The Best Australian Essays 2014 (14 page)

Subdivision began in the '70s and ‘living on acres' ceased. The five-acre blocks were cut up into quarter-acre lots. Houses covered the paddocks and nursery gardens – huge houses built right to the boundaries, gabled and turreted, Tudor and Californian and Spanish Mission in speckled chocolate or blond textured brick with triple garages and short driveways lined with tiny box hedges and white standard roses. Even the topography changed – slopes were flattened, small hills constructed. The creek disappeared which once emerged at the first bend of Oratava Avenue and wandered across Harrington's paddocks, accompanied on its winding course by arum lilies like a dwindling line of geese, to end in the maidenhair-fringed pool in our bottom paddock.

It is very easy to recast this life as idyllic, to see simplicity and moderation where there was just a lack of alternatives. We, and any of our neighbours, would instantly have abandoned our acres and our integrities to live in one of these new palaces. The small houses on the big blocks of the past were not ‘tastefully' simple compared to the ‘tasteless' opulence of these big houses on small blocks. In Oratava Avenue in the '40s, taste didn't exist because choice didn't exist. What you had was the same as what everybody else had, and anything ‘special' – embroidered tray cloths, mulga wood pipe stands, matching pairs of oval paintings of Scottish highland scenes – was not chosen but had been handed down in the family.

This sameness in possessions corresponded to a quality of character all the more pervasive for being unspoken. I think I would call it fellow feeling – cooler than compassion, warmer than justice, and applicable to the trivialities of daily life in a way that those more ambitious ideals are not. The essence of this fellow feeling was simply that what you expected for and from yourself was not particularly different from what you expected from and for others. No two ways about it.

The Unremembered Six

Christian Ryan

Some school semester in 1969 or '70 – it was spring – a hazel-eyed boy under the influence of a particular teacher, a Mr Briggs, could feel his future floating out in front of him, uncertainly, like the insects. He thought about following the insects. The west Kent commuter town where he went to school was a place of lakes, deer, old trees and valleys. Insects were what engrossed the boy. He liked listening to Mr Briggs talk about them. So many insects, anywhere you look – what makes each of them so interesting? How is it that wherever there is a habitat, they'll find a way of living? He discovered and read a book about animal behaviour, and his curiosity grew. He sensed he could be happy in that future, that world, it made him excited, and it was an outdoors world. But a second world – and this world, the way the boy carried himself in it, was very much an interior world – was also just beginning to flicker at him. That was the spring he got picked in the school's first XI.

Cricket is a game played on a dirt pitch and grass. But it exists on the wind – the space, a kind of ether, between the ball/stroke that's just happened and those about to happen next, and the balls just bowled or about to be bowled and strokes executed or awaiting execution in all the games of cricket being played somewhere simultaneously of whatever duration, overs-span, age level, seriousness, etc., and also, most tantalising, every ball or stroke ever. Twenty-five seconds later another one comes along. But the ball/stroke that's gone doesn't actually go anywhere. The ball/ stroke hovers. Nearly always, it is hovering in a place most people cannot locate, and the people who potentially could locate it – inside their memory, imagination, in a newspaper report or book, on YouTube – are at that moment not doing so. But it is still there, somewhere. Ted Dexter once drove Tom Veivers for six during a tour game at the MCG. No footage exists. Yet a handful of the still-living recall it, and consider it maybe the finest stroke ever struck in Melbourne. One, Bill Lawry, told Jonathan Agnew last December that Dexter's drive, ‘went halfway up the sightscreen, it was just flat, I was at mid-off and it could have killed me, a tremendous strike of the ball'.

The Lawry–Agnew podcast is currently google-able. Probably soon it will get dragged down, and definitely Lawry and the others who were present will someday die, and years may fly by without a single person giving a second's pause to dwell on what happened that day when Tom Veivers bowled, but even then the moment will be forever safe, forever there, this sentence's existence marginally increasing the prospect of a future kid or grown-up enjoying the sudden exhilarating feeling of that drive of Ted Dexter's popping into their head. What, though, of the ball/stroke that is unfilmed, unwritten of, untalked about, and unremembered by anyone who was there? What then?

One afternoon Chris Tavaré hit a six.

It happened in a three-day match in Newcastle, Australia, where the sky was bright and Northern New South Wales won the toss and made 163. Curator Ken Stace's pitch at the No. 1 Sports Ground was flat and good, so 163 was below-par and anticlimactic, especially as cluey judges reckoned that of all the Northern NSW line-ups ever assembled this lot had balance, experience and the best shot yet at knocking over a touring England side. They had extra incentive, too. A pre-game function was held at Newcastle City Hall and whoever did the invitation list forgot one team. The locals downed sullen beers among themselves instead that night. Late the next night, after the disaster of 163 – top score was Rick McCosker's 53, out hooking the last ball before lunch – a telephone rang at the Travelodge Motel. It was Kent calling to tell Tavaré he'd been appointed the county's new captain.

So next day, the day after his twenty-eighth birthday, walking out to bat, it is possible Tavaré felt in a place of some kind of serenity. Loose soil on the outfield, the result of recent topdressing, had disappeared after a morning's gentle mowing. Nearly 1600 spectators, paying two dollars a head, were in. Tavaré would have noticed the gasometers across the street – evocative of The Oval, London. Or did the parked cars sidled up against sections of the boundary remind him of the outground at Folkestone, Cheriton Road, scene of a 42 and a 0 he'd made two months before?

In Newcastle some people watched from their car seats. And Tavaré batted, seatbelt on. He and opening partner Graeme Fowler lasted nearly two hours together at a scoring rate of 1-point-squirt-all per over.

Batting's a chew-a-person's-insides-up ordeal. It asks that you be dominant while requiring you make yourself vulnerable – the ball, object of your downfall, rests in the bowler's hands and is outlawed from touching yours. Your goal is twofold: to survive and score runs. Routinely Tavaré made it onefold, and in this way he's in a category of not much more than one. Invincible in defence, uninterested in scoring, he was – if we apply the twofold test – a half-batsman, with the aura of an anti-batsman. Once, Tavaré spent 67 minutes on 0. Later, same innings, he spent 60 minutes on 24, first-class cricket's only batsman to have endured a pair of scoreless hours in the one innings. Adding to the burying-my-goldfish feel, he did it at HQ, the Home of Cricket, Lord's: like flatulence in the front aisle at church. I mentioned Tavaré being a one-man category – unlike the other blockers and stonewallers who clog cricket's scorebooks, and as distinct from the rearguard specialists, the human barnacles, the many vexing pissants (e.g. Geoff Boycott, who in some parallel timeless Test universe is still putting on 92 for the second wicket with Tavaré in Mumbai); unlike them, Tav, perversely, was so unrelentingly boring and so predictable in his boringness that it became not at all boring. It became – something other. This was a creepy concept to try bending your mind around, sitting on the couch, TV switched to the cricket. You could not watch. You could not look away. Your head was filled with Tavaré. And it was filled with a stack of issues and stuff totally unconnected to Tavaré. Peering at Tavaré could have the effect, unusually, of making a person feel as if they were peering in on oneself.

Naturally, only a cricket watcher whose own insides were reasonably chewed up would react that way to Tavaré. In Newcastle, Fowler was caught at short leg, David Gower came in, and he and Tavaré added 90, Tavaré's contribution being 30 – and at some point during their partnership the crowd started hooting.

‘Yeah, I remember, maybe,' says Michael Hill, Northern NSW's captain that day, ‘there was some hooting. But look, we played Rest of the World in 1972 and Graeme Pollock and Sunil Gavaskar added about a hundred after lunch, in even time, perfect batting, beautiful batting. They got hooted because the ball kept going along the ground. Very tough judges in Newcastle.' Also, at an indeterminate hour, possibly post-hooting, and certainly after the morning's batting was done and he'd squeezed in some side-practice, England's captain Bob Willis returned to the Travelodge to answer letters. Willis was resting this match. Gower stood in. And the captain on tour always has bags of incoming correspondence to keep up with.

There's a little-seen Patrick Eagar photo of Tavaré – different innings, same summer, a fast bowler is about to let fly. It is a rearview landscape shot. It is, to the uninitiated, a photo not of Tavaré but of four slips and two gully fielders, crouching chevron-style not arc-style, a mildly unusual geometric formation which is why Eagar has taken it from behind. But if you are a Tavaré person it is to Tavaré your eyes cling. In the far left corner of the frame, he is waiting on the crease. Dangling exactly vertical is his bat. That's not how the textbook teaches you to do it. In the same vertical line, going up, are his weirdly long forearms, his above-the-elbow region, and the back of his helmeted head. Textbook-wise, he should be approximating a back-to-front question mark, but he's an exclamation mark minus the dot, an unbent line – with some air of impermanence, as if he has just floated into shot, and is tilting, tipping … Tavaré! This is what stills photography can do to the stillest batsman the game has known. It can render him so still he starts sliding backwards. I can't look at the photo without feeling unsettled and downhearted, and I don't think that's right and I don't think Eagar intended it that way. In another photo – just a grainy square in a magazine, no photo credit, badly cropped, the bat's sawn off at the top – Tavaré is essaying a drive: bareheaded, aggressive, everything's flowing, classical. And I don't know which of the photos, unless it's neither of the photos, is playing tricks.

After dealing with the ball, each ball, he would wander halfway to square-leg, head bowed. Whether he was relieved to have survived the last ball or gathering strength for the next, no one was sure, and nothing showed on his thin face. Cheekbones jutted out of the gauntness; his eyes seemed deep-set in their sockets. When people picture him now, the thing they are picturing is often that walk towards square-leg, which was not a tic he started off with but something that developed many years into his career, by which time he'd been to Oxford and completed a zoology degree.

He still thought about the insects – how, wherever there is a habitat, they'll find a way of living.

*

Perth, in the summer that straddled 1977 and '78, was a yellow-lit city of flies, highways, the Channel 9 Appealathon, sand, Hungry Jack's signs, a sort of LA of Australia running at quarter speed, where ambition is soaked up in sunscreen and washed off in the shower block afterwards, and where Tavaré came to bat at number three for the University Cricket Club. He was well loved by teammates. At least three still see and keep in touch with him.

Greg Davies – ‘Square of the wicket: fantastic. Particularly on the off side. Tavs rarely let anything short get past him.'

Leigh Robinson – ‘Chris was a stylish batsman. Seemed to be getting out caught behind. But he had lots of shots. Hit the ball quite hard.'

Colin Penter, captain – ‘A dashing player. Very strong off the front foot. Strong cutter. Wasn't a big hooker. Still strong through the leg-side, though, off pads …'

He averaged 14 in October, 13 throughout November, 6.75 in February and 10 in March. In between he collected a 68 at James Oval in his only innings all January. On the last day of 1977 he made 125 at Cresswell Park, hammering the Claremont–Cottesloe bowlers in an elegant and brilliant exhibition that included a two-hour partnership of 162 runs with Greg Davies, who nonetheless can't quite place it.

*

Was it really an urge to catch up on his letter writing that drove Bob Willis back to the Newcastle Travelodge? Watching Tavaré bat can have been no easier for those who knew him than it was for us, who could only guess at him. A fortnight later Tavaré assembled 98 runs across nine hours, fifty-three minutes and two innings at the WACA, and Willis in his tour diary painted the dressing-room scene thus: ‘Two of the side lying on benches, not watching the game at all, and two more intent on the television. Some were reading or playing cards.'

‘I do enjoy watching Tav bat,' Willis himself would say to Mike Brearley in earlier times. Something unbearable, beautiful, painful – loveable – wraps round the cricketer who plays his own way, even if it is a closed-off way. Their vulnerability is palpable. So much is on show, and at stake – nothing less than a likeness of them. If Tavaré was batting, that meant Willis's grateful bowling knees were getting some sorely needed sleep. But even for Willis this was a delicately balanced thing. The phenomenon of Tavaré setting himself at the crease, like a tree's roots expanding, freed the batsmen around him to play their strokes, or else it pressured them into having to overplay too many strokes, no one could predict or tell which and it changed on an innings-to-innings basis. And yet Ian Botham would say: ‘I like batting with Tav.'

Botham was next man in – ‘best player England has produced since Dr WG Grace,' shouted the
Newcastle Herald,
advising its readers to flock to the ground. Immediately Botham got away with a backward sweep and a heave, which made his Ashes miracles of 1981 feel close. An off break came down, and he drove and edged it to slip.

Accompanying Tavaré the whole circumference of Australia was his wife Vanessa, and he was happier with her nearby, although aeroplane tickets were pricey and a player's tour fee modest. Also, she had phobias about flying – for which she required sedation – and heights as well. And this tour of Australia consisted of twenty-five flights in 127 days, from one downtown hotel to the next, most of them taller than the Newcastle Travelodge. It was hard on her, worried him. Getting to Newcastle alone had involved a coach, a twenty-seater plane, then another coach. Test cricket – the seconds between those heavyfooted walks towards square-leg – was strain enough.

‘Unsmiling,' remembers Bob Holland. ‘Serious. Tall. He played with a straight, dead bat, or let balls go, and there was no reaction to any sledging, no annoyance, his character did not change.' Holland, joined by the captain Hill and Colts offie Steve Hatherell, was part of a Northern NSW spin trio against Tavaré. A big-breaking, back-spinning leggie, Holland played eleven Tests for Australia, and first grade till he was fifty-two, and in his life bowled to Sobers, Gavaskar, Viv, the Chappells, but never another like Tavaré. ‘Can't think of another one. With first-class cricketers, when they got half an opportunity to attack, they usually did. He wasn't like that. He would wait and wait and wait.'

Holland's spin partner Hill had encountered English occupiers before: John Edrich, Geoff Boycott. Tavaré was something unique. ‘But closer to Edrich than to Boycott because Boycott was much more technically perfect.'

In Newcastle, a breeze fluttered across the ground and Tavaré called for a sweater. ‘Hit the fucking ball,' hollered a spectator, ‘and you'll keep yourself warm.'

Alien-seeming to some Australians, this was a man who donned a headscarf, pinafore and attended the England touring squad's Christmas Day dress-up lunch as Hilda Ogden from Coronation Street. Quintessentially English was another interpretation: he did the
Telegraph
crossword, roast beef was his favourite food, and the place he best liked to play cricket was The Parks in Oxford. He mixed well with others but was early to pyjamas and bed. Not a big drinker, he'd drink a bit. Shirts, not always quite figure-fitting, were perfectly ironed. The tour social committee fined him, affectionately, for braininess. In interviews it was as if he had a cutting and brilliant riposte that would put everyone on the floor but something was holding him back from using it. And so he'd give the predictable answer in his downbeat voice. Installed in his car, future county teammate Peter Roebuck noticed, was a device to make it go exactly seventy miles per hour on motorways. Cricket wrested control away, it was cricket controlling him. How he was doing on the field – that's how and who he was. ‘Sometimes tortured,' according to Willis, who he'd come to for advice, and then follow the advice. Self-preoccupation was not a problem. He'd make team-centric suggestions about field settings, training routines. Generally, though, he did not speak a lot. He liked gardening, and woodwork, and films, and home. He once said to Willis that maybe a degree of screwed-upness was crucial to both their success.