Don Bradman is an Australian icon, yet he was such a distinctly un-Australian hero. Teetotaller, Protestant, Mason, closer to his wife than his mates, a leader, a loner, never one of the boys—the list of culpable behaviour goes on. Always shrewd and calculating, in both his batting and business endeavours, he never bet on horses, never swore. Not rugged. He is un-Australian in the way Menzies is un-Australian. Both were patriots, but patriots of a nation founded on British blood and Empire. That is just one of the paradoxes of the Bradman myth that Tasmanian sociologist Brett Hutchins has set himself to solve in Don Bradman: Challenging the Myth, and he does the job pretty well.
The ‘true’ Australian, as first described and analysed by Russel Ward in Australian Legend, was egalitarian, a swearing and drinking male who bonded with other blokes of his type but was ill at ease with women. He was the product, Ward assures us, of the distinctive, masculine ethos that sprang up in the Australian bush in the 19th century—a tradition and shared set of values bequeathed by countless gold-diggers and shearers, ex-convicts and stock-drovers. It took the first Sydney Push of the 1890s—which included the Bulletin writers, the Henry Lawsons and Banjo Pattersons—to assert that the bush didn’t just foster brutes, as had been previously thought. Rather, it was the cradle of a distinctively Australian civilisation. The cities were unstable, as the 1890s Depression proved, while the bush was the home not just of the weird but of the truly authentic and real.
Since this argument was first coined in the 1950s, it has been criticised for leaving out as much as it includes. One thing it fails to explain is how Don Bradman has been incorporated into the Australian tradition; how a man who was consistently sober, reliable, monarchist, monogamous and ruthlessly accumulative, whether at work or play, could so effortlessly become the definitive Australian hero.
Hutchins provides one answer. Alongside the Wardian bush ethos there is the social conservative tradition, both Australian and Anglophile. The Menzian worship of British institutions, culture, values and habits is the final apotheosis of a very British cult of respectability which took root and flourished in this very alien ground, living on in Australia’s longest serving prime minister’s mind well after the British themselves had packed up their empire and gone home to join a European union. In this context