Willowman

by Inga Simpson

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'Joyous storytelling at its best. I was enthralled' SARAH WINMAN, author of Still Life

'I bloody loved this - a gorgeous, heartbreaking examination of so much more than cricket' ROBBIE ARNOTT, author of Limberlost

'Not since Jasper Jones have I been so utterly spellbound by the next ball, the state of the pitch and the intricacies of scoring' KATE MILDENHALL, author of The Mother Fault

From the critically acclaimed author of Mr Wigg comes an enthralling literary novel about a batmaker and a gifted young cricketer, set around the time the game began changing. For fans of Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.

Cricket has a willow heart. Batmakers around the world have tried everything, crafting bats from birch, maple, ash, even poplars . . . After two hundred years, cricket bat making is still beholden to a single species: Salix alba caerulea - or white willow

Reader Cricket Bats, one of the last traditional batmakers back in England, has a contemporary home in the Antipodes, with Allan Reader keeping the family business alive in a small workshop in Melbourne.

When Todd Harrow, a gifted young batter, catches Allan's eye, a spark is lit and Allan decides to make a Reader bat for him, selecting the best piece of willow he's harvested in years to do so.

As Harrow charts a meteoric rise to the highest echelons of the sport, leaving his equally talented sister's dreams in his wake, Allan's magical bat takes centre stage as well, awakening something in him. But can Allan's fledgling renaissance - hanging as it does on the magic of that bat - carry on after Harrow is stricken by injury and a strained personal life?

Set as the new short form of the game began to gain prominence, Willowman is a love letter to the art and beauty of cricket and a meditation on the inner lives of certain kinds of men and women, for whom it is a way of life. Award-winning author Inga Simpson writes exquisitely about a national sport you will never view the same way again.

'Heartfelt . . . Uplifting . . . Simpson explores family, priorities, the pain of making difficult choices and the knowledge that it's never too late to start over. This is an uplifting book that will satisfy both cricket lovers and readers who enjoy loving stories about beginning again' BOOKS+PUBLISHING

'What a wonderful book. What a read. A love story to cricket, to families, to craft and to music. Beautifully written' MICHAEL BRISSENDEN

'A fabulous novel. Inga Simpson brings all her craft and sensitivity to a story that has never been told, and now that she has done it, it feels like this was a story that was needing to be told. With her art, Inga joins the likes of Meg Lanning, Ellyse Perry and Alyssa Healy in the vanguard of cricket's exciting new revolution. Long may it last' MALCOLM KNOX

'Moving, gripping, authentic, so tenderly told; at once a page-turner and a life-giving meditation - Willowman is just magic' BROOKE DAVIS

'Delightful' JOHN DOYLE (aka Rampaging Roy Slaven)

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 416

Sample

Cricket has a willow heart. Batmakers around the world have crafted bats from birch, maple, ash, bamboo, even poplars – but nothing else measures up. I’ve tried Australian timbers, too: huon pine, red cedar, bunya. You can shape a bat, sure, and it will hit the ball, but it doesn’t have the right sound, the right qualities. Despite what administrators, sponsors, broadcasters, even the players would have us believe, without the tree, there’d be no game. After two hundred years, cricket batmaking is still beholden to a single species: Salix alba caerulea or white willow.

Willow grown in Kashmir – that long-contested high ground – is the best alternative, but the bats are heavy and yellow, good enough for some. Those who don’t believe in magic.

It’s no coincidence that white willow and cricket come from the same place: the south-east of England. While ever white willow has water, it grows fast. For the best cricket bat willow, you need plenty of rain. A consistent water supply means consistent growth, which produces an even grain. And even grain is more likely to produce a good cricket bat.

Now, with the twenty-first century underway, I’m growing white willow here. It began as a bit of an experiment, after my year working with the willowmen in Essex. Thanks to a government grant, back when I was still young, when people thought I was someone, going somewhere.

Australian farmers and environmentalists call willows the rabbits of the rivers, clogging up our waterways – just another feral colonial fuck-up. But white willows do not weep. Their trunks are tall and straight, their leaves upward-facing. They prefer fertile river flats to stream banks. Their roots run deep, travelling far and wide to feed the network of tubes pumping water up to the tree’s crown.

Australia might beat England more often than not these days, but the Poms still have the wood on us. Every high-grade bat in the world is made from white willow, grown in England. The top players want English willow for their bats, and for good reason. It’s the best. All that rain has to be good for something.

It’s frustrating, to say the least, having to import willow from the old enemy. They’re still making us pay for that first Ashes win in 1882, and every win since. Two big companies have the market stitched up. The best clefts go to local English makers and, these days, to big buyers in India. With its exponentially expanding population and cashed-up passion for the game – especially this new twenty-over version – India will soon be the superpower of cricket. I’m lucky enough to have a contact, from my summer with the willowmen. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on English willow, not in such small quantities.

That’s why I started growing my own little willow republic. My grandfather, one of the last traditional batmakers back in the old country – as hallowed as Lord’s and the Ashes themselves – said it couldn’t be done. Plenty of others have said it, too. But here I am all the same, growing white willow and making bats. England may have given cricket to the world, but it’s a world game now.

The collective noun for willows is a prayer. And reverence is warranted. Walking these rows, surrounded by uniform trunks, morning sun filtering through the canopy, the leaves shimmering silvery-blue, it’s as picturesque as any landscape.

Frank and I surrounded our little Gippsland grove with blue gums. You won’t see that back in England. They’re good companions, protecting the willows from the wind and shading them while they grow. But the willows have already caught up. White willows – like many of us who have been transported or transplanted – grow quicker in the Antipodes, as if anxious to get somewhere, prove something, or make up for a dubious start.

Most people wouldn’t recognise white willows from the road. If they notice them at all, they probably assume they’re poplars. That’s just as well, given what the timber is worth. Some mornings I wake up in a sweat from a dream that someone has come in overnight and cut them all down, carted them away. So far, it hasn’t happened. Touch willow.

Every single one of my trees is female, not a rooster among them. Cricket bat willow only comes from female trees. And, at sixteen years, these are just reaching maturity. That’s why I’ve come, hat in hand, to bring one down – to see if the timber is any good for making bats.

As with any farming, growing willow is subject to the vagaries of weather and chance. It’s a fool’s game, like cricket itself. But cricket is more than just a game. It’s a lot like life, and it all begins here.

Frank’s battered hat appears from behind the hill, followed by a raised arm, as if to distinguish his lanky frame from the tree trunks. In my own plantation, we fell willows in February, when there’s still enough heat to get the moisture out of the timber. But this is Frank’s first. He’s anxious to see what we’ve grown, and today is the only day we managed to align our schedules ahead of summer.

‘Morning, Allan.’ His cheeks are the colour of the cool-climate shiraz he’s so fond of drinking.

‘Frank.’

‘This is the one, then?’

I manage a nod. My guts are churning worse than on Katie’s first day at school. I’ve taken my time picking out the tree but we’ll have to see inside first. She’ll be a good indicator for the grove. There’s no use cutting a heap down if they can’t make top-quality bats.

I put on the earmuffs and fire up the chainsaw. Frank stands back, gauging the height, second-guessing whether there’s room to bring the tree down inside his fence, rather than on it. Farmers always seem to think that owning land means they’re the only ones who can operate machines or manage anything practical outdoors.

In the old days, they felled willows with big cross-cut saws, two men on each end. There was none of this cutting a notch first; that would waste precious timber. They just drove a wedge in behind the saw. Even back in Essex they use chainsaws now, felling twenty-five or thirty trees a day and trucking them back to the yard. The scale of production would have Grandfather turning in his grave.

I offer my thanks, for what I’m taking. It’s not quite a prayer, but I ask that the timber will allow me to create good cricket bats and, maybe, even one or two that are really special.

Those remarkable bits of willow are what I live for, making the work not work, more like delivering something into the world, peeling away the layers to reveal what’s already there inside, waiting. On those days, I think it’s what I was put on this good earth to do.

It was calm earlier, a nip in the air. But there’s a breeze now, which I’ll need to allow for. I make the cut low to the base, so as not to lose any more timber than necessary. Having already calculated exactly how many bats are in the tree – forty-four in this case – any less would be a failing. I cut the usual narrow wedge, to control the direction of the fall. The extra-long saw blade allows me to work my away around without switching sides. I just keep on going right through. Even after all these years, it’s nerve-racking. There’s an element of chance: how she’ll fall, the whim of the wind. And, no matter how I school myself, I’m bringing down a living thing. It costs me something, and so it should.

She starts to give, and the weight of her crown pulls at the last line of fibres holding her trunk together. And then she’s cracking, tipping, and gravity, momentum, pull her down, whoomphing into the soft ground, sending up a golden cloud of wood dust.

Once cut, the bark separates from the timber, coming away in a fashion human skin isn’t inclined to – thank goodness. I tap Frank’s arm, and point. When the smooth willow is first exposed, it has a blueish tinge. It fades as we watch, oxidising and turning brown, as if the spirit of the tree is slipping away, into the soil. Or burrowing deep into the fibres of the timber.

Examining the stump, the growth rings, is always a revelatory moment, the tree’s story laid out, the first insights into her character. This one isn’t as symmetrical as she first appeared, slight ridges and furrows are exaggerated in the timber, appearing to flow in, like waves, from the edge. That’s the way the human eye works, the brain, but of course the tree’s movement is from the centre out, the way she grew.

Frank lets his cattle in among the willows to control the grass. Maybe they gave this tree a little nudge, early on. They’ve damaged one or two over the years, even ripping off the bark one hot day, chewing it to cool themselves down. There’s a compound in the cambium, salicin, the basis of aspirin. In medieval times, people used willow bark to relieve headache and toothache. How cattle know to chew the bark is another marvel, evidence that other creatures are a whole lot smarter than we give them credit for.

‘What do you think?’ Frank says. He peers at the grain through his frameless glasses.

‘Pretty good.’ Good but not great, is what I’m thinking, but best to reserve judgement.

The tree’s growth rings are relatively even, considering the drought years, but there are a couple of compacted bands, ridges and variations. There’s a lot of sapwood on a willow, more than a third on this one, though not quite centred. Heartwood has more colour, and is more brittle, so the less of it, the better for bats.

Willow grown back in England is creamy white, like the Royals. Australian-grown willow is more of a pinky-brown, as if darkened by the sun even beneath the bark. I used to bleach it but gave that away. There are enough chemicals in the workshop to worry about, and colour doesn’t make a spot of difference to performance.

We measure out twenty-eight inches, the maximum length for the blade of a bat, and start cutting the trunk into sections. Chainsawing is a whole lot easier once the trunk is horizontal. I used to allow more margin for error, but these days I don’t make many mistakes – and there’s less and less room for margins.

Pale sawdust streams out, over my jeans and boots, raw and sappy, as if from the earth itself. I tell myself I’m not really killing the tree. Not quite. When I work the willow, back at the bench, it’s still living tissue; I’m just changing her form.

‘Give me a hand?’ I say.

We manoeuvre the first round onto the ground and level it. I cleave it along the grain with the block splitter, into eight three-sided billets or wedges. If the timber splits easily, and feels light, as if it wants to come apart, it’s good. If it’s hard to split, and heavy – then not so good. The first round is somewhere in between.

The next few rounds go a little easier, but perhaps it’s just that I’m warmed up, getting my swing right. The last two, approaching the top of the tree, are smaller, enough to split into only six billets.

The upper trunk and crown are a lichen forest. One variety is flat and vivid green, a bit like young willow leaves, with orangey spots, its flowers perhaps. The other is grey-green and shaggy, with all sorts of branchlets and leaves.

‘Quite the ecosystem, isn’t it,’ says Frank.

‘Every tree is a whole world, my grandfather used to say.’

We stack the blocks onto the back of the ute. Not as rough as I would firewood, but not as delicately as I handled willow when I first went off to Essex, either. They’re heavy to lift, still rough and full of moisture, still blocks of wood.

While Frank has his back turned, I lean on the side of the ute to catch my breath. The work knocks me up more than it used to. I should have gone easy on the red wine last night – and the nights before that.

Frank tests the weight of a good-looking piece with his long fingers, nails clean and neatly clipped. ‘Decent grain on this one.’

I nod. The lines aren’t too far apart, and aligning nicely with what will be the hitting surface of the bat, but grain isn’t everything. Sometimes it’s the imperfections that a batter will fall in love with.

Frank is a dentist, in the city. He grew up on a big property, but this one – at five hundred acres – is just a hobby farm: Belted Galloways, or Belties, as he calls them. Cricket is another one of his passions. He only plays socially, but watches every game on television and reads every book going. He’s built up quite the library, and not just on his shelves. He has volumes of cricket trivia stored away in his archive of a mind. He’s always the first asked to quiz nights. Frank collects information the same way he collects books, ephemera, furniture, and weird antique dentistry contraptions. Instruments for torture I call them, not having been blessed with the best teeth.

When the last of the lengths are on board the ute, I raise and latch the sides of the tray, sucking in big breaths as quiet as I can.

‘Did you know that Bradman numbered his bats?’ Frank says.

‘You think he knew they’d be worth something?’

‘He was a smart fellow.’ Frank is hovering. He’s a man used to being in control and I’m not giving him what he wants. ‘What’s next?’

‘I’ll stack it away back at the workshop. And then we wait.’

Frank nods. ‘You travelling all right, Allan?’

‘I’m doing okay.’

‘I’m glad.’ He shakes my hand. ‘I’ll call in to the workshop sometime.’

‘Look forward to it.’

I turn up the radio in the ute. They’re playing Mendelssohn’s overture, The Hebrides, featuring not one but two oboes. The tones, and cascading notes, are somehow sympathetic with the sugar gums and dry-stone walls criss-crossing the paddocks. It was Scots immigrants who built them, hauling the greystone by hand and using their stonemason traditions to reshape the landscape. People carry their music with them.

It’s drier than it should be; summer has come early. There’s a lot of traffic on the highway for a Thursday, too. More and more folks commuting. More and more tourists heading down to Mornington and the Otways, the Great Ocean Road. Council is widening another stretch of road, great tracts of bare earth and a mountain of trees turned to mulch. I shake my head. In Europe they grow white willows on the verges, as a buffer along highways and factory zones to scrub the air clean. Even in those murky settings, the timber remains pale, unscarred by the poisons of human industry. Only the red leather of a cricket ball leaves a mark.

Willow is, though – like many of us hailing genetically from the north – prone to sunburn. And, like all trees, white willow has its share of pests to contend with: sally sawfly, borers, giant willow aphids and, these days, a warming world. Anyone can see nature’s balances are out of whack. It would only take one disease, one tiny predator. Like those bark beetles in the northern hemisphere turning spruce and pine forests to rust.

It’s well past lunch by the time I back the ute down the lane, and my stomach is telling me about it. When I get out to open the gates, the tray is low over the axles, weighed down with willow. The ground in front of the shed, between the workshop and the house, is soft and the tyres leave two deep trenches. Marlene would have something to say about that if she was still here.

I ferry the billets, three at a time, to the drying shed. As I lift each one, my feeling is that they’re too heavy. There are maybe a couple, all sapwood, that have a bit of potential. My arms are blocks of wood, too, tired from all the sawing, lifting, carrying.

I make a cup of tea and put together a sandwich from what’s left in the fridge, which isn’t much, but it’s fuel, and head back out. I pull an old brush from the jar and paint the ends of each block with resin to prevent them splitting while they dry. Batmakers used to dip each end in wax, like a maturing cheese. The resin is easier to work with. As a one-man show, I’ve had to adapt, to minimise labour and costs, energy expenditure. So far, the willow keeps on giving.

The drying process will take between three and twelve months, depending on the whims of weather and willow. Last winter it was so cold I brought the best of them inside, to be near the fire. They weren’t bad company, actually, didn’t complain or criticise, just went about their quiet transformation. These billets will become clefts, the raw blades I shape into bats. As the blocks release moisture, they shrink and lighten, taking on a fibrous quality. That’s when the alchemy begins.

Mid-morning, I down tools and wander across the paddock and over the hill to the local ground. It’s a walk I find myself taking more often than I can really afford during summer. It costs nothing to sit in the tiny stand or on the grass up the back, in the shade of the sugar gums, but I should be shaping, pressing, sanding – not watching the game. There are customers waiting, and the season is short enough as it is.

I could sit there for hours, days. And I have. It would add up to years of my life. Her life was how Marlene liked to put it, as if it had been misspent. I never played seriously or had aspirations, just turned up for club games. Until I was married. It’s something about the close-cropped green turf, the pitch out in the middle rolled flat, the neatly chalked white lines, the peeling corrugated iron roof of the clubhouse, the black and white letters of the old scoreboard, and the Maribyrnong snaking away behind. It’s the orchestra of leather meeting willow, the whoop and huddle of players when a wicket falls, and the generous applause each time a player hits a boundary, takes a wicket or reaches a milestone, no matter which side they’re on. With the backing hum of cicadas, the weight of eucalyptus in the warming air, it all adds up to a kind of meditation.

There’s something about the start of the season, too: the lengthening days, the mounting expectation. The echoes of summers past, games won and lost, greats come and gone. The hope twitching in the still-growing bones of the young players that this will be their breakthrough season. Or, among the more hardened, who have long let go of that dream, the gratitude at being back with their mates, hoping they can contribute, that this will be the year their club holds up the trophy, and that they will be there on the podium, spraying beer over their mates and belting out the team song in the sheds afterwards.

In many ways, I prefer grade games to the Sheffield Shield. I enjoy picking the batters on the rise, those who will go on to play for their state and, perhaps, represent their country. I like to think I’ve developed an eye for it, seeing in them what they cannot yet see themselves: that particular combination of natural talent and technical skills. There’s a purity to their game before pride, entitlement and anxiety set in – before they become conscious of the selectors on the boundary fence. They’re raw product, all possibility; how their story will play out is yet to be told.

It’s not unlike the process for crafting a bat. Picking out the best pieces of willow from their sound and feel, bringing all my knowledge and experience to bear. And still, the best bats just have something about them that I can’t predict or explain. It’s the same in great batters: a lightness of touch, the unquenchable desire to score runs, a fierceness of spirit – something inside that needs to be expressed. Technique is important but batting is an art.

My brother had the gift. He was a talented all-rounder, needing to be constantly involved in the game. For a time, we both worked the willow, our inheritance, just from different sides of the fence. Natey had a taste of playing for the national team – only four Tests, one season. His performances were solid but unremarkable. ‘Never thought I’d choke,’ he said. After he was dropped, and then did his Achilles, he never was able to fight his way back. It’s a particular pain, to know the game at that level; to play, train and travel with legends, only to feel it slip away – destined never to be one yourself. The game made him – and broke him. Sometimes I think it would’ve been kinder not to have played those Tests at all.

Club and grade cricket are where I sell most of my bats. Only a few are good enough for the top-level players, and these days they’re all sponsored by the big companies anyway. But I’m not at the ground for sales. Melbourne is hosting the Under-19s National Championships – a one-day competition – with a few of the games to be held at Footscray Oval. It’s a rare chance for a close look at the nation’s emerging talent pool – the next generation of Test players. There’s a crowd of a couple of hundred compared to the usual couple of dozen, so I’m not the only one. Everyone has been talking about a young batter from Queensland and I want to see him for myself.

I’m still waiting at the bar when that particular crack makes me turn – as pure a sound as I’ve heard for years. The boy, fresh off the plane from Brisbane, found the bat’s sweet spot first ball. The next shot is a front-foot drive through the covers, so beautifully executed, holding his shape even as he watches the ball run down to the fence for FOUR, that it brings tears to my eyes. Oh. Just when I’d been feeling jaded, with cricket, with life, along comes this gift.

I wander down to the fence, thinking I’ll stay for half an hour. He’s small for a Queenslander, and far from imposing as an opener. But he backs himself and isn’t afraid to play the hook and pull shot, which you don’t see so much these days. When Harrow drops to one knee, slashing the ball through the covers, the crowd groans with pleasure. The power and ease in the young man’s body is a kind of grace. The grace everyone wishes they had.

After he reaches fifty, he begins to pull and cut anything short and wide, his horizontal bat shots finding the fence either side of the wicket. And the way he cuts. His wrists seem to swivel on the finest mechanism, caressing the ball. He sees the ball early and plays it late, never seems caught in two minds. He and fellow opener, Reid, are grinding Victoria’s young pacemen into the turf.

When Harrow is just two boundaries short of a century, the crowd spills from the bar and out of their cars down to the fence. He drops his knees and runs the ball down to third man for two. A simple, low-scoring shot, but there’s something about the way he plays the ball, as if he had all the time in the world. A sign of a mature head on such young shoulders. When I look around, men, women and children are applauding, smiling, shaking their heads, murmuring to each other. The sparkle in their eyes is a question: Is this the one?

My gut, my heart, tell me he is. That once-in-a-generation player. After losing the Ashes over there, in England, Australian cricket could do with the boost, a promising young batter on the rise, a name on everyone’s lips. Someone to carry the country’s hopes, to lift the team back to greatness. Someone who can live up to their promise, fulfil their potential. The potential we all like to believe we have inside us. To deliver us our dreams.

Harrow’s bat is a decent piece of willow. With timing like that, he doesn’t need to strike the ball hard. But the bat I would make him would have a larger centre, less weight and more air. With a little help, he could work magic with those hands, play for his country, be the best in the world. Maybe there’s something of Natey about him, with his curls and open, smiling face. I want so much for him to succeed.

As if sensing the possibility, Harrow dances down the pitch and strikes the ball back over the Victorian spinner’s head and beyond the white picket fence for SIX.

It’s the perfect way to bring up a hundred. When he raises his bat, the crowd, almost all Victorians, are on their feet to applaud him. Harrow grins, with the pride, joy and embarrassment of a young man whose whole life is ahead of him, the future his for the taking.

Harrow hadn’t even been sure he’d play, with four openers in the squad so, given the opportunity, he was never going to waste it. His hundred, in front of an appreciative Footscray crowd, was the backbone of a good total, but they’d have to bowl well, too. Victoria was one of the fittest teams, training with the AFL players in the off-season, and a tight unit. But Queensland had William Walker. He’d moved down from a big property up north to play cricket, living in a caravan out the back of his aunt’s place at Eumundi. He practically had to fold himself in half to fit inside. The boys warmed to him from the start. He was funny, and your typical gentle giant. Off the field, anyway. Once he had the ball in his hand, you didn’t want to get in his way. Talk about white line fever.

They called him Skywalker, because his head was so high up, in the clouds. He also had a tendency to drift off while fielding down on the boundary. The boys had to yell and point to the ball heading his way. But far out, could he bowl. It was like he mesmerised the batters with the idea of speed, coming down from such a great height.

Harrow watched from second slip as Skywalker ran in to bowl, all limbs in motion, a blur at the point of delivery. It was quick, hurrying the Victorian batter, who fended at the ball. The nick came hard and fast. Harrow didn’t so much see the trajectory of the ball as sense it. His body, his weight, moving in line, watching the ball all the way into his hands, scooping it up and closing his fingers around it. OUT.

Skywalker roared, arms raised. The whole team ran in and mobbed him, like boys clamouring over a giant.

From there, the Victorian boys caved. Sky ended up taking six for thirty-nine to bring home the first Queensland win. The perfect way to start the competition.

‘The Force is with us,’ Harrow said. And it became their motto, pulling them together as a group.

Sky’s parents and three brothers were all there in the stands, rugged up, the tallest family by far. It was one of those moments when Harrow felt the world shifting, propelling him forward. And he found himself missing Mum, Dad and even Liv, wishing they were there, too. With the gum trees all around and the river flowing by, Footscray Oval reminded him a lot of his home ground, back at Landsborough, where it all began.

When Mum pulled into Bill Morris Field that Saturday morning, the freshly mown green grass shimmering before them, something settled in Harrow’s blood. With its white picket fence and rainforest backdrop, it was the most beautiful ground on the Sunshine Coast. The fence was hand-painted every winter by club volunteers to keep it perfectly white in a sub-tropical climate. The pickets only actually made it two-thirds of the way around the ground. Beyond that, south-east Queensland burst through any pastoral dreams. Rose gums dwarfed fences, stumps and bats. Remnant rainforest crowded along the creek line, as if trying to retake the ground.

There was even a tree in the ground. A big old fig near the main gates. The gentlemen who built those four pillars and wrought-iron gates, like the entrance to some grand county ground back home, just didn’t understand how big that tree would grow with a hundred inches of rain a year and the ground warm through all four seasons. Its buttressed roots had spread and risen, almost blocking the entrance. Vehicles could no longer pass in or out, and spectators had to enter and exit single file.

If he hit the trunk on the full, it was SIX. But if the ball went up into the crown, bouncing down through the branches and leaves, it was still in play. And, if a fielder was fast enough to get there, anticipate its fall, and take the catch, it was OUT. It brought a random element to the game, and always made for a good story afterwards. Somewhere along the way, a kurrajong and feijoa had got into the act, on the other side of the gates, and no one had discouraged them. Now they were established trees, too.

If he hit the ball into the creek, it was SIX. No one even tried looking in that tangle of trunks, vines, lantana and brush-turkey nests anymore. Not since Bob Giscock cut his shin to the bone on a piece of rusted corrugated iron, staining his whites red. The club went through a shitload of extra balls, a hundred and fifty a season, but it saved a lot of time.

Hitting the Landsborough Loggers president’s car, a blue-and-white striped limited-edition Ford Falcon Cobra, was a two-week suspension, effective immediately. A whole generation of cricketers was scared of slogging it to cow corner, where he parked. He liked to say it was thanks to him that young Landsborough players learned to work the ball right around the field, developing a full range of shots.

The stand wasn’t much, just a green shed with room for the members and a dozen volunteers (the old boys) but a crowd would gather on three sides of the ground. Covered benches went first, bagsed by devoted dads and mums hours before the toss. Families parked their cars on the fence line, or backed up the ute, wagon, van or truck, staging their own picnics in the back. Kids clambered all over the playground and, when things got started, found a spot on top of the swings or the slide, even in the branches of the old rose gums. Plenty just wandered up and leaned on the fence for an hour or two; it was the right height for that.

The pitch itself was the low point: cement with synthetic grass laid over the top. It was a long way from Lord’s or the Sydney Cricket Ground. The upside was that bounce and spin were consistent; those variables h