The Best Australian Essays 2014 (15 page)

Alien-seeming – they did not think that in Perth.

Something was afoot in Newcastle.

Tavaré hit an off-drive so hard it hurt the hands of the fielder who stopped it. In the eighty-ninth over he was 85 not out and the Northern NSW bowlers reached for the new ball. Tavaré stepped forward, sort of skipping. Some shots, visiting commentator and pundit Henry Blofeld saw, showed a lovely flowing arc of the blade. To the spinners he, occasionally, danced.

Ghost rumours linger, of what journalist Alan Gibson thought he saw when Tavaré batted half a day at Leicester during the 1978 county season – ‘Some of his drives reminded me of Beldam's pictures of Victor Trumper'; of a twenty-seven-ball ton at Crystal Palace's football field in the 1981 Lambert and Butler Floodlit Cup.

In Newcastle, hitting Holland to the midwicket fence brought up 100. ‘Frustrating,' Holland recalls. ‘Bowl six good balls and he'd play six back, so I'd try tossing one higher, it would be slightly overpitched, and he'd hit it hard and very, very classical.' In stands of 55 with Derek Randall and 37 with Ian Gould, Tavaré was the dominant partner. Vic Marks had heard him remark once or twice before: ‘I'd love to be able to play like Lubo [Gower] or Gatt [Gatting]. I can't.' Now Marks and Tavaré added 47, Marks making 6 of them.

Suppose in Newcastle, Australia, he batted four seasons in one day. If, watching Tavaré, it turns out we never really knew him, is it possible to know anyone, by watching?

He moved from 123 to 131 in two balls, off-driving then on-driving Hill right and left of the sightscreen. His first 50 had taken 222 minutes, the last 50 took fifty. When, half an hour before stumps, he was bowled for 157, nearly no one who came to the ground had left, and people clapped.

Sometime between 50 and 85 a six was hit, an on-drive.

Hill remembers spilling a catch – ‘a sitter, waist-high, two hands, standing in the gully where I'd fielded all my life' – when Tavaré was 34 not out and ex-Test man Gary Gilmour was bowling off a seven-pace run-up.

Part-timer Robert Wilkinson remembers the wicket he took, Gould (though he misremembers it as Gower) ‘caught at midwicket'.

Matthew Engel's
Guardian
report makes no mention of a six.

Wicket-keeper Kerry Thompson admits, ‘Nothing about the match jumps out at me.'

Hatherell has ‘virtually no memories of Tavaré'.

One photo exists of Tavaré's innings, and he is on-driving, along the grass.

Left-arm quick Timmy Towers died of cancer at thirty-six.

Holland remembers Eddie Hemmings's nine wickets and shrewd strategising (‘despite the burden of a pillow under his shirt').

Mid-on fielder Greg Arms remembers Holland bowling from the southern end and Tavaré hitting from the north, towards the city, ‘a couple whistling past me'.

No one remembers a six.

At the school where it all started, Sevenoaks School, that's where he is now, teaching biology, with additional responsibilities for school hockey, netball and cricket. It does not take much – being there's enough, he says – for his own school cricketing days to come roaring back fresh, and from there it is a small leap to other balls blocked, hit high, still rising, never landing.

The Nightwatchman

Doveton

Dennis Glover

If you were asked to journey back to a different time and place, when and where would you choose? For me, the child of auto and cannery workers, there's only one answer: Detroit in the early 1960s. It was when the unions were strong, wages were high, blue-collar skills were still at a premium and unextraordinary people spent their lives creating extraordinary automobiles to the soundtrack of Phil Spector's wall of sound. I'd go back to Motown.

Of course, it's impossible to go backwards in time, so blue-collar America must make do with the Detroit of today, where their children scavenge among the city's industrial ruins, stripping the lead from factory roofs to the beat of gangsta rap, like squatters stripping marble from the ruins of Rome after the triumph of the barbarians.

In 1960, thanks to its auto industries, Detroit had the highest per capita income of any city in the United States. Think of that: not New York and its bankers, but Detroit and its factory workers were the locus and symbols of global affluence. That's called democracy.

Since then the city's population has fallen by sixty-three per cent, 78,000 of its homes lie abandoned, and its murder rate is eleven times higher than New York's – mainly because the auto plants shut down, taking ninety per cent of all manufacturing jobs.

But Detroit is a long way to go just to feel depressed and possibly even get shot. There is a far easier alternative, especially if you live in Melbourne – go to the street where I grew up, in Doveton, in Melbourne's outer south-east.

Let's start in the past, using the time machine of my memories. It is 1975, I am eleven years old, I'm playing cricket in the middle of my street. The nature strips are a four, and it's a six if you can hit it over the front fence of anyone's house. There's no risk of trouble, as everyone's dad is at work.

On the offside, number twenty-eight's dad is at Perkins Engines, number thirty's dad (mine, a leading hand) is at GMH so is thirty-two's (he's a GMH line manager, and one of my dad's bosses, who caused a minor street-wide sensation when he brought home a Leyland P76). From memory, thirty-four and thirty-six were in vehicle production too, probably making trucks at International Harvester.

On the offside, twenty-three worked for Ford (it must have been in retail, as the Ford plants were far away), twenty-five was a self-employed car mechanic, and twenty-seven was an engineer called Boothroyd, the only person in our street with a degree. He who worked on the Holden design staff and was an officer in dad's Dandenong-based Army Reserve artillery battery. My best friends, two of the players in our games of street cricket, were named John (now a left-wing state Labor MP) and Jimmy (who worked his way from apprentice draughtsman to the manager of a major engineering works).

The former's dad worked as a cleaner in the same GM plant as mine, and the latter's dad ran a small garage that specialised in converting imported American cars from left to right-hand drive. Every week there would be a gleaming new Chevy, Ford or Chrysler (‘as big as a whale') sitting in his drive. Cars – their design, manufacture, repair and sale – gave us our bread and butter, our political direction and our social structure. They were the art we created, and the delight of our little community, which centred on the primary school and neat strip shopping centre at the end of the street, with its kindergarten and its stop for the bus that would take our mothers to Dandenong for the weekly shopping.

I'm sure you get the picture – my little valley was green. But even after making allowances for nostalgia, here was a community built for us little people, in the age before capital cut itself free from our democratic control. In it were managers, factory workers, small business people, all living together, with their children going to school together. It all added up to a relative prosperity unknown to ordinary Australians, and perhaps ordinary people anywhere in the world until then. No wonder our dads were in the Army Reserve: this was worth fighting for. Take the vehicle plants and the canneries away and you take away more than jobs.

Little did my friends and I know we were living out the final days of a two-century industrial revolution, which we blithely assumed would go on forever. At fourteen, my father had been apprenticed into the Hilden Mill, in Lisburn, not far from Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Built in the late 1700s, the mill was one of the very first steam-powered cotton manufactories, and even in the early 1960s its massive stationary engines drove cotton spinning machinery through huge wheels and leather belts. Dad's job as a hackle pin setter was to keep the production of the factory's high-grade sewing thread running efficiently.

Industry ran in his blood. His grandfather had been a labourer at Harland and Wolff shipyards, where he smashed thousands of infamously brittle rivets into the steel hull of the
Titanic.
This all made my father a valuable commodity when he migrated to Australia in 1963, giving him his pick of available jobs – first at International Harvester and then at General Motors Holden, where he remained for most of the rest of his working life.

Something keeps drawing me back to the street. Two years ago, when Dad died, I stood outside my old house and wept, but not just for him. No more fours and sixes to hit here, the fences are long gone, and the nature strips and front yards are buried under concrete and rusting cars. Number twenty-eight has an old caravan out front, just visible behind a collection of abandoned vehicles. The thing that made me shudder, though, was my own former home, where I lived until I went to university to study history and law just after my eighteenth birthday in 1982. Today its collection of towing trucks, decaying vehicles and stacks of metal panelling are suggestive of a car wrecking business.

From craftsmen to scavengers in one generation: here was the economic progress we were told would make us all wealthier. I hope that little home scrap business is thriving, but I challenge anyone to look at a sight like my old street without wondering what has gone wrong.

My reveries in my old street that day were interrupted by a huge man in a singlet and shorts who stepped out from a driveway to pointedly take my photograph in a manner obviously intended to intimidate. I wondered why, and left, bemused.

Some six months later I guessed the reason. My neighbourhood was in the news: a drive-by shooting had punched three bullet holes in the metal shuttered windows of a house further down the street, which, with its high walls, imposing gate and security cameras, resembled a fortress. The street is now a place obviously wary of strangers, and it doesn't pay to loiter.

On my following trip just before Christmas, I went to the site of our old primary school. If you have ever read John Wyndham's classic novel
The Day of the Triffids
you would know that its best scene is the one where the protagonist travels back to London years after the apocalypse to find the once great city reclaimed by nature, with pavements choked by spreading weeds, turf growing on roofs, tree roots undermining buildings and branches poking through smashed windows. That's the primary school today, a vandalised jungle slowly disappearing under nature's onslaughts. There's a website that features haunting images of abandoned man-made structures, and if I were a better photographer I would take a photo of the school and post it there.

The school was closed a couple of years ago and replaced nearby with what is known as ‘a birth to Year 9 community learning centre', which specialises in countering socio-economic disadvantage. It's sadly necessary today, but when there were jobs and when there was prosperity – when we had auto plants and canning factories – all the local children needed to succeed in life was something called a school.

You can download reports from the new learning centre's website, and they tell you that seventy per cent of the local eleven-year-olds are below the expected level in reading, and eighty-four per cent of local fifteen-year-olds are below the expected level of numeracy for their age. If we take the educational reformers' word for it and accept NAPLAN scores as accurate measures, the only conclusion to draw is that this new economy we have created is failing places like Doveton.

Many comfortable and progressive Australians think such forgotten and neglected places exist only in outback Australia. They should go to Doveton. Like many similar factories, Doveton's biggest source of employment – the GMH plant in Dandenong – closed its gates in the mid-1990s after a long decline. Dad had been laid off a little earlier, in the ‘recession we had to have', and got another job the very next week – cleaning vehicles in a used car yard for lower pay, prestige and respect. My mother lost her job too, when Heinz downsized, and she never worked fulltime again.

Places like Doveton contain a valuable lesson for us. They show what happens when the auto plants and the canneries shut down: you go from 1960s Motown to Piranesi's Rome in a single generation. South Australian premier Jay Wetherill tells us that the combined effects of closing Ford, Holden and possibly Toyota will be a decade-long recession along the south-eastern seaboard.

The gutsy Liberal MP Sharman Stone fears that if SPC Ard-mona closes, the same fate awaits the people of Shepparton.

Who knows if they're right? I can only accept what I see with my own eyes, which is this: in Doveton our auto plant and cannery started disappearing two decades ago and my old neighbourhood still has not recovered. So, sadly, my money would be on both being correct.

In
The Road to Wigan Pier,
George Orwell said that it was a kind of duty for people in power to see the places the economy and our politicians have failed, lest we should forget they exist. But what conclusions should the powerful draw from places like Doveton?

Most obviously, that when you shut the auto plants and the canneries, the little people pay for generations.

But there is another lesson, one that provides some hope if we are willing to heed it: the need for a wider moral approach to economics, and policymaking more generally. Today we tend to see economic policy through narrow statistical prisms like ‘productivity'. If we all just become more productive and give up unaffordable luxuries, the Productivity Commissioners tell us, a new Golden Age beckons.

But like a cat chasing its tail in ever decreasing circles, that Golden Age is never obtained. To the people of Doveton, the Golden Age seems to lie only in the past. In their aggressive push to make places like Doveton more productive, all the economists have done is ensure they produce very little at all.

Essentially, Doveton's fate demonstrates that our approach to economics needs to be widened and deepened to take in the sorts of moral and aesthetic considerations that earlier policymakers, like the ones who created Doveton, accepted implicitly. People have to be efficient, sure, but they don't have to live alongside junk yards, their schools don't have to be turned into urban jungles, and they don't have to be cleaners and gleaners.

They deserve to live in pleasing surroundings and have the chance to create objects of beauty and utility that embody craftsmanship and pride – things like cars, things like food. Creating Holdens in real life beats creating them in our dreams. Our economists need to understand this as they contemplate creating yet more Dovetons.

The Age