Ten Things #8

GH on Modi, memory and (Paul) Melville.

Artwork by Fisher Classics

1/ The Indian Premier League is still going. So is the Indian premier election, although there seems less doubt about its winner

2/ In a detailed report last week, the Washington Post revealed the reach of Indian black ops abroad, including that the Australian government four years ago expelled Indian intelligence agents whom they had caught trying to steal sensitive defence technology, and also to infiltrate police and airport security systems. On the evidence of a recent Jetstar flight, however, one of them got through and is now demonstrating the safety instructions on the Airbus 320 NEO.

3/ Which reminds me: one staple of local op ed pages in the last decade has been the ‘well-it’s-not-all-cricket-and-curries’ column about India’s relations with Australia, where the cliches gather like iron filings on a magnet: ‘economic miracle’; ‘trade opportunities’; ‘pivot from China’; ‘world’s biggest democracy’. Not even George Bush knew such a conga line of suckholes as those Australian columnists prepared to efface Narendra Modi’s fascistic authoritarianism, vicious sectarianism, subversion of institutions and strangulation of free speech. Tony Abbott’s sycophantic sallies, in particular, give useful idiocy a bad name. When the BBC released its excellent two-parter, India: The Modi Question, incurring the wrath of the subject, there was no push to screen it in Australia. When Albo allowed himself to be used as a prop in a party rally disguised as a Test match at Ahmedabad, it was all treated as a mildly eccentric Indian whimsicality. Counters to the narrative, such as India’s role in the extra-judicial murder of a Sikh activist in Canada, and now its fingerprints on a parallel plot in the US, have been reported perfunctorily. One journalist who tried, the ABC’s Avani Dias, has now been expelled for her trouble, and why this is not a scandal I cannot tell. For further and better particulars, read my friends N. Ram in Prospect and Ram Guha in the Indian Express. Perhaps the foregoing is a metaphor: the Indian cabin is depressurising, Modi is in control of the masks…..

4/ Dandy Warhols at Northcote Theatre on Friday night - good sound, light and set list, although I hate Courtney's Rick Wakeman hair, and they didn't play 'What We All Want'.

Note to self: watch Dig! again.

5/ Today marks half a century since a feat unique in Test cricket’s 2538 matches: brothers scoring twin hundreds. The Chappells amassed 646 of the 1455 runs in the Wellington Test that spanned 1 to 6 March 1974: Greg (247no and 133) and Ian (145 and 121). ‘A superb exhibition of elegant shot making,’ said Bert Sutcliffe. ‘It was a revelation to see so many runs hit with the full blade of the bat and with such perfect timing.’ Yet, interestingly, neither brother has ever shown great regard for the records broken. In Chappelli (1976) Ian disposed of the Test in a brisk paragraph; in Adrian McGregor’s Greg Chappell (1990), Greg said of his maiden first-class double hundred and highest Test score dismissively: ‘It was of no big moment. The wicket was unbelievably good and the outfield was fast. But I don’t really rate it, other than for the number of runs and for striking the ball.’ Much as we fetishise big scores, their making readily grows immemorable. That game at Wellington was drawn, Bevan Congdon and Brian Hastings both scoring hundreds. The attendance thin: Cricketer Annual reports fewer than 27,000, with icy, windy weather throughout. No newspaper souvenirs were printed. No limited edition memorabilia was minted. For similar reasons, I remember the 2003 Perth Test, in which Matthew Hayden biffed and bullied his way to the Australian Test record score of 380. As Dos approached the Taylor/Bradman milepost, I went to mow my lawn. My next door neighbour leaned over the fence and said: ‘Hey Gideon, I thought you’d be inside watching history being made.’ ‘That’s not history, Bill,’ I said. ‘That’s a statistic.’

6/ Perhaps it’s because memory struggles to incorporate the vast that the flashes of momentary illumination tend to leave the deepest impression. I dare say we will come to know more in due course about last week’s death of twenty-year-old Josh Baker from Worcestershire, found dead in his flat after failing to appear for the last day of a second XI fixture. But, coincidentally, I had recently been thinking about Victoria’s Paul Melville, and reread Tommy Hanlon’s exquisite tribute to a cricketer ‘as easy going as a summer breeze’.

7/ From those days when Sheffield Shield cricket was broadcast on the ABC and when I would cheerfully have watched cricket all night and all day, I remember two of the innings Tommy mentions: when Melville got out first ball in his debut trying to sweep against South Australia in February 1977, then a year later when he compiled a composed 86 in 159 minutes against Western Australia. He was developing fast. He swung his Gray-Nic in great arcs, threw himself round in the covers and had a powerful arm, which you needed back then before ropes were brought in to flatter batters. Cricket in those days was played largely by big, burly men with moustaches and hairy arms: Melville stood out because he could easily have played guitar for Supernaut, being whip thin with a huge mop of curly hair. And such was the paucity of batting talent in those Packer-riven days, he might not have been far off representing Australia had he not suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on 21 November 1978. 

8/ From the Public Record Office Victoria, I today retrieved Melville’s ‘body card’ - the record of enquiries preliminary to an inquest that may or may not take place and, in Melville’s case, did not. It tells us only that Melville rose late complaining to his mother Mavis of a ‘severe headache’, and lost consciousness ten minutes later, emitting a thin trickle of blood. Yet there is a curious intimacy in the posthumous compliment paid Melville’s body - it was that of a ‘well-built young man’.

9/ In hindsight, it seems surprising that the sudden death of a young athlete in his physical prime did not call forth deeper inquiries. We will never know now, but Tommy tentatively conjectures a link between Melville’s death and the heavy knocks he suffered in suburban football, where concussion was shrugged off like a corky. But because premature passing heightens every feature of a life, nearly half a century later I have no difficulty calling ‘Veggies’ to mind.

10/ Likewise in an elegiacal mood, I recommend this personal evocation of cricket in the mind by Anwen Crawford: Beautiful Smudge

You may never look at Steve Smith in quite the same way again.