the Australian Olympic team would join the boycott of the Moscow Olympics. The darling of the Australian media was a 17-year-old swimming champion, Tracey Wickham. Eventually the team did attend but for totally separate and personal reasons young Tracey decided not to; her reasons were genuine and personal. She was immediately vilified and overnight went from Australian golden girl to Olympic villain; anything she said in attempted explanation was distorted and thrown back in her face. It was an experience from which she never really recovered, this wolf-pack savagery being provoked by the accusation that she had let the country down. Had she declined a Hollywood contract or an Oxford scholarship it would have been ignored but this was Australian sport and her action was portrayed by the press as treachery.

When Nick Faldo was the golfing world’s number one he was virtually ignored by the British press compared with the consistent acclaim heaped on Greg Norman by an adoring Australian media when he was in that position. Norman was Australian and the media made sure that his country basked in what they felt was reflected global prestige.

The Australian media are masters at contriving and distorting a situation and then whipping it up into a national furore. They are particularly adept at this if they feel they can target a prominent individual, a “Tall Poppy”. In 1972 the Australian media had Frank Sinatra in their sights due entirely to an innocuous tongue-in-cheek comment he made about the standards of some reporters during his tour of Australia. The local media immediately went into overdrive, distorting the comments as having been deliberately aimed at Australian journalists. Sinatra said he had been speaking in general terms and wasn’t talking about Australia at all. However nothing could quell the media bloodlust who then mobilised the Australian Council of Trade Unions to black-ban the remainder of his tour unless he apologised.

It was the most extraordinary exhibition of immature and parochial mob-rule by a media that had clearly been lying in wait to pounce on and exploit the slightest pretext. The whole situation eventually fizzled out but it was a graphic example of the manner in which the Australian media can behave. Australia was then more mature by some 40 years but it was the same tactic used on Jardine, an innocuous comment was distorted and reported as an anti-Australian slight which is very much what Jack Hobbs had described in 1933.

The Sinatra furore did not pass unnoticed overseas. Helen Reddy, an Australian singer who had then achieved some global fame, voiced her embarrassment when she appeared on Johnnie Carson’s The Tonight Show in Los Angeles. Reddy had never met Sinatra but she said she was ashamed of the “gutter standards in journalism that are giving Australia a bad reputation”. The next day she received a dozen yellow roses from Sinatra with a note saying: “If anyone ever hits you, call me.” The average Australian was not concerned over this petty issue for the International Sinatra Society was itself headquartered in Melbourne; it was purely and simply a media beat-up.

That this level of press abuse could still occur even 40 years later gives some measure of what Jardine was up against in 1932/33. As if to attempt to justify their earlier fabrication even now the Australian press will not give up on Sinatra, articles regularly appearing that denigrate or belittle a man the rest of the world regards as an iconic 20th century entertainer. Douglas Jardine and Frank Sinatra, two entirely different men in totally separate fields, two men who could make innocuous remarks anywhere in the world without comment – except in Australia. Extrapolate the manner in which a trivial issue is distorted and exaggerated to produce national outrage (and sell papers) and then the furore created over leg-theory comes into clearer perspective.

Anything different or unable to be understood is likely to be a target for the Australian press. In the early 1990s the Malaysian High Commissioner to Australia had an official title that included his own plus his father’s Malaysian honorifics. This produced a full title of some six or seven words, a perfectly normal custom in that country. However, when a letter from the High Commissioner explaining some point appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the paper soon published a reader’s letter that sneered and poured scorn on anyone with a name of such length, saying that nobody with that sort of title could be taken seriously. There will always be ignorant, insular people in any country, and the writer of the letter concerned probably thought he was being funny. But the remarkable aspect of that particular issue was that the Sydney Morning Herald felt the letter to be worthy of publication. It says something about the philosophy of the newspaper that it did so without apparent thought for the gratuitous insult to a neighbouring Asian country and a gentle Malay culture going back a thousand years.

Another example of the lengths to which the media will go involved the 2005 jailing in Indonesia of an Australian woman convicted of drug running. This provoked the most furious and intemperate reaction in the media with one radio station likening the brown-skinned Indonesian President and judges to banana-eating apes. This comment evoked barely a ripple in Australia but it was an example of what Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew calls this short-sighted and parochial mentality of “publish and be damned”. Such ham-fisted comments explain why Australia’s relations with their Asian neighbours have never been smooth. Government and national media comments that might be supported at the bar of the local rugby league club reverberate around the sensitive cultures of Asia causing offence that could easily be avoided with a little more consideration and subtlety.

The Bradman mantra continues even today. In 2003 an article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald saying that Bradman gave England an everlasting inferiority complex. The rationale for this theory was that public schools such as Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Marlborough were totally obsessed with batting because it was only through batting that a gentleman could reveal his true character and thus the innate superiority of English culture throughout the world. According to this theory, boys at British public schools were taught how to bat, but not how to bowl, because the latter was not considered necessary for a gentleman.

The article went on to say that the English felt that “no batsman could consistently score runs with just untutored physical talent”. Such an idea ignored the untutored, English, physical talent of cricketers such as Hobbs, Woolley, Hendren, Mead, Hammond or Sutcliffe with not a public school education among them, who somehow managed to total some 333,000 runs at an average of 50. That batting should require more coaching attention than bowling is perfectly logical and is merely because the majority of batting strokes are not natural for most people as they have to be taught and learned through practice. The natural stroke for any boy when first handed a bat is to grip it like an axe and play a baseball slog in the direction of mid-wicket. Bowling is quite different and can be picked up by an individual with reasonable talent far more easily without the guidance of a coach, even though it requires practice to achieve real skill. The difference between learning the two is really just as simple as that.

The article alleged the English had felt incredibly humiliated by Bradman because he was a batsman and not merely a bowler. It was a level of thought that demonstrated the apparent need to consistently measure everything in the world in terms of beating England. It also again revealed once more the Australian attitude that defeat in itself is humiliating and showed the inability to understand let alone accept that England did not feel humiliated by Bradman. The truth was that the English cricket crowds who watched his mammoth run-making were not resentful but were amazed and applauded his feats as would any cricket crowd in Australia. Had Bradman been English then Australia might well have felt humiliated, but that is a rather different thing.

Sledging is actually praised in the Australian press as being an Australian tradition. As in the case of the barracker perhaps this should come as no surprise given the example set by politicians and the language and personal insults that are regularly hurled across the chambers of Federal and State parliaments. Political questions are not asked, they are bellowed and the higher the decibel level the greater the perceived effect. Grudging concession that sledging does occur might have been expected, but a 2005 editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald stated: “In the gentlemen’s game a capacity for endless obscenity gives you the edge. Australia’s domination of world cricket has been built, in part, on a fearsome capacity for saying rude things to opponents’ faces. People who don’t like sledging should turn a deaf ear.”

The editorial continued to state that those who complain have no respect for tradition and it finished with the words: “If you don’t like it, then don’t listen.”

Once again a spade is a spade attitude, and if you don’t like it, well then p**s off.

When a relatively unknown spinner, Michael Beer, was picked by Australia for the fifth Test of the 2010/11 series, The Australian stated that little was known of his bowling but he was reputed to be a “very effective sledger”. Beer was not a success as a bowler and his vocabulary was no asset either because Australia lost the Test but it is a crippling comment on a culture that the ability to be offensive is thought to be an asset worth mentioning.

Rather than taking pride in what was right, the driving rationale was merely an instinct for what had been successful. It seemed to say: “We’ll use any tactic we can if it helps us win.” Australian success with this tactic was further celebrated in a recent Sydney Morning Herald article by Australian author Thomas Keneally who sneered at what he described as England’s “gentlemanly outrage over sledging”. In fact there is not a cricketing country in the world that has agreed with the Australian tactic but most have felt they have to fight fire with fire and have responded in like fashion. It would appear that anything even vaguely perceived as “gentlemanly” is regarded as affected and lacking in masculinity and is the target of sneering comment, so perhaps Keneally’s jibe should come as no surprise for sneering at anything English is a popular pastime of the Australian press.

In modern parlance the word gentlemanly is generally accepted as meaning civilised, courteous, obliging and well-mannered, but in some quarters it still appears to be regarded as snobbish and effete and is therefore, in itself, “un-Australian”. This attitude may explain the style of Thomson’s rejection of Cowdrey’s proffered hand as described in the second chapter.

This rationalising of anything that assists an Australian success came back to bite them in 1947 when Indian spinner Vinoo Mankad ran out Australian opening batsman Bill Brown, when Brown as the non-striker was backing up too far. This was in a match against an Australian XI and even though Mankad had earlier warned Brown the Australian press was outraged at such an unsportsman-like action. Press fury was intensified even further when Mankad did the same thing to Brown a month later in the second Test and they concocted the expression to be “Mankaded”. Some years later Bradman stated that Mankad had been quite within the rules of cricket in his actions but at the time he made no comment. The boot was on the other foot in 1979 when Australian bowler Alan Hurst ran out Pakistani batsman Sikander Bakht in similar fashion but in that instance the press remained remarkably quiet. By comparison, having invented the words “bodyline” and “Mankaded” no similar expression such as being “Chappelled” was coined for bowling a ball along the ground; maybe different rules applied.

To demonstrate the colour of the Australian press we need look no further than the September 2006 death of Australian Steve Irwin. Irwin had achieved a small degree of global exposure through a circus-like act whereby he wrestled with crocodiles and snakes and generally exposed himself to peril for the benefit of the cameras. He finally went too far in one of his escapades and when swimming within a couple of feet of a stingray was killed by its barb. Almost the whole of Australia went into national mourning, and the Queensland Government offered a state funeral (which his widow was wise enough to decline). However, when Australian but England-based feminist and social commentator Germaine Greer put matters into a more balanced perspective in an article in The Guardian she was subjected to the most vicious attack in The Australian, where she was described as “a bitch-slapping, poorly sketched caricature of a harridan, an unwashed and wretched bag-lady and a childless feral hag”.

Just what had provoked such intemperate fury by The Australian, the country’s only national newspaper? The paper had likened Irwin’s death to the passing of John F Kennedy or Princess Diana, which was why Greer had suggested there had been a degree of over-reaction. Quite simply Irwin had achieved some world attention and Australia and the media in particular had basked in the reflected superficial glamour of his performances and reputation. Greer had not actually criticised Irwin, but she had portrayed the Australian response from a detached balanced standpoint and had committed the cardinal sin of criticising the country’s reaction. Like Bradman, Irwin had been elevated to iconic, saint-like status, and because of this she had brought down on herself a torrent of offensive language.

As Jack Fingleton wrote in 1946: “It can be of no lasting good to any game if an individual is thought to be the greater. Did it mean that Bradman, by his huge scores, by his consistency in producing century after century, had dulled the cricket appetite of the Australian crowds for anybody else than Bradman?”

It was for nothing more than such a trivial transgression that Greer was targeted in this manner in 2006, but the treatment she received from the Australian press in the 21st century does put into an understandable perspective the national reaction some 70 years earlier when Bradman was brought down to earth.

Embarrassed by the inaccuracy of their early season gloating at the prospect of victory in the coming Ashes series, the expression “bodyline” was itself concocted by the Australian press to deflect attention away from their earlier predictions. So let us have a look at leg-theory and/or bodyline from a technical standpoint and see just what the fracas was all about.