Improbably, given my interests and the subsequent direction of my life, I come from a sporting family. It is that quintessential Australian world that informs my book Rose Boys, as it goes on informing my life. My father, Bob Rose, played for the Collingwood Football Club in the 1940s and 1950s. His four younger brothers all played for Collingwood, too. They were known as the Rose Brothers. Dad won more Copeland trophies than anyone before him, he helped win a premiership in 1953, he was the first Australian Rules player to be dubbed ‘Mr Football’. Later, after a stint coaching Wangaratta, where I grew up, he returned to coach Collingwood into some of the most celebrated grand finals on record, including the 1970 grand final, perhaps the greatest individual game of them all. Sadly, Dad lost all three grand finals, by just a few points. He later coached Footscray and had a second stint at Collingwood in the 1980s. He served on the Collingwood committee for decades. When he resigned in 1999, his official connection with the club had lasted for more than 50 years.
My family’s link with Collingwood didn’t end with the Rose brothers. My brother Robert—my only sibling, three years my senior—also played for Collingwood. Promising though he was as a footballer, Robert was a much better cricketer. Even as a young schoolboy, much was expected of Bobby Rose Junior, as he was known. He realised much of that potential in his teens, first playing cricket for Collingwood, then for Victoria. By 1974, when he was 22, Robert seemed to be on the verge of Test selection.
Apart from his precocious sporting prowess, Robert was an adventurous young man, to put it euphemistically. He was hedonistic and immensely popular. He wasn’t called ‘Rambles’ (after the Nat King Cole song) for nothing. Trevor Laughlin, one of Robert’s cricketing mates at Collingwood, remarked many years later that he and Robert had always thought of themselves as ‘bullet proof’ in their wild days. I was struck by this. I had no such sense of recklessness or invincibility. When I was an adolescent I was bookish, morose and abnormally isolated. The contrast between my innate fatalism and Robert’s boundless assurance was the first of many I examined in Rose Boys.
Robert was alluring to many because of his undoubted humour and charm, but also because of the glamour that sport confers—almost uniquely confers—on the