In the middle of January I had some photographs developed. They were of the fourth cricket Test against India, January 2004. Steve Waugh in his striped jacket, walking with Sourav Ganguly to the pitch for the toss. The guard of honour his team formed when he stepped onto the field of play at the start of the first session. The crowd’s standing ovation when he walked off with his bat for the last time in a Test match. Waugh below my stand, chaired on the shoulders of his teammates, and in front of me spectators waving red handkerchiefs.
Two summers ago I switched on the TV and flicked through the channels, and instead of moving past the cricket I figured I’d watch it for a few minutes. The last time I had watched cricket was 1983. Since then a lot of different things have happened to me. ‘Waugh’ was a name I’d come across here and there, because even if you’re not a cricket-follower some player’s names are in the news all the time.
It was during that summer of 2002, sometime around Australia Day, that I spotted Steve Waugh fielding. he was nibbling on his fingernails. I don’t know why that hooked me, but it did—so much so, that I borrowed some of Waugh’s books from the local library. Not long after Tugga was sacked from the one-day side—the St Valentine’s Day massacre.
SBS’ World Sports program showed the press conference; Waugh looking as if it was him against the world. He was out of one-day international cricket, and I remember feeling rather peculiar about it all. By then Waugh had already made me glad he was around.
When I came to this country as a small child it wasn’t good to be different. In the early 1970s I couldn’t go into the school playground or walk home after school without a white Australian giving me stick about having brown skin. ‘Blackie’, ‘abo’, ‘go back to where you came from’. Children and adults would walk past me in the street and let me know they thought I was dirt. Such attitudes started to fade away at the end of the 1970s, but in the following decades there were still some idiots who assumed that if you were a darkie you talked funny and didn’t understand English.
In the 1980s I became an Australian citizen in order to get work. My identity as