Bradman's legacy

When Sir Donald Bradman passed away in February 2001 it was said by many that he epitomised everything it means to be Australian. As our nation celebrates the 100th anniversary of his birth on August 27, we recall again that he became synonymous with all that it means to be Australian. During the latter years of his life he was often quoted as being the most famous living Australian. However it was more than his extraordinary cricketing prowess that led Don Bradman to have such an influence over the Australian psyche.

His influence over the mood of Australia from the time he burst onto the first class cricket scene in the late 1920s, until his retirement from the game after World War II, is described by one of his team-mates on the 1948 tour of England, Sam Loxton. In 2001 I was fortunate enough to see Loxton and Neil Harvey, two of the few remaining survivors of that epic team, speak at a sporting function. Loxton remarked that night that while many Australians were struggling through the grim days of the Depression, Bradman “lit up the nation”.

Bradman’s response to his own fame was usually the seeking out of solitude and a quiet place to rest.

In responding to criticisms of his apparent aloofness, biographer Michael Page notes that Bradman said that, “I was often accused of being unsociable, though I fear the charge was applied in a very loose sense. In substance it boiled down to my dislike of artificiality and publicity.” Such intolerance of pretence has become a defining characteristic of Australians and it was certainly true of “The Don”.

The world-beating feats of Bradman came to the fore with the utmost intensity during the infamous Bodyline series in 1932-33. This was the series during which tensions between the “Mother Country” and Australia reached fever pitch and have never been more bitter, before or since.

The target of Australians’ frustration during the Bodyline series was the English captain, Douglas Jardine. This was a time when Australians were being asked by the English to reduce their standards of living as a means of countering the problems of the Depression. As a result, Page states that Jardine was, to Australians, “the personification of the “toffee nosed Englishman”: arrogant, aloof, almost incapable of expressing himself to anyone outside his own strata of English society”.

Page goes on to state that, as Jardine was also characterised as “the Australian notion of the type of upper-class Englishman who looked condescendingly upon ‘colonials’”, it is little wonder that he was hated by a young Australian nation with a short history of mistreatment by British authority.

It is against this background that Bradman’s legend, along with the Bodyline series, became a defining notion in the creation of an Australian sense of national identity.

The performances of Bradman during the Bodyline series were highlighted first, during the second Test in Melbourne, when, before a world record crowd of 68,188, he scored 103 against Jardine’s bodyline tactics. Already a hero in Australian culture, this performance only heightened his status as the hope of Australia and an inspiring example of someone who could challenge the might of the British Empire and succeed. Page describes the feeling at that time “as that of a nation waiting for the declaration of war”, remembering that this “war” was against Mother England.

Bodyline was instrumental in creating a sense of national identity for Australia in that it cemented in the minds of Australians a sense of determination against the odds, of standing up to the might of the British Empire. Against the personification of British greed and arrogance that was Jardine, and bodyline as a symptom of Britain’s determination to keep Australia inferior to the homeland”, Bradman represented the hopes and dreams of a nation still in its youth.

While it is true that Bradman’s cricketing record is far above that of all others, it was the time at which he produced his extraordinary deeds and the manner in which he performed them that had such a startling impact on creating a sense of national identity in this country.

Another reason that Bradman had such a remarkable impact on Australia is because we have always found our identity, at least partly, in the deeds of its sporting (and particularly cricketing) heroes. Charles Williams, who wrote a biography of Bradman in 1996, states that, because of our history, Australia has never had a military or political hero like the USA or other prosperous nations have.