Hands and Heals The Autobiography

PRELUDE

FROM BILOELA TO THE BAGGY GREEN

THE LATE RAY LINDWALL is one of the greatest cricketers I have ever met. I don’t mean ‘great’ in respect of his ability, which I’m sure was extraordinary if his record and the way people who saw him in his prime talk of him is any indication. But I never saw him play, so how can I truly judge? No, I mean ‘great’ purely in terms of the man—larger than life, a person whose aura in cricket circles was such that as soon as he moved into the group that you were in, joined your conversation or sat at your table, you knew you were in for an enjoyable and rewarding time.

In Hobart in November 1995, I found myself in the Bellerive Oval dressing room with Ray Lindwall and one of his Queensland and Australian teammates from the 1950s, Ron Archer. Outside, as a cold wind whipped off the Derwent River, it was chilly. However, in here the atmosphere was warm and hearty, even if, we three apart, the room was empty because the party that followed our victory over Pakistan in the second Test of that summer had moved on to the team hotel. We stayed behind, Queenslanders and Australians, and sat there with just our chat, a bottle of Bundaberg rum and my baggy green cap for company. We were toasting an Australian Test victory, but in fact the celebration, from my perspective at least, was for much more than that. As we slowly polished off the ‘Bundy’, Ray and Ron took turns, half an hour at a time, to wear my baggy green cap and reminisce about the good old days and compare those times with what I enjoyed today. In so doing they reminded me, never directly but simply and gently by who they were and what they said, how incredibly fortunate I was to be a part of their cricket family and to have the opportunity to wear that baggy green.

This was one of the most rewarding afternoons of my cricketing life. Sadly, Ray Lindwall passed away soon after, but the memory of our time together that day will stay with me forever.

THE WAY AUSTRALIAN CRICKET maintains a link with its past, through traditions such as the baggy green, is one of its greatest features. When I went out to keep wicket for Australia, I was often reminded that I walked the same path as men such as Rod Marsh, Wally Grout, Don Tallon, Bert Oldfield and Jack Blackham. I would be pretending, however, if I said I was aware of this when I was first selected for the national team, or that I quickly saw myself in their league. That didn’t happen for a long time, maybe not even until that bottle of Bundy in Hobart. When I was first selected to wear that baggy green I had played just six first-class games—I went straight from being a club player to a Test cricketer—so I never had a chance to draw breath and appreciate what had gone before me. At that point I probably knew more about the story of my club, Norths, than I did about the history of the Australian team. Before that, playing and practising in the Queensland country town of Biloela, I’d lived only for the cricket moment. However, as I grew as a person and sportsman with the Australian XI, so too did my rapport with the traditions of the game grow. Consequently, when I was named in the Australian cricket Team of the Century on January 18, 2000—alongside Ray Lindwall, among others—I rated my selection as the biggest thrill of my cricket career, the ultimate accolade.

First Test, Australia v the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, 1991.

The day of the announcement was in many ways a strange one. First up, I wasn’t even aware that the team was being picked. At pre-function drinks, just before we moved in for the luncheon where the team would be revealed, the former Queensland and Australian wicketkeeper John Maclean came up to me and said, ‘Heals, good luck…you’re short odds to make this team.’

‘What team?’

‘The Team of the Century.’

I don’t know where I’d been. Maybe I’d had my head down, concentrating on my new role as a cricket commentator with Channel Nine. Perhaps there hadn’t been sufficient publicity. More likely, I had been reading snippets, hearing whispers, but it just hadn’t gelled that I was a contender. As John walked away, I started thinking…maybe I am a show.

I was the world record holder for number of Test dismissals, although in my mind that didn’t prove a whole lot—it just meant I’d played more matches than my predecessors. A second thing in my favour was that I had just retired, which meant I might receive a small ‘sympathy’ vote. The selection panel was dominated by former cricketers, all of whom know how hard it is to finally call it quits. Thirdly, I had the good fortune to keep to the greatest legspin bowler of all time, Shane Warne, which advertised a part of my ability in a way no other keeper ever could.

And, I imagined, the selectors would have looked through their alternatives at every position and thought, subconsciously, ‘We’d better put a modern guy or two in.’ If players such as Steve Waugh and Glenn McGrath were missing out, I might be getting in.

When the announcement finally came, I was very nervous. I kept thinking, ‘Gee, I wish Mum was here.’ My thoughts were with my family, which told me that this was a big thing for me. If I had known earlier that this team was going to be selected, I would have definitely flown my mum and my wife Helen to the function. I remembered back to when I was first chosen for Australia, staring at my name among the other players and thinking, ‘What will people think of this?’ My name just didn’t look right: ‘Ian Healy’ was hardly the right stage name for a top-liner. Same with the first Queensland first-class side I played for, and the Australian Under 19s.

The announcement itself was strangely low key. First there was an introduction by the master of ceremonies, Andrew Denton, then an entertainer did a skit on the ‘Big Ship’—Warwick Armstrong, famous captain of the great Australian team of 1921. Then came the obligatory auction. Finally, at a moment when it seemed everyone was in the toilets, Australian Cricket Board chairman Denis Rogers was on his feet, telling us that the big moment had arrived.

‘Could everyone please resume their seats…please…ladies and gentlemen…please, everyone…if you don’t mind…quickly…’

And then he was off. First name was Arthur Morris…then Bill Ponsford…Sir Donald Bradman…captain…

Afterwards, there were six of us on the stage—Arthur Morris, Neil Harvey, Greg Chappell, Shane Warne, Allan Border and me. Sir Donald Bradman, Dennis Lillee and Keith Miller were unable to attend. Bill Ponsford, Bill O’Reilly and Ray Lindwall have passed on.

I rang Mum straight after the press conference. I get a lot of my traits from my mum: my organisation, neatness, the way I try to be loyal and straight with people. My late father emphasised that straightness, too, and instilled in me an ability to stand up to people and situations, to play a straight bat and have confidence in myself. They both taught me the advantages of having a sense of fun. I recalled immediately the expense and the time both my parents put into my sport, the work they did raising money for country teams I was a part of, the local competitions I was raised in. As kids, we thought we were good players, and we were good players, but we never stopped to realise that talent on the field didn’t automatically mean it was easy for our parents and supporters to gather money off it. We never appreciated the amount of effort that people such as my parents and other children’s parents put in, week in, week out, so that the local Biloela team (and then the Callide-Dawson regional team) could play.

ALLAN BORDER ONCE DESCRIBED me as ‘one of the great celebrators’, and I’d have to agree with him. I love winning and enjoy immensely being passionate about what I do. Getting up on a table or a bench in the Australian dressing room and leading the team in our victory song, Under the Southern Cross, was always one of the great experiences of my life. We’d played hard, fought hard, so let’s party hard was my philosophy. And yet I have always tried to be practical about the situations I find myself in, to take such situations and the people in them as I find them. In the days and months since that Team of the Century was announced I haven’t spent any time dreaming about keeping to O’Reilly, or having Keith Miller standing next to me at first slip. Greg Chappell at second slip, Ponsford in the gully, Morris at short leg, captain Bradman in the covers.

I have, though, occasionally gone back to that Bellerive Oval dressing room, and that afternoon I spent with Ray Lindwall and Ron Archer. That was real and special. I’ve never thought of myself as being anything other than an ordinary bloke who’s lived an extraordinary cricket life. I know that I had talent, and I know that I worked extremely hard to get where I ended up. But I also know I was lucky—brilliant parents, great family, perfect environment to learn the game, right place at the right time in the selection stakes, wonderful friends, superb teammates…

From Biloela to the baggy green, it’s been an amazing ride.

CHAPTER 1

A LUCKY COUNTRY KID

ONE DAY, SOMETIME IN the middle of winter 1972 in a Queensland country town called Biloela, a man in his early forties was standing at the bar. He was the town’s new ANZ Bank manager and he was drinking alone, as he had for the past few weeks, ever since he and his young family had driven up from Brisbane to their new posting. Unfortunately, two previous ANZ managers had left town under the same angry cloud, after money from the local bowling club, then the golf club, went missing, so there was no chance the new appointee would be receiving a warm welcome. But one as cold as this? Finally, a bloke came over, a big man, a pig-truck driver, maybe to have a chat…no, just to put his hand firmly on the wall the bank manager was leaning on, the truckie’s arm coming menacingly back over the manager’s left shoulder.

‘And how long do you think you’ll last up here?’ was all the truck driver said. It was not a question so much as a statement. You city types are not wanted here.

The bank manager looked up at him, stopped for a moment, then sipped on his beer. ‘Mate,’ he replied slowly, ‘I’m here to ask the questions, not answer ‘em’.

The truckie stopped abruptly, affronted, like a famous West Indian cricketer confronted on his home turf. But slowly they started talking. And ended up friends. That bank manager was my father, Neville Healy, and soon Biloela became his town, and though I’d been born in Brisbane it became my town, too, for the next nine years of my life. Dad would end up a distinguished Biloela citizen, treasurer of this, on the committee of that, and even help in the creation of junior cricket in the district, while I’d play sport every spare minute of my life, and get the grounding that eventually helped make me an Australian Test cricketer.

WHILE ON CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS in 1971-72, Dad had learned he’d been transferred to the bush. ‘To where?’ he did a double take when the phone call came. Uh-huh…[long pause]…And where exactly is that?’ My mother was aghast; it sounded so far from everything she knew. Biloela was the largest town and administrative centre in the ‘Banana Shire (so named after a legendary working bullock named Banana that was buried with great ceremony after dying in 1880), 600 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, around 150k from the coast, between Bundaberg and Rockhampton.

Until our big move, we’d been living in the Brisbane suburb of St Johns Wood and Dad had been manager at the ANZ’s Rode Road branch in the Brisbane suburbs. When, in March 1972, he and his family—wife Rae and children Kim, Ken, Greg and Ian—jumped into the family Kingswood to head north I was a few weeks short of my eighth birthday. We arrived seven hours later to discover that our new house was a couple of doors from Biloela High’s playing fields and cricket nets, right opposite the primary school’s footy ground and a short pedal on the pushbike to the town’s main sports ovals.

A day out at Sea World on Queensland’s Gold Coast, on a break from a school sporting adventure, in 1970.

Back in Brisbane I’d played soccer for the local The Gap under-7s team, the youngest age group, when I was four and in kindergarten, and after we steamrolled through the season scoring 120 goals and conceding two, I’d set off on my first tour, on the train all the way to Sydney. My biggest memories of that adventure are of a couple of clinics where we were tutored by some of the game’s best players and a slightly sour recollection of a match played on a ground without sideline markings and with a shonky referee. It seemed they played to different rules in Sydney, and I, upfront from day one, threw a four-year-old’s dummy spit over the injustice of it all. Mum came as my chaperone on that trip, which was lucky, because on the way home I broke out in German measles.

I kept playing soccer until we headed to Biloela, which was a rugby league town, we discovered. But that was okay, it was all sport. In my last year in Brisbane, 1971, I’d played in the Ashgrove Primary School B team in cricket. I was seven—many of my teammates were 11—which I guess made me something of a prodigy, but I just knew I loved playing sport and was confident enough to survive in any company. I doubt that this would even be allowed today, as participation rather than competition is seen as being more important.

That last year in the city I was coached for a little while by one of the leading coaches in Queensland soccer, and apparently impressed him so much that he wanted Mum and Dad to leave me in Brisbane when we left for the bush. ‘He’ll be playing senior soccer by the time he’s 15,’ he explained, but my parents’ attitude was that a lot of things can happen between the age of 7 and beyond, so they didn’t even consider it. Three or four years later, they finally started up a soccer comp in Biloela, and I found myself playing league and soccer in the winter. I even managed to make the regional rep soccer team, and at the carnival ran into that same coach, who later told my parents that I’d ‘lost that edge’ I had when I was younger.

It was as part of the Ashgrove cricket XI that I smashed my first six, a mighty blow over midwicket at the home ground of the Ashgrove Marist Brothers school. Geez, that hit went a long way. Or so I thought at the time. One day, around 15 years later, I went back to the scene of that famous swipe and learned, somewhat sadly, that the boundary was around 35 metres from the pitch. I could have sworn the ground was as big as the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

Before we left for Biloela I had my first taste of Test cricket, when Dad took us out to the first Ashes Test of the 1970-71 season. I can’t say that the occasion fired any huge ambitions in me, but I can still remember parts of the day vividly, especially the atmosphere and the Gabba crowd, and the fact that I was part of the huge invasion onto the field when Australian opener Keith Stackpole reached his century. The next day he went on to 207. This was Rod Marsh’s first Test, but I never saw him, because Australia only lost three wickets during the entire first day.

All rugby league teams need a good goalkicker, and I wasn’t the worst in Biloela’s junior footy competitions of the 1970s.

This was one of three photos of Biloela Primary School’s cricket nets that was taken in September 1999 and given to me at a Year 10 school reunion in May 2000. On the back of one was the message, ‘I remember playing on the pitch in the middle of the school ground, too. I still remember you belting that PE teacher, Ritchie Rich, around that ground.’

I wasn’t a keeper in those days. That didn’t happen for another three years.

I ONCE HEARD GREG Chappell, former Australian captain and selector, one of the biggest influences on my cricket career and a product of the well-heeled Prince Alfred College in Adelaide, state that ‘country kids are tougher’. I’m not sure if he’s right, but I do know that country kids in the 1970s, from a sporting perspective at least, were luckier. I never stopped to think, as my sporting life evolved, how fortunate I was to be growing up in Biloela, but with hindsight I know I was.

Between weekends I never tired of having another hit, whether at the High School or the even-better nets at the primary school, from where we’d often aim our biggest hits at the Biloela Hospital windows across the road. These larrikin moments aside, I can remember often reminding myself that I was not just playing sport, I was practising my sport as well. I think that made a difference. No one taught me that, it was just what I thought. I’d go to the footy field and practise kicking goals, or into the nets to rehearse my defensive technique. It was fun to play properly. I was also more than happy to spend an hour hitting a cricket ball that was hung in a stocking tied to the clothes line in the backyard.

The sporting opportunities available to me in Biloela were things I assumed people my age everywhere had. I know now they didn’t; in fact I was able to practise much more than the city kids. When we lived in Brisbane, Mum and Dad had told us kids that we wouldn’t be allowed bikes until we were 11. In the bush, however, where the pace was half a step slower and traffic hold-ups nonexistent, we had them straightaway. So, from when I was as young as I can remember, I was in the nets with my mates or kicking a footy between the posts, and on Saturday afternoons in summer, after finishing my junior cricket, I’d park my bike behind the dressing rooms and watch the seniors, playing for them whenever they were short, or sub-fielding if someone needed a break. Not only were the nets within such a short distance, but so were my mates, my practice partners. I never got tired. Perhaps some of my colleagues might not have been as keen as I was, but I never acknowledged that at the time.

Today, if I want to take any of my three children to a cricket net, or a netball court, or a ground with football posts, we have to jump in the car. The city has plenty of excellent sporting facilities, but compared to Biloela they are far flung. As I grew up and my sporting prowess and hunger developed, my parents didn’t have to drive me to practice, or restrain me because they needed to be fair and drop one child in one suburb, another child in the next suburb, a third further away again.

I was nine when they decided to start junior cricket in Biloela. How lucky was I that this wasn’t put off a few years! I believe my father played a part in this initiative, but the chief catalyst was a gentleman by the name of Kevin McSweeney, who invited all the prospective young cricketers from the town and surrounding districts to gather at the main oval on a Saturday morning in September 1973. When he came to talk to we Under 10s who had assembled, Mr McSweeney hushed everyone up and asked, ‘Okay, who of you can bat?’

My arm shot up. So did a lot of others.

‘And who can bowl?’ Mr McSweeney asked.

Up went my arm once more, again with most of the others.

‘And who can wicketkeep?’

This time, I was the only one who said yes, so I was the wicketkeeper for the Under 10s.

It was more than simply a youthful desire to be everything that had me nominating for the keeping job in addition to seeking batting and bowling opportunities. My determination to be a gloveman had first been fired at the trials for the Callide-Dawson Under 11s rep team six months earlier. These tryouts took place when the only organised cricket I was involved in was with the Biloela Primary School or the occasional cameo as a very young substitute fieldsman in the men’s comp on Saturday afternoons. I can still recall, clear as you like, the 10-year-old keeper of that Callide-Dawson team. I was taken by the extra work he was getting, how everything revolved around him, as if he was somehow special. That’s when I resolved to try to be a wicketkeeper, so when Mr McSweeney asked if there were any keepers about, I was quick to show my hand.

WHILE BILOELA ITSELF IS a town of around 5000 to 6000 people, its sports people included local townsfolk, farmers and graziers and men who lived in and around town but worked at the nearby Callide coal mine and power station, or even further away at the big Moura mine. It was not unusual for men from towns such as Theodore, Baralaba and Moura, all more than 50 kilometres away, to come to play in Biloela. Many were tough characters, and tough cricketers, who gave little away, even to spirited 11 year olds.

The men’s cricket competition involved eight teams, four games every Saturday afternoon, three of them in town on turf pitches and the other on a concrete pitch in the little town of Jambin, around 30 kilometres north. Biloela’s main oval was a well-kept field surrounded by a picket fence, and the other two pitches were on neighbouring grounds. Every Saturday afternoon, and Sundays, senior matches were played on these three fields, so it was possible to scout around the six teams trying to find out which of them might be short. Of course I was not the only youngster after a hit, so there was some nous needed to be consistently in the right place at the right time. Then there was the pressure to do a good job so they’d want to use you as a fill-in again. The men seemed like giants. I’d arrive nice and early, with my small kitbag over my shoulder and my brother Greg’s hand-me-down spikes tied to my handlebars by their laces, and wait for an egalitarian mix of graziers, coal miners, farmers and power station workers to join their mates from the town centre. If I got a game, I’d bat No. 11 and sprint from fine leg to fine leg. On such days, there was nowhere I would rather be.

Those bushmen were cricket savvy in a way many Test cricketers long to be. I loved playing with them and for them, and learned plenty. The matches were full of characters, men such as Charlee Marshall and Merv Bidgood.

Every year, Mr Marshall captained a local schoolboy team in an open-age competition. He was a lovely bloke, around 50, who was a schoolteacher, poet, farmer, hobby breeder of Shetland ponies and local legend. He was also one of the craftiest cricketers I’ve met, never beyond trying to get one over the umpires for the sake of his schoolboy teammates. More than once he’d cut short an lbw appeal with a sincere apology for his rudeness, then not even appeal for the next one before explaining that his excitable proteges had a habit of shouting for things that clearly weren’t out. But then would come a tremendous shout, ‘Now, that’s out!’, which always won the ump’s approval. After all, no way would Mr Marshall be appealing for something that wasn’t out.

Mr Bidgood’s claim to fame, he keeps reminding people, is that he once bowled a bumper at the future Test cricketer, Ian Healy. He was a grazier from out at Baralaba, north-west of Biloela. I was 11 years old at the time, but was also 26 not out, and the team I was filling in for that day were edging towards an unlikely victory. Even back then, winning was important to me. I might have been filling in, batting No. 11 and fielding at fine leg, but I still wanted to win the game as much as any of my teammates did, and sought to be the best that I could be and do the best I could for the team. I remember that ball flying harmlessly over my head, and being genuinely excited that I’d survived my first ever bouncer. This was real cricket! Years later, Mr Bidgood told journalist Robert Craddock, who helped me with my first book, ‘What was I supposed to do…we were trying to win the game.’ He also pointed out that there was no way he was trying to hit me, as Dad was his bank manager.

Early days, moving down the legside during a national junior carnival.

I DON’T THINK YOU can ever get luckier than to be born into a loving and caring family; I know I missed out on nothing from my parents and received plenty. When I look back now, I realise with great pride the key role my dad played in my development, teaching me the basics and backing my natural confidence and love of sport. More than once in later years, I’d hear Dad proudly say of me, ‘You know, when he was 18 months old he could actually step out to a cricket ball with the right style.’ I can vaguely recall, too, the big plastic cricket bat I’d lumber around way back then. There were many who thought that Greg might have been the best cricketer in the family, and Dad might have been among them, but one thing I’m sure of is that I had a better temperament for the game than my brothers. While Greg and Ken were prone to spit it whenever they were dismissed in controversial circumstances in the backyard, Mum reckons the only time I ever threw the bat was in South Africa when I was 32 years old. More of that later.

In 1978-79, the Australian Under 16s carnival came to Rockhampton. This photo was taken during our game against Tasmania, with me, the Queensland keeper and captain, standing up behind Tassie batsman Wayne Squires. My habit of sticking my tongue out was one I took a long while to lose.

Mum was as keen a supporter as Dad. By the time I was 10, leading into the 1974—75 season, I was desperate to own my own bat, and started saving by stockpiling empty soft drink bottles that I could later get a five-cent refund on. Though I pestered spectators and exhausted players throughout the ‘74 rugby league season, I was still short of funds when October came around. So Mum put me on an incentive scheme: five cents for every run I scored after I reached 50, and 10 cents for every run past 100. As I’d never scored a century in my life, she probably thought she was on pretty safe ground…

A lot of cricketers keep count of their runs when they’re batting. Early in the season that summer, against a team from Monto, I was counting cash. I finished with 179, and was soon the proud owner of a brand new blade that became my closest friend.

Mum was always telling me, ‘If you can’t be a good cricketer you can at least look like one’, and I listened to her. I was an organised person from day one, and was aware that whenever I was billeted out as a kid, I used to amaze my hosts with the way I’d look after all my things, clean my shoes and gear, fold my clothes. I knew a lot of my teammates were ignoring the same advice they’d been given by their mothers, but I didn’t care. Even in the Test teams years later, surrounded by cricketers such as Steve Waugh who couldn’t live unless their corner of the dressing room was in chaos, I kept everything neat, clean and tidy. My time management back at Biloela must have also been pretty good. I always found time for homework, without ever letting the study impinge on my sport. Another advantage of living in a country town…both primary and high school were only a few doors away, so it was finish school, get home, food or homework, then down to the nets, then back to finish homework. Easy.

Like young sons all around Australia, the three Healy boys were forever playing Australia v England Test matches in the backyard and filling out the blank scorecards in the back of the ABC Cricket Books. Those games we played then remain so clear; in our eyes they were Test matches. I can even remember the pair of shorts I wore throughout the 1974-75 season, when we wanted to be like Lillee and Thommo, the Chappells, Rod Marsh and Dougie Walters. However, for me it wasn’t a case of dreaming of or wanting to play for Australia. It was just fun, take it as it comes. I was happy doing what I was doing, all the time. And I wanted to be good.

We frequently played with a hard ball, despite what Mum said, which led to the odd bump and bruise, and the occasional broken window when the ball flew over the batsman’s head after kicking off the edge of the concrete path that was our crease or the willow tree root that jutted up through the path. Because we bowled away from our house, that window was part of the residence behind us, which belonged to Mr Gesler, manager of the local Bank of New South Wales. Mum and Dad were quick to offer to pay for the damage—we three boys had run a mile—but Mr Gesler said no, the insurance would cover it. Nowadays, he’s quick to tell people that Ian Healy broke his window, which may or may not be true because I can’t remember who was bowling at the time. My memory is that we broke more windows of our house with the footy than we did other people’s with a cricket ball, but what I can’t understand is how parents can look back laughingly on things such as broken windows in next-door neighbours’ houses. They didn’t seem so happy at the time.

As my cricket developed I didn’t think my parents were especially involved, but when I look back on my life now, they were doing plenty to allow me to be as good as I could be. The amount of time that Dad put into junior cricket in Biloela—umpiring, fund-raising, helping to get the Junior Cricket Association up and running, urging other parents to be involved—allowed my cricket to be as organised and interesting as it was. Right through my time there we had six competitive junior teams in my age division—three junior games every Saturday—in a town of around 5000 people. Mum was the one who would discipline me, keep me on track. Neither parent pushed me, but they didn’t really have to. They could see me going to the nets every day and playing my sport the way I did.

If I had a local role model it was my older brother Greg, who played a lot of junior rep cricket for Central Queensland and Queensland before he moved down to Brisbane to play grade cricket for Norths. We worked together on things and I learnt to play cricket by watching him when I was very young and he was just starting to flourish. In fact, all three of us Healy boys ended up playing for the Queensland Under 19 side, Greg as a batsman and Ken as a batsman and part-time keeper. To be honest, though, I can’t remember any of us receiving too much formal training as youngsters, except for all the support we received from Dad, watching the experts on television, and reading the books devoured by so many young cricketers in the 1970s—the Rothmans coaching manuals, Jack Pollard’s Cricket the Australian Way, Greg Chappell’s Successful Cricket and Ian Chappell’s My World of Cricket. However, as I grew older, and began to play more representative cricket, I did start to come into contact with more qualified coaches. And when I made the Queensland and Australian junior sides, I was being helped by the best coaches in the land. I remember one year being told that I ‘snatched’ at the ball a bit, and being excited at how the coach then took me through a series of drills to fix me up.

Was I a ‘natural’ wicketkeeper? I don’t know. I know I was the gun in the local district, and perhaps I had a greater ability than others to absorb things when I was watching the keepers in the Biloela senior cricket and also the elite keepers on TV. And then I was able to practise and apply these lessons I’d absorbed. If you can call that natural ability then, yes, I was a natural. My guess is that in almost all cases keepers are born, not made, but what you need to be born with are pretty good instincts, a lot of energy and a desire from the jump to be behind the stumps. As a nine-year-old, I wanted to be a keeper; I could catch, was agile and was able to learn quickly about technique. If a naturally brilliant fieldsman such as Ricky Ponting had set out to be a wicketkeeper as I did, I think he could have become a good one, but if he started now, in his late twenties, he wouldn’t have a chance.

CRICKET IN THE SUMMER, footy in the winter. I enjoyed playing rugby league, and every season I can remember feeling disappointed when the league competition ended (as I did when every cricket summer came to a close), but it never quite ‘got’ me as cricket did. Some of the footy could be tough, especially against teams made up of sons as rugged as their coal-mining fathers, but even so, in 1976 I was lucky enough to be selected as a halfback for the Queensland Primary Schools Under 12s league team, alongside future internationals Peter Jackson, Dan Stains and Mark Hohn, for a three-match series against NSW which we lost two games to one. I’m not quite sure why, but I felt a little intimidated by my rugby league rivals from the city in a way that I never did on the cricket field. The fact I was playing cricket with the men must have played a part. Perhaps I just wasn’t a good enough footballer, but I really felt that talented young league players had to move to the city very early in their careers, or they’d get left behind. I imagine, as the sport in Australia has got more and more city-centric, it’s even worse for young country footballers now.

A photograph from the weekend the Queensland Sheffield Shield team hit Biloela in 1974. Queensland and Australian champion Greg Chappell is facing the camera, back right, with Queensland keeper John Maclean, to Chappell’s right, looking down as he signs an autograph. I’m standing in front of Maclean, with my cap visible, but my face obscured by the guys in front.

Every sporting schoolboy needs his heroes, and mine were the Australian wicketkeeper Rod Marsh and his Queensland counterpart John Maclean. The television was important, as it allowed us to watch the stars in action—Marsh in the Test matches and Maclean on the ABC during the final session of Sheffield Shield games. My allegiance to Maclean was complete after the Queensland Sheffield Shield squad came to Biloela, pre-season, for a weekend in October 1974. Greg Chappell, Jeff Thomson, everyone. The players, the biggest thing to ever hit town in my eyes (and many others’, too), took part in some coaching clinics on both mornings and then played a two-day selection trial. I was supposed to be a scoreboard attendant for the entire weekend, but had to go home on the first night with hives after something dropped out of a tree and nailed me. Sadly, I was wheezing and sneezing, and couldn’t back up on the Sunday. Still, I had a field day on the Saturday. At one point I went up to the Sri Lankan-born leggie, Malcolm Francke, and asked for the ball he was spinning, but he replied, ‘I’m sorry, it’s not my ball to give you.’ That’s exactly the same answer I always gave to young kids during my career. Earlier in the day, Mum had grabbed my arm and introduced me to Maclean, who kindly talked to me about keeping and showed me his gloves. That was enough. Where can I get some? Maclean recommended Mick Matula’s sports warehouse in Brisbane, Dad got in touch with them, and I had a brand new pair of John Maclean gauntlets. I really wish I’d kept those gloves, but eventually they were tossed onto the rubbish pile out the back of the house, rotten to the core from my sweat and the rubbing of wet inners that came with constant work. Seasons later, John became something of a mentor for me, not so much on the technical side of the game, but simply by the way he was always totally supportive. He took me to lunch when I first made the Queensland and Australian sides, which was something I believe the late Wally Grout had done for him, and since then, especially in recent years, he has helped introduce me to the workings of the business world. It’s a good brotherhood, the keeping fraternity.

Looking back, it was a real