Ian Redpath 1941-2024

GH on a local hero

In my mother’s living room in Geelong stands a glass-fronted bookcase, whose old dark wood I recollect from childhood, and had been in the family long before that.  It is now in excellent condition - gleaming palely, in fact.  That’s not an accident.  ‘Ian Redpath did that,’ my mother unfailingly recalls.  He arrived at her request one morning in his van, carefully dismantled the bookcase, scrupulously restored the wood, cleaned the glass, repaired the snibs and catches, and returned it good as new. Better actually. She knew he was a cricketer; but she swore by his antique dealer’s skills.

Ian, who died this morning aged 83, was Geelong’s Test cricketer.  He was known in the town by the solidly unchanging facade of Redpath Antiques on Shannon Avenue.  When first I summoned the nerve to go and interview him, he talked while busily occupied in his back room, moving round his work table as he answered my questions. I had my copy of his autobiography Always Reddy.  ‘A fishing book disguised as a cricket book,’ he said dryly, and indeed, now I check, about a quarter of the book’s photographs feature scenes from an angling life.  Antiques and angling: are you getting a picture of the man?  Patient, methodical, a bit old-fashioned…

To these add amateur.  Ian was the last Australian to represent his country without being paid: he forsook player payments up to and including his Test debut rather than jeopardise his status as an amateur footballer.  Bill Pearson, who played fourteen Sheffield Shield matches for Victoria in the 1930s, had had to refund all the money he had received from cricket in order to resume kicking goals for Old Scotch.  On the advice of his father, Ian went without the £85 he was offered when first capped by Australia; he finally, he said, had to accept the tour fee for the 1964 Ashes tour.  What changed his mind, I asked him?  ’Otherwise I would have starved,’ he said. And a skinnier Ian scarely bore thinking about.

There is a photograph of him returning from that 97 he compiled in his maiden Test innings at the MCG in January 1964.  He is being applauded, touched on the shoulder by an autograph hunter, trailed by a wary policeman.  He is looking down, smiling a little to himself despite being cut off three runs from a hundred; his creams are unsullied, his bat lightly taped.  His ears protrude from a haircut almost militarily short; under the chin bobs his signature Adam’s apple. 

He is as recognisably of his time as David Boon of the eighties, even if they are both cast in similar roles: the unflashy, dependable one; the fulcrum of the batting lever.  The hair would grow and the sideburns extend; there was even, briefly, a moustache.  But Ian’s features remained unmistakable - no helmets in those days to disguise them - and his 70kg physique unaltering.  Frank Tyson called him ‘the most substantial thin man in cricket’.  Asked recently how he might have fared had he pursued football, Ian said he wasn’t sure the sleeveless jumpers would have flattered him.

Ian belonged to a family rooted in our town.  On the eve of his first tour, co-workers at the family woollen mill presented him with a travelling clock; on the eve of what would have been his last, he decided that his fledgling antiques business, then in Pakington Street, needed him more.  He drove a Torana in those days but when he was playing at the MCG took the 8.45am train - I like to imagine him waiting on the platform at the nineteenth-century rail shed that still stands today.

His batting was as unchanging as that shed. It had no metropolitan sheen.  His stance was slack-kneed, his bat slim-lined, his backlift barely a flex of the wrists. He swayed inside bouncers rather than hooking them; he stroked drives rather than bludgeoning them.  Used to keeping the ball on the ground, he jokingly flexed a non-existent bicep when he hit Lance Gibbs for two sixes in the Adelaide Test of 1976.  There’s hardly been a more self-deprecating cricketer, and right to the end. I rang him a couple of weeks ago to issue congratulations on the christening of the ‘Ian Redpath Scoreboard’ at Kardinia Park. ‘Not bad for a bloke who could hardly make it move,’ he chuckled.

Ian was doing himself an injustice, of course, and not only because no Australian has taken more runs from a first-class over. Though he was a slow bloomer, his courage and phlegmatism served Australia well for more than a decade. Getting Australia over the line at Leeds in 1964 kept the Ashes down under; getting them over the line at Cape Town in 1966 got them on the board against South Africa. Having put on 219 with Bill Lawry on his Test debut, he added 219 with Greg Chappell at the WACA in 1970, and 220 with Greg at the SCG in 1975. Not surprisingly, Greg loved him. In Redpath’s last hundred, in his final Test, his bottom hand was dark from previous knocks; playing on the off side, he relied entirely on his top hand. He became, on getting out, Gibbs’s 308th Test cricket, then a record; he detoured before walking off, to shake the bowler’s hand with his bruised one. Later he used to same hand to pour the great West Indian a celebratory glass.

I remember because I was there: that last hundred was the first I ever saw live. The day, baking hot, unfolded slowly, but my Geelong heart throbbed with pride. So pardon me, also a Geelong Collegian, for feeling a tiny extra share of him. Among our other old boys, Lindsay Hassett was too old, Jack Iverson too mysterious, Paul Sheahan too suave; Ian Redpath was the man. I remember him jokingly contrasting himself to Doug Walters - how Doug approached Tests like club games, while he, Ian, approached club games like Tests. That’s me too, I thought. Australia loves the brilliant, the bold, the charismatic, the aggressive. But it also reserves a place for the battler - everyone who takes the game a little too seriously, but knows they do, and can also laugh at themselves for doing so. Ian was the battler’s battler.

Here I am calling him ‘Ian’, like I knew him, even though I hardly did, but somehow he invited that. He was a fine cricketer, a good bloke, and also quite the craftsman.