10 Things 6
GH on a vision of Victor Trumper, and a cool family connection
1/ The IPL’s still on.
2/ Actually, I know it is, as in the same week there’s been a game of 549 runs and one of 181 runs - big dipper cricket, to borrow a formulation of Ray Robinson’s. You can measure these oscillations, interestingly, by the durations of those ‘highlights’ packages on IPLT20.com that faithfully chronicle wickets, fours and sixes. SRH v RCB is nearly 15 minutes of Danny Morrison losing his shit, all the better to cram in 400 runs of boundaries - it would have been more economical to show the fifty-four dot balls instead. GT v DC is a muted eight and a half minutes about which not even Ravi Shastri can get excited, over almost before it begins. Somewhere, I dare say, Star has a productivity metric of elapsed time versus highlights incidence, ahead of the day when we bow before our AI overlords and leave everything to virtual reality. If we haven't done so already.....
3/ Here, by contrast, is 1/100th of a second at which one cannot stop looking even almost twelve decades later. George Beldam’s immortal vision of Victor Trumper from Great Batsmen: Their Methods At A Glance has now been rendered in cricket ball leather by friend of the stack Paul McGrath for auction at the Chappell Foundation’s annual knees-up at the Sydney Cricket Ground on 15 May, and you’ll need to bid against me, so much do I like it. For those who don’t know, I argue in Stroke of Genius that Beldam’s image constitutes the first great sports action photograph, even though it was originally envisioned as a technical template. ‘Jumping out for a straight drive,’ reads the original caption. ‘Shoulders, arms and wrists will all come into the stroke.’ I’ve seen the image reproduced in oils, watercolours, bronze, china, chalk, resin, and tapestry; it’s appeared in ads for Haig whiskey and Hahn beer; it adorns the poster for You Am I’s Victor Trumper’s Ever Lovin’ Pop and Soul Revue. But leather from old six-stichers’? That’s next level.
4/ Guest speaker this year at the Chappell Foundation, where my friend Pete Lalor rules the roost, is Adam Gilchrist, charming, informative and a Cricket Et Al subscriber. G’day Gilly.
5/ Ricky in Trailer Park Boys: ‘Make like a tree and fuck off.’
6/ Do you remember your first baggy op shop jacket? I do. Now my daughter C has hers, a necessary rite of passage - that moment when you realise that clothes need not be new, that they can have a history that predates yours. Sacred Heart Mission in Brunswick Street has some great bargains, by the way. We also came away with a coffee mug celebrating the 75th anniversary of KLM - perfect for the adolescent with an interest in civil aviation. Needless to say, we are both gripped by the revelations of the Boeing whistleblower at the moment….
7/ C’s genealogical delvings are also a source of on-going fascination for us both. Did I know, she asked the other day, that we were related to the playwright Garnet Walch? No I did not! But here was the thing. Did C know that what is commonly considered her great great great grand uncle’s play Australia Felix (1873) concerned a cricket bat and opened on the day that W. G. Grace’s English team played their first match in Melbourne?
8/ Like a great many antipodeans, Walch had been outraged at the asperities cast on colonial society by Anthony Trollope in his recent travelogue Australia and New Zealand (1873), and by the English as a result of the notorious Tichbourne Claimant (the Wagga butcher Arthur Orton, who tried to pass himself off as the heir to a baronetcy). Walch sought to make merry at English expense, but also to endear himself to the sporting public, by presenting ‘bold Captain Grace’ as an antidote to Tory stuffiness.
9/ In Australia Felix, the ‘etherial genius’ Mirth is in possession of a magic cricket bat which he dangles before his nemesis Mischief….
….the symbol of the manliest game,
To which I’ve ever lent my royal name,
Type of true British sport, without alloy
Where you, friend Mischief, are de trop, old boy,
No swindling blacklegs soil the turf I prize,
Them and their filthy lucre I despise,
The cricket field’s the modern tournament.
Mirth presents the bat to a beamish lass, Victoria, who passes it on to her fiancé Felix for use in the forthcoming match against the Englishmen at the MCG. Alas, Felix is a bit like a young David Warner, and under the influence of louche ‘Miss Collyns Treeter’ gambles the bat away. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine: it’s a play. Although I’m not quite sure how it went down. The Australian Dictionary of Biography considers Australia Felix to be Walch’s ‘best pantomime’; Henry Fotheringham in Sport In Australian Drama reports that it was ’neither particularly successful nor ever revived’. Take your pick. I know which I prefer. Eat your heart out Eddie Perfect.
10/ Anyway, nice to trace our lineage back to a specimen of sports/theatrical bohemianism. Family resemblances? Like my mum, Walch was also a librarian, becoming secretary of the Melbourne Athenaeum; he was also once described by a friend as ‘shabbily dressed and distracted looking’. Hmmm.
"shabbily dressed and distracted looking". There might be something in this. I hope you don’t mind me recounting this story Gideon, but we actually met around 25 years ago, maybe more, at the Knox City library. You were there with a selection of your books to give a talk about cricket. I distinctly remember two things about the night. One, your obvious passion talking cricket, especially cricket writing, and Two, your rather shabby appearance! Wearing an oversized misshapen jumper with large holes in the sleeves, you looked to my eyes like a typical bohemian from the grungy inner suburbs (although certainly not distracted). I have sometimes wondered since what made you trek all the way out to the suburban blandness of Wantirna South, but glad you did as I still have those books.
Love it!