The Best Australian Essays 2015 (35 page)

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' –

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

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 lacked 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.

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.

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?

Here's why.

Your opinion is co-opted by having skin in the game. It's difficult not to align your beliefs with your self-interest. Too much carrot. And it's even more difficult when there isn't enough stick. If there are no consequences for immoral behaviour, then it will soon start to look a lot like the right thing to do.

So if you're a leader whose country is under some perceived threat from within (Islam? Parliamentary democracy?), meddling with law might seem a good way to suppress the threat. But there are, potentially, consequences. Your self-interest and that of your constituents aren't necessarily aligned. There might be protests, and there might be polls, and there might be elections …

But what if the threat is from without? Well, you can declare war, of course. That might mitigate the threat, even if it's massively overblown. But a massively overblown threat can ‘rally the troops'. Everyone starts pulling as a team, all your countrymen have common purpose. So here you, dear leader, can line up everyone behind you; your self-interest (being re-elected, establishing a family dynasty, creating a legacy) is held in common with that of the people.

Until soldiers start coming home in body bags.

When that happens, you have skin in the game. The mothers and sisters, and the viewers of the news, might not agree with you any more. How can you kill the enemy without taking a hit in the polls? Well, if you are the US president, and your name is Barack Obama and you have the industrial might of the greatest country on earth behind you, the answer is simple. Use drones. No one dies (except those people whose names look a bit like yours but who are nothing like you). Perfect. You managed to act without skin in the game. But the human race is wising up. (Just here the iPad auto-corrected me to ‘winding up'. I hope that was an accident, rather than artificial intelligence peeping through.) Now we have the International Court of Justice. The thing is, Barack isn't such a bad guy. It's just way too hard to notice that you've slipped off the straight and narrow when it's so easy to get things done. And you can always internalise an argument that goes something like, ‘Everybody would do this if they had the power.' But it's no less a war crime if ‘everybody would do it'. So here's my message to Barack Obama.

See you in The Hague, mate.

Intermission.

The other day, the other Melbourne Cup day, two horses died. That made me think about the morality of horseracing and the morality of gambling and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the morality of gambling on horseracing. It's hard not to think about it. At the moment, that's the only thing people want to ask me. Tonight I'm having a public conversation with Phillip Adams. The first question will be, ‘How do you justify making your living in such an unethical way?' Or it should be, if Phillip has any balls. So I have to think about it. And so I might as well write down my thoughts and charge the
Monthly
for them. After all, Nick wanted luck in the Lucky Country. And he wanted gambling. Tick and tick.

I've already established, at least to my satisfaction, that having no skin in the game leads you to break the rules. Conversely, an opinion you hold based on skin in the game isn't likely to have any merit. Prisoners on death row don't constitute a major demographic in support of capital punishment. And blokes who make their living gambling on horseracing aren't likely to support a ban on gambling. Or horseracing. So my opinion isn't worth the electrons it is written on. With that proviso, read on.

My opinion? Horseracing is okay. (Just.) Gambling is okay. (Just.)

There is plenty of gambling on things other than horseracing. For example, gambling on poker machines is legal, but, in my opinion, it shouldn't be. (No vested interest here. I don't own any pokies.) Pokies are squalid, antisocial, grandma-raping machines, and they allow (force) the punter to control how often they gamble. When rats are able to control how often they stimulate a pleasure centre of their brain, they give up eating and they give up shagging. They just push the button. If they are given regular stimulation but have no control over when, they behave just like rats – happy rats. Humans aren't rats, and pokies aren't pleasure, but I think you can see the point I'm making.

And there is horseracing without gambling. Dubai has horseracing but no punting. So the morality of gambling has to be considered separately from the morality of horseracing.

Gambling first, and briefly.

In
A Bone of Fact
, my autobiography, I contend that it is okay for me to win if it is okay for me to gamble. I won't rehash that argument here, because poor Nick is going to have to pay me by the word. But, at a superficial level, it would seem to be absurd to contend that it's not morally okay for winners to bet but it is okay for losers to bet. Casinos might disagree. And in the unlikely event that my mad plan to put a small casino at Mona gets up, I might be confronted by this dilemma. Should I, like an annoyed card counter at the Hobart casino years ago, erect a sign that says, ‘Losers only welcome'?

Morality is a morass mixing the personal (sans self-interest) and the societal. Everybody has had a crack at defining it, but here I plumb with Jeremy Bentham, who summarised his moral principle as ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong'. I align myself with him because, applying this principle and the ideas that emerge from it, he was able to conclude that slavery was wrong, child labour was wrong, and animal cruelty was wrong – and he supported separation of church and state, freedom of expression, the rights of women, and the rights of homosexuals. A principle that allows you to leapfrog 200 years of missteps must have something going for it.

So does gambling support the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number'? Certainly not, at least not directly. Of those who gamble, only those who win in the long run and those who lose within their entertainment budget are directly benefiting. Those two groups are in a minority. That's why I tend to like the Vegas/Macau model, where those who want to gamble choose to: Save up. Travel. Bet. Indulge. Repeat.

But the majority of gambling is local. So the onus is on the gamblers to stay within their entertainment budgets. Many, perhaps most, don't. Thus society benefits only from tax revenues. That raises issues. Those who are contributing do not derive a benefit proportional to their contribution, and they may have no choice about their contribution, since their gambling may be expressing a pathology. And if the punter has a pathology, the revenue generated is a sickness tax. That could be called the ‘beggar pays' principle. And it isn't very principled.

The beneficiaries of the revenue, the governments, have no skin in the game. These days, when the scope of the damage that gambling causes is discussed, authorities can just say, ‘At least this way the gambling is policed. If we close it down it will move to the outlaw West of the internet.' The lesser of two evils. A principle that assumes that the consequences of an action are known for certain.

So, depending on who is doing the gambling (and also the type of gamble), gambling can be morally repugnant or just okay. Libertarians might argue that no one needs to be protected from themselves. But safety nets protect populations as well as individuals, because they induce speculative behaviour by mitigating the consequences of risk. (Trapeze artists will attempt more when there is a net.) An individual taking a risk benefits society. Next time you enjoy a local beer (and you really should be enjoying local beers), think about all the breweries that didn't quite make the grade, outcompeted by the lovely foaming brew you are quaffing. Those beers you can't drink, because they now don't exist, are crucial to the quality of those you can. More failures generate more successes. But the failures need protecting from the risk they took.

Gambling isn't a single thing. It can be an expression of a skill set, one or more of a range of pathologies, a social entertainment, or a rational economic behaviour (even for losers). The latter happens in one of two circumstances: when one thinks a lot of money is worth proportionally more than a little bit (for example, that a million dollars is worth a lot more than a million times a dollar – a ubiquitous belief that might justify a Tatts ticket but doesn't justify turning over money multiple times) and a situation where money has more than economic value. One will gamble if one's life depends on it – a cancer operation must be paid for. The state might not do it. And actually, that last thing can be used as a diagnostic for an appropriately formulated society. If the safety net isn't formulated in such a way as to protect one from needing to bet your life, then the system needs to be changed, and the self-interested rich, and the libertarians, can go fuck themselves. In fact, in a well-formulated society, fucking themselves might be their only option.

Got a bit off track there. Anyway, since the range of gambling is too wide to assign each case a moral category but there are clearly some immoral categories, then the best options are to make gambling illegal altogether or to categorise the style of gambling in terms of the social damage it does and outlaw the biggest offenders. The biggest offenders are pokies, because, as I said, the punter controls the frequency of the gamble. At the other end of the scale are casinos that don't service locals and thus only tax the entertainment budget of visitors. In the middle (and ignoring the animal rights issue for a moment) is horseracing. Going to the races focuses the mind on a limited number of spaced events; offtrack betting means more events and a greater disconnect between gambling and racing itself as a source of pleasure.

The bottom line: since I can't demonstrate that my punting is anything more than ethically equivocal, I'd better do something worthwhile with the cash (or stop gambling).

The morality of horseracing.

Wim Delvoye is one of my favourite artists. He is represented at Mona by a Gothic cement truck (by the time you read this, on the back of a Gothic semitrailer), a small Gothic chapel, and
Cloaca
, the alimentary canal analogue that, when given food, does nothing much except make shit. We also have a tattooed pig's hide. Wim's pigs were tattooed while they were alive. Exploitative? Cruel? Sensationalist? Well, some argue that art doesn't have to abide by the same strictures as society. It plays the social value get-out-of-jail-free card. That was played by, and on behalf of, Bill Henson, when he photographed adolescents naked. I'm not saying he deserved censure (naked kids probably doesn't equal sexualisation), but he has to play by the rules, like everyone else. After all, the guy who starved dogs because he opposed mistreating animals certainly had a point, and in my opinion he was making art, but his ends-justifies-means argument doesn't cut it with me.

Wim tattooed pigs under a general anaesthetic. These pigs, bred to be slaughtered at ten months, were then allowed to live out their unhealthy, truncated natural lives. Farmed pigs are unhealthy because of selective breeding to gain weight, and for docility, and are cardiomyopathic and myopic. But of course, we need them for food. Or do we? Muslims and Jews don't eat pork, and they seem to be doing okay. And vegetarians don't eat pork. Nor do vegans. We aren't killing pigs because we need to, we are killing pigs because we like to.

Wim exploited (tortured?) pigs for entertainment. In return they received an extra ten years' care. Since entertainment is universal, just as eating is, and I would argue that the consequences for Wim's pigs were far less severe (tattooed pig versus dead pig), it seems reasonable to assert that tattooing pigs is okay. This has a big dollop of moral relativism in it, so those who gather their beliefs from a central authority, like a church, or a good book, are going to remain unconvinced. Their certainty shifts over time. (Many Catholics were excommunicated or killed for believing that the son wasn't as old as the father – a heresy called Arianism.) And it varies over large areas, but locally commitment to the same beliefs seems paramount.