The Best Australian Essays 2015

by Geordie Williamson

  ‘You’re finished,’ the surgeon said.

  Joseph Mitchell’s office and the $20,000 salary he retained through the goings and comings of four New Yorker editors was a mark of respect and even awe towards the champ he once was. Also: maybe – who’d swear against it? – the thing he was sweating over and not handing in for thirty-one-plus years would be his greatest piece yet. No obvious clues suggested it mightn’t be. He left his apartment with a pencil and piece of paper folded three times into a rectangle in his jacket pocket. About nine he reached the office, so immersed in the thought he was thinking he’d merely nod, no words, at any passer-by in the hall. Some mornings he spontaneously marched straight past the office like it hadn’t entered his line of vision and instead walked for hours to and around some place familiar or unfamiliar, the scene of an old story perhaps. On leaving the office about six, outside the lift, he occasionally let out a sigh. Maybe the piece was getting closer? Everyone hoped so. Mitchell’s writing had an unwriterliness about it that made him exhilarating to read. ‘The words,’ marvelled his New Yorker colleague Calvin Trillin, ‘seemed to have materialised on the page through no human effort.’

  Mitchell’s last piece that ran was ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’, which ran in 1964 and was a sequel, twenty-two years in the waiting, to ‘Professor Sea Gull’. Both pieces were about real-life, shabby-suited Joe Gould of Greenwich Village. Gould was basically homeless, invariably hungry, often hung-over yet claimed to have translated famous American poems into the language of the seagull. Gould had been working twenty-six years on a book called ‘An Oral History of Our Time’. It was 9 million words long, still unfinished, eleven times longer than the Bible and seven feet high if you stacked together the school-type composition books he scribbled in, and he scribbled in them in parks, libraries, doorways, cafes, and bar & grill booths, and on subway trains and platforms. Soon after meeting a new person, Gould would say, ‘Did you ever have a painful operation or disease?’ and the conversations that followed, as well as other conversations Gould eavesdropped on, would form the meat of the Oral History. Wrote Mitchell:

  Gould was a perfect example of a type of eccentric … the solitary nocturnal wanderer, and that was the aspect of him that interested me most, that and the Oral History … He seems to be a perfectionist; he seems to be determined to keep on writing new versions of each of his subjects until he gets one that is absolutely right.

  Lillee – he loved to run alone, in the still-dark morning – could have been anxious to perfect a particular ball, or methodology, or some matter of technique, or some element of his bowling personality. Who could guarantee the next ball he bowled wouldn’t be more devastating than each of the 43,336 first-class balls he bowled before coming to Northamptonshire? Maybe there was something he had never got absolutely right. And when he stopped playing the thought of it bugged him, improbable as all that sounds. This was DK, he who’d bowled faster than anyone who could bowl better and better than anyone who ever bowled faster. But consider this, something so fundamental: Lillee’s mate and wicketkeeping ally Rod Marsh (of DK’s comeback, Marsh said – ‘you couldn’t help but admire him … but then you couldn’t also help thinking, what an idiot!’) felt Lillee had a weakness bowling to left-handers (an intriguing theory and, not that this is conclusive, if you count down Lillee’s 355 Test wickets, upper-order or essentially capable left-handers equal 12.9 per cent).

  He wasn’t finished. The surgeon mis-forecast. But whether Lillee’s unresolved business was left-handers, something else, or nothing, it had to wait. After the crack, the next noise he heard was laughter from the spectators, one of whom, Simon Hendy, had a camera and snapped the moment of tender human frailty as Lillee was chaired off the County Ground, like a partial reenactment of the gold-bordered Centenary Test victory photos from 1977 when Gary Cosier and Greg Chappell hoisted Lillee high on their shoulders. Except in Hendy’s photo Richie Norman, who was Northants’ physio, and Rob Bailey are holding Lillee much closer to ground. An arm under each weathered Lillee knee, they are grimacing.

  Gould … is extraordinarily responsive to alcohol. ‘On a hot night,’ he says, ‘I can walk up and down in front of a gin mill for ten minutes, breathing real deep, and get a jag on.’

  Lillee’s drink was rum with dry ginger, or rum with Coke, also port, chardonnay, red wine or beer. Coincidentally admitted to South Bank Hospital in Worcester on the same day as Lillee was in a hospital bed in Northampton was ‘Both’ [Botham], which must have been a blow to ‘Wot’ [‘World’s Oldest Teenager’ – Lillee], who spent the first Saturday night after his injury at ‘Lamby’s’ [Allan Lamb’s] house. Botham was getting two spinal vertebrae fused, ruling him out of much fun, a pity, as Lillee and him had a history of fun including a recent get-together, two weeks before his signing with Northamptonshire, when Lillee bailed Botham out of a Perth jail after Botham played Rubik’s cube with a fellow plane passenger’s head. Even that was fun: Lillee arrived with the bail loot and a six-pack of beer.

  Lillee and Lamb had in common a zest for fishing and the great outdoors. Nights at Lamby’s were about as outdoors as things got during the next seven weeks. DK was in a rented house in a suburb of Northampton. Twice-daily he saw a physio, an hour’s drive each way, Lillee working the brake and accelerator with his non-injured left foot. He appeared on Wogan, the same Friday that Eartha Kitt was on. He was spotted at Wardown Park in Luton walking laps. Sixteen days later at the County Ground, with Lancashire in town, he had graduated to a trot. In the sweep of cricket literature, few sadder sentences are known than these: ‘I have to admit it was pretty lonely in the house. Helen and the kids came over in school holidays but I rattled around it when I was there by myself.’

  This was DK, the stars’ star, who in his heyday crashed two Clive James poems, including 1984’s ‘A Gesture Towards James Joyce’ –

  … In the same way that a bouncer from Dennis Lillee

  Has its overture of giant strides galumphing towards you

  With the face both above and below the ridiculous moustache

  Announcing by means of unmistakable grimaces

  That what comes next is no mere spasm

  But a premeditated attempt to knock your block off

  – plus the flute-propelled album closer, ‘No Restrictions’, on Men At Work’s Cargo.

  Hear the cricket calling, switch on the TV

  Sit and stare for hours, and cheer Dennis Lillee

  Whoa-oh-oh

  Whoa-oh-oh-oh

  Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor was stoked to find himself in the company of Lillee – ‘a proper drinker and I got drunk with him on Jack Daniel’s’ – at a party at Oz pop guru Molly Meldrum’s house. The delight was mutual. Somebody, whined the couple next door, had been proclaiming ‘I love Duran Duran’ on the footpath at 5.30 a.m. ‘Oh,’ came the reply, ‘that was Dennis.’ He inspired a one-off character Dennis of the Lillees in a UK special of The Paul Hogan Show. Who’d Hoges persuade to act in the role, which involved a mask, a bare hairy chest, crotch-clinging black trousers? Oh, that would be DK.

  There was another script which Lillee and Helen had been fine-tuning. This was the cricketing afterlife script. The denouement was never ever intended to be MORE CRICKET. He was seventeen when they met, she fourteen. They lived in houses situated back to back and tore down the pickets of the fence separating the two houses to be together. After three years they were married. A year after that he made the Test team, and he had been in it only a small number of years when they began wistfully mapping a golden life phase when he would no longer be in it. He wanted to cook more. He longed to do sketches in charcoal. She had visions of family outings. They craved simply being together, with the kids, in their red-brick Karrinyup home with its flashes of the ocean through the windows and of Victor Trumper straight driving in a poster above the bar, and the racks of all the cassettes and LPs he was addicted to yet barely able to feed his addiction, and the ceramic knickknacks he had picked out but painfully lacke
d the time to enjoy. There’d be a lot more, they agreed, of that. Of being.

  She said on a 1979 episode of This is Your Life: ‘I’m happy for him to be a cricketer but I won’t be sad when it’s all over and he is home for a while.’

  He told Australian Women’s Weekly, 1977: ‘The limelight is plastic, and I’ll be glad to be out of it.’

  His mum Shirley said in 1981 that about ‘now’ was the time to stop. ‘But it’s his life.’ Shirley out of everyone might have guessed the worst for Dennis and his right ankle in Northamptonshire. They were so fragile, his ankles, she used to pack him off to school in shoes with ankle straps. Even then he fell over.

  That was at Belmay Primary in ‘the remotest capital … I have never found a place I like more than Perth’. On getting back from the office, Joseph Mitchell unwrapped the wrappers round a local paper of the North Carolina county he was born in, which he subscribed to, dispatching page one with a glance then poring over ‘Deaths and Funerals’ on page two, and he started subscribing soon after leaving home when any reminder of home made him so homesick his breathing went amok.

  ‘Oh, I’m doing all right,’ Gould said, smiling complacently. ‘I’m doing fine … You know how bohemians are. They profess to disdain money, but they lose all control of themselves and go absolutely berserk at the slightest indication of the remotest hint of the faintest trace of a smell of it.’

  Lillee was on about 30k once you added some office-equipment company sponsorship to the county’s money. Part of the job involved teaching and encouraging others, which at this juncture of Lillee’s life was no job at all, more a compulsion. Joe Gould was Harvard-educated and quit his day job the moment the idea of the Oral History fell into his brain, and Lillee like Gould was on his own Oral Mission, which wasn’t about money or a roof over the head but about a search and meaning and the parts inside whose needs cannot be met by a roof. Lillee was on his mission from the earliest days of his club comeback in Perth.

  Michael Broadbridge hit 95, clean-bowled by Lillee, for Melville against Scarborough at Tompkins Park. ‘I was eighteen or nineteen,’ says Broadbridge, ‘and he was well and truly past his prime but the ball kept shaping away from me at the last minute. Didn’t swing out of his hand. That’s what’s vivid to me: his shape. Anyway, I had this ability to play sort of across the line, not that that’s a great trait, but I hit him over square leg and midwicket and I think that frustrated him and I think words were spoken and he gave me a hairy eyeball from time to time, definitely. Then after the game he came into the rooms and said in front of everybody how well I batted. And later in the bar he walked up to me. He shook my hand and in his hand was a hundred-dollar note and as he shook he said, “I want you to have that. You should have got a hundred today.”’

  On Lillee’s second day in Tasmania, with South Australia two for about 200 in reply to Tasmania’s 111 all out, Lillee pulled part-time slow-medium bowler Errol Harris aside for a one-on-one. ‘All the younger guys, we followed Dennis whatever he did, whatever he touched,’ says Harris. ‘Things like, whatever Dennis drank, energy drinks, the next minute there’d be heaps more ordered and we’d all be having chocolate Sustagen. That’s what Dennis drank, with milk. I remember his first game – Devonport where we were playing was windy at times and maybe I was a bit wayward and probably I was nervous because Hookesy and Wayne Phillips were batting. Dennis asked me to hold the ball across the seam. And all of a sudden I had four-for.’

  Lillee in track pants, stiff-jointed and unwavering, was bowling again in the nets at Derby two days before his thirty-ninth birthday. He was in the field three days after his birthday for his third Championship match. Mid-afternoon the light dimmed. Kent’s batsmen Roy Pienaar and Graham Cowdrey were invited to go off. No, they said, and batted on against Lillee in the semi-dark, not the first pinprick of indignity. The first happened on his first afternoon for Scarborough when the field was damp and Lillee was using grass clippings to keep his footing. Giles Bush, who was batting, reached into the clippings to pluck something out. ‘Here, Dennis,’ said Giles, ‘this snail moves about as fast as you’ve been bowling.’

  Tim Curtis’ scalp beneath the church spire at New Road was a blessing: Lillee’s figures, in his fourth Championship match, read one for 106. Lillee ‘just had a thing about 0/100 … it really crapped me off’. Graeme Hick rated his 132 that day the flukiest of his thirteen hundreds for the summer. Hick would hit Lillee for four. Hick would peek at Lillee’s face. Lillee’s face told Hick that ball would no effing way have been four runs years ago. Whatever this was, fair was not it. Unfairness, soreness, frustration, bewilderment, irrelevancy – who even cared? even at home? hadn’t news of his joining Northants gone lost in that week’s furore around Tim Zoehrer’s axing for a tour of Pakistan? – impotency. Loneliness, nah. Pretty lonely, yeah. In the house in Northampton he saw that rather than perfecting ill-perfected balls, balls he’d once mastered were slipping away. The past was a bitch, a heavy weight. He was like the serious painter who sees his new work is missing some core kernel that his old work had, so he bins it. Painter or writer. Lillee was serious about bowling. He was serious about everything. Lillee cried during Love Story. His misfirings were visible, public, if ‘public’ is the word for the County Championship. He could startle a batsman with a change-up in pace. But the explosive ball, at will, and when needed, was beyond him. In his second-last game Derbyshire’s ninth-wicket pair, Frank Griffith and Ole Mortensen, survived the final eighty-two balls for a draw. Going out to pubs with Lamby, sometimes people did not recognise him. I’m a crocodile hunter, DK would say.

  He has got in the habit lately of asking people he has just met to guess his age. Their guesses range between 65 and 75; he is 53. He is never hurt by this; he looks upon it as proof of his superiority. ‘I do more living in one year,’ he says, ‘than ordinary humans do in ten.’

  Lillee has never driven inland again on that second trip into and around Australia he promised himself – too busy.

  Joe Gould’s Wisden of the world – ‘An Oral History of Our Time’ – was never published. It never existed. Gould dreamt it. But he couldn’t dream it into being. It was a lie, a figment, a few fragments of scraps of overworked ramblings about tomatoes, Indians, his dead parents.

  Joseph Mitchell’s cracking open of Joe Gould’s secret was the last piece he handed in. It was not – quite – the last thing he wrote and kept. There was the beginnings of a memoir, three chapters, the second of the chapters cut off, and the line – ‘Tree-climbing was exhilarating to me, and I discovered that I had a natural aptitude for it … it is one of the few things I have ever been genuinely good at.’ If only there was a place Mitchell could go daily, close the door, climb trees.

  There was not. In Chelmsford on a Saturday, 17 September 1988, Lillee ran in for the last time. The cream of English sporting journalism was in South Korea for the Seoul Olympics. Tomorrow being a Sunday, and both Essex and Northants being out of the Championship race, most of the weekday reporters had left. Flapping on Lillee’s face as he ran was a novelty-shop old man’s white beard – a last laugh, at himself, and it didn’t matter if the crowd was 65,000 chanting ‘Kill, Kill, Kill’ or sixty-five. That was a curious thing about fast bowling, Lillee had noticed. Once he was into his run-up, his office, he could not hear them.

  The Cricket Monthly

  Skin in the Game

  David Walsh

  Nick Feik, the editor of the Monthly, asked me to write an essay for his esteemed rag. Now, I’m a bit pissed off at the Monthly, so initially I didn’t really want to do it. I’m a bit pissed off because Richard Flanagan did a piece on Mona (my museum, and the only reason anyone asks me to write anything) and me for the New Yorker. It ended up in the Monthly as well, and I didn’t want it to, for at least two reasons: I felt that I had already committed to another writer for a Monthly piece, and I didn’t like Richard’s piece at all. They contacted me before running it, and I told them I didn’t want it printed, but it
went to press anyway. Our respective interests were not aligned. I thought, ‘I’ll never write for those bastards.’ At the time they had no interest in me writing for them, and a huge commitment to Richard Flanagan. Now Nick asks me to write, and I’m too flattered to say no.

  Anyway, the two potential subjects he offered were ‘luck in the Lucky Country’ and ‘gambling and compulsion’. By touching on these subjects only peripherally, and forcing the process into the essay (‘David, can I take that paragraph about the Monthly and me out of your essay?’ ‘Fuck off, Nick.’ You’re welcome! – Ed.), I can exact a small vengeance, while simultaneously showing what can happen when one acts without fear of consequences. Nick has skin in the game, but I can flense him. Of course, he might not print the essay, but survivorship bias, that elegant construct that ensures that we only factor in events that happen, protects me from the ravages of not being printed. Either no one knows Nick got his way or everyone knows I got mine.

  Preamble over.

  Obama is a war criminal.

  That’s not what this essay is about. In fact, it’s only peripherally relevant. But maybe now you’re thinking, Right on, maintain your rage, or maybe you’re refreshing your disgust with those bloody bleeding-heart liberals.

  I have spent some time wondering why beliefs come in clusters. Why do many believe that a society should not have the right to take a life but simultaneously hold that a pregnant woman should? (A view that I’m mostly aligned with, but typically avoid scrutinising.) And, in my home state of Tasmania, why does an individual’s asserted right to be protected from meddling intervention by government go hand in hand with subsidies for the forestry industry?