The Best Australian Essays 2015 (34 page)

Days later, my plane home east still seemed determined to collude with the primacy of that famous and brutal accident as the story that defined this part of the world. The map of its flight path indicated each state capital, plus Darwin – and ‘
Batavia
, 1629', with a small dot for the site of the wreck, out there on the reefs.

But it hadn't been
Batavia
and its souls who staked a claim on my imagination during my time offshore. What came to rest there were the truncated arcs of the 239 stories that seem to have disappeared entirely – further out, further down in the unplumbable depths of the Indian Ocean, beyond my millpond and its distant wall of waves. Not centuries ago, but on 8 March 2014, when MH370 disappeared off the face of the earth. Without the wreckage we expect from such impacts. Without the last-minute phone calls we expect from such moments. Without the careful lat/long pinpointing we expect from this century. Without an explanation to lament; without a fate.

This was the story that had found me, on the edge of those eyes-open islands at the edge of the world.

Further out, further west. Under the infinite vastness of all this blue.

Griffith Review

The Thirty-ninth Summer of DK Lillee

Christian Ryan

Lillee in crotch-high shorts, black-bearded and leonine, stands by the bonnet of a second-hand Toyota Land Cruiser, which is parked on a side street just off a highway somewhere mid-Australia in the middle of 1985. The hair is thick on his cheeks and chin, tufty on top of his head. Sunglasses balanced at seventy degrees do not hide the encroaching baldness. It is not long since he exited the first-class scene, and within weeks – it may have been days – of that newsflash he was dictating to his ghostwriter fragments of a paragraph that ended up reading, in part, ‘What I'll be doing five years down the track is anyone's guess … The only thing certain is that I won't be playing cricket.' Three years and seven months the promise held good. Then he was back, on a comeback, but before that, not wanting that, perhaps in some shadowy way sensing or foreseeing that, and trying to stave that off, he was here, nowhere, off the highway, beside the Toyota – not leaning on it, standing – with one arm in a slung-out embrace of his two young sons, the other curled round the tummy of his wife, Helen, whose own arm, the cushiony inner part of it, was locked snug into the cuddle, holding Lillee close.

A friend had hand-selected the Toyota. Lillee tied a tent and mattresses to its roof. First night of his cricketing afterlife was in a motel bed. At Monkey Mia they camped on the sand with the sandflies, next to a lone tree. They put the tent up again in a caravan park at Halls Creek. To the south and east, inland, were salt lakes and sand dunes, accessible via tracks so faint they could have been constructed in Braille. North went the Lillees. Strangers would approach, say, ‘How you going, DK?' so he shaved his head and facial hair, remaking himself hairless, nearly unrecognisable. Darwin was a place of pubs with easy-wash tiled floors where people with heady, twisted histories could come and find forgiveness, feelings of belonging, start fresh. The Lillees paused, drove on: 28,000 kilometres by his estimation, clapping eyes on half the circumference of Australia, down to Katherine, taking the Kakadu turn-off, up through Jabiru and along the Gulf of Carpentaria, near where the young naturalist David Attenborough fell into conversation with old Jack Mulholland of Borroloola decades earlier. Mulholland used to go out prospecting, be away three weeks, not much luck.

‘Isn't that a bit disappointing?' enquired the young naturalist.

‘Not at all … Money's no good to you.'

‘It can make life comfortable and easy.'

‘Buy yerself a few luxury yachts? Drink it? Spend it on beautiful women? If I've learnt one thing in my life, it is that the measure of a man's riches are the fewness of his wants.'

By night Lillee lit campfires. ‘Fire,' he'd once said, painting his own childhood, ‘was a fascination for me.' Following the tip of Queensland, they crossed Cape York: Weipa, Aurukun, Coen. On a bank of the Archer River he ran into Queensland's fat police minister, Russ Hinze. This was a couple of years before the bribes accepted by the notorious ‘minister for everything' were found to tally $4 million and he quit. Lillee sat himself down on Hinze's side of the river, around Hinze's fire, fixing himself a rum with coke and blowing on a didgeridoo while Hinze accompanied him on guitar. Lillee's beard and moustache had grown back, bushy and black. Some regrowth was happening up top, too. But between where the beard ended and his receding hairline resumed was an inch-high gap. He was an alarming, hideous sight. ‘I have always felt myself to be alone, isolated' – so went a diary entry of explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, on penetrating this part of the world – ‘and the surroundings … reflect nothing whatever but my own voice, like an echo.' Leichhardt, in Cape York, had childhood flashbacks at night. Lillee heard commitments calling out to him from the south: a wedding he had to go to, some possible business openings, the prospect of a trial column with a newspaper. Trip over. He vowed someday he'd return.

Lillee had mates whose cricketing afterlives stretched out safe and far as the eye could see in the Channel Nine commentary box. But Lillee, on TV, came across as sort of gauche. So he waveskied, in a wetsuit, and other times wearing dick stickers, tackling Perth's beaches and the shark waters near Margaret River, the rumoured demon rider, seeking out the humongous waves, never hanging back, getting in close to the jagged rocks, which required bravery, admittedly a bravery he had a choice about, no one was pointing a paddle at his head, but it was a rung or two above the faux bravery of bowling fast in a cricket match. The stakes were lower, though. On the waves, it was just DK and the waves. Cricket had always felt like DK against the world.

There was a
New Yorker
writer, Joseph Mitchell, a candidate in his day for world's greatest living reporter. For the last thirty-one years and six months of his career he went to the magazine's office, stepped out of the lift, a typewriter's clacks frequently discernible from the other side of the wall near the desk where he sat. He did not hand in a single piece.

What if there was an Australian Test team office where Lillee could go daily, shut the door behind him, draw an income, do the thing that was inside him and he was compelled to do, and no one ever had to see it?

There was not. And, short of bedding down with the muck of the rest of them in a nine-to-five job that actually existed, the destiny awaiting Lillee was the unshirkable destiny of the slow-ageing ex-champ – tea and toast downstairs with, in Joe DiMaggio's case, his widowed sister; blue bathrobe over thin pyjamas; a dawning day ahead of wheeling, cadging, trying to drum stuff up, too much daytime drinking, meetings with sycophants and second-rate opportunists skating on your reputation, golf, too many unasked-for wanderings down memory's lane, enough that the lane constricts, narrows, becomes a tunnel. Destiny yeah, or nah. Maybe he could delay it.

The comeback began at a beachside Perth club team, Scarborough. Then when his own state wouldn't pick him he temporarily upped sticks to Tasmania. He was slower, still sage-like, still hissy-fitting like the old DK, moderately successful and none of it prepared anyone for the shock twist of a sponsor's rep in a kangaroo costume peering over DK's bowling shoulder beside an artificial practice pitch at the County Ground nets.

Lillee was there on a Wednesday in May to pronounce himself present and fit to play four-fifths of a season with long-slumbering Northamptonshire. And he wasn't content simply saying he was ripe for it, he wanted to show them. So they all, reporters and cameramen, trekked out after him to the nets, a place he first visited the day before when he whistled the wind through opening batsman Wayne Larkins for a solid hour to work off jet lag. The great DK Lillee was battling a chest cold, from the flight. He had on tracksuit pants. Also, he had on two sweaters. And beneath the sweaters he had on an indeterminate number of shirts, the top-layer shirt swaddled so high up his neck, past the throat, that it was unclear how many shirts he had on underneath it. There was a hint of some comb-over action. A few of the more questing reporters turned up – guys like Selvey, and Alan Lee – and inside, while the rain hit the panes, they bombarded him with why, why, why and DK could only list the why nots. All two of them. Not because he still had ambitions. Not for money.

Next day, same location, Northants were hosting Gloucestershire. Six hundred-odd spectators were in though all England wanted to see him. They watched the weather keep the players off until two, at which point Northants batted, so Lillee sat, an anticlimax. Early afternoon the following day he bowled his first three balls. His fourth, landing mid-pitch, smacked someone named Andy Stovold's glove. His eighth was a shade slower and wider, tempting Stovold into driving at it. Coiling through the gap between Stovold's flapping arms and the stumps went the ball, offcutter, bowled him, like clockwork, a very old clock and Lillee was tweezering back the clock's hands to stop their ticking. That night while he slept was the day of the passing back home of Austin Robertson. Austin was a white-haired gentleman Lillee held deep down in his heart and the father of Lillee's ghostwriter, also Austin, or ‘Ock'. Lillee credited Austin Sr with teaching him how to run. When Lillee ran to the crease next evening, second innings, every beat of the motion was familiar: pause, look up, abrupt tilt-forward of the chest, look down, then a rhythmic, speeding-up lope.

Six for 68 he took. He had on a thermal vest. A yorker got Bill Athey and Terry Alderman failed to hack away an offcutter, two of four men out bowled; bumpers, legcutters, outswingers were sighted. In Darlington for a one-dayer he bowled nine tight overs against Minor Counties. Eleven overs against Worcestershire were less tight but entrapped Ian Botham, out caught in the deep. Hitting the County Ground for Lillee's second Championship match were Leicestershire. He'd played them before, on tour with Australia in 1972, when he secretly pouched a tennis ball tossed onto the field and instead of bowling the cricket ball Lillee went whang with the tennis ball, which was white. A perplexed and stunned Bob Massie fielding at fine leg thought Lillee, so slippery, had turned the ball white hot. Not today. Today balls were veering leg side, something to maybe mull over while catching breaths down by the long-leg boundary. An autograph-seeking vicar pressed his body against the fence. Lillee, oblivious to the vicar's clamouring, kept his gaze fixed on the pitch. The vicar could not break it. A moment later the ball rolled Lillee's way and he was chasing it in new boots with long spikes when he turned, slipped and heard a crack, which was the cracking of a bone in his right ankle, and every ligament was torn as well.

‘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:

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.