Cricket

Watching young cricket players on a pitch close to home, the author is visited by memories that flow from the action. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.

Poignant memories of junior cricket

For junior cricketers, earnestly emulating their heroes is part of mastering their craft.

Credit: jacojvr / iStock

Here I am, back in Fremantle, a personally cherished and geographically isolated place – a place removed even from the most isolated capital in the world of which it’s a part.

The development of Perth from about the 1950s happened with violence and aesthetic disregard. It was an architectural and environmental cleansing so severe that just a few minutes into each visit I’m reminded it’s the Australian capital with the smallest tree canopy. Verdancy varies, of course, across the expanse of the city – but there’s a general aridity here that’s depressing and brutally etched by the city’s unforgiving light.

Fremantle, however, just 20 minutes south, largely survived the bulldozers of the cowboy developers and crooked politicians. Here are the sandstone structures of old churches, prisons, hospitals and schools. And there’s the port, of course, over which the giant, giraffe-like cranes stand like sober guards.

I’m resting beneath a tree on the boundary of Fremantle Park watching kids play cricket. It’s a Saturday morning, and both pitches are occupied by under 12 boys. I’d stopped for only a quick rest, but their play sponsors a train of memories and I stay for some time.

I saw qualities I’d long forgotten about junior cricket, and my own years devoted to it. Like the difficulty of wicketkeeping when the deliveries have no consistency of carry. Our poor keeper was saving more byes with his pads and feet than he was with his gloves.

I’d forgotten that the striker’s end doesn’t change at the completion of an over; only the batters swap ends. I’d forgotten that the umpires are typically the respective coaches, and how they continue to encourage and instruct as they arbitrate.

I’d forgotten about the honesty required of fielders about whether the ball has crossed a boundary that’s practically invisible and at best implied by generously spaced cones, as I’d forgotten the impossibility of 12-year-old arms returning the ball to the crease from that distance.

I’d forgotten the sweetness of children earnestly emulating their heroes – not only in their bowling actions and ramp shots but also how they encourage each other on the field – as I’d forgotten, at that age, how great the variety is of height and physical development. There was one boy comfortably taller than me; another so small his batting pads offered similar protection to his lower jaw as they did to his legs. And I think: when I was their age, the sight of me cocooned by protective batting garb must have also inspired chuckles to anyone paying attention.

The shade was lovely, and so too the lying down, and just beyond the oval was the John Curtin College of the Arts. It’s a selective high school and I’m not sure I’d laid eyes on it for 30 years. There’s a soccer academy there, of which a friend was a part when he died, with another teammate, when their coach’s van crashed at great speed one afternoon on a country road. I watched the interment of that teammate and heard the howling of his mother as his body was lowered into the pit.

One day, some mates decided we should wag high school and head to John Curtin to hang with Stevie’s friends. I don’t recall the justification for this – only the collective sense that it was a justified pilgrimage and much better than spending the day in our own school.

So, we drove to Fremantle. Our insinuation into the school to which we weren’t enrolled was simple enough, and we hung with Stevie’s mates at lunchtime on the oval. Later, we got fish and chips on the water. We could feel, of course, the wicked finality of death, but we had no vocabulary for it.

Anyway, in front of me is the John Curtin school. Behind me is the harbour and its administrative building, before which is a sculpture of the harbour’s designer, C. Y. O’Connor.

An Irish-born engineer, O’Connor also designed the great Goldfields Pipeline – a 530-kilometre pipe from a dam in Perth’s hills all the way to Kalgoorlie. The sculpture’s style is typical for a historic figure, but the next day I visit the second C. Y. O’Connor statue – the stranger one.

In a car – and it’s always a car in Perth – it will take just 10 minutes to drive south from the Fremantle centre to North Coogee and the beach named for the engineer. Fixed about 40 metres out into the water here, you’ll see the sculpture – the one marking the place where O’Connor rode his horse into the Indian Ocean and shot himself in the head.

The same day, March 10, 1902, he left a note: “I feel that my brain is suffering and I am in great fear of what effect all this worry may have upon me – I have lost control of my thoughts.”

It was a dramatic end, and its sculptural commemoration strange – especially given the city in which it exists. Fixed out there in the water since 1999 is a now-barnacled statue of a man on a horse, its bronze now largely green from weathering. The horse is raising its head, as if in great pain, while its impassive rider stares south towards the harbour he designed. That’s one of the strange things about this sculpture: the horse seems more anguished than the man riding it.

The weather is warm, but the water freezing, and I’m not a sufficiently confident swimmer to get out there. I can only get so close. But there it is, the strange commemoration of a dramatic suicide – and nearby, the casual traffic of dog-walkers on the shore.

Tranquillity and weirdness, and I’ll be damned if I can find the place that separates them.

Two days before I watched those boys play cricket, I walked across the same oval with my brother. I saw a small scrap of yellow paper that had been scribbled on, and claimed it. It looked like a shopping list, and I don’t think I was mistaken, but as I read it to my brother its unique character was immediately revealed.

There were four items. The first was “turtle skulls” and the second “pyramid”. Items three and four were unfortunately illegible. Here, I joked, was a shaman’s shopping list – the ingredients necessary for some spooky potion.

At the cricket nets that evening there was a man throwing down balls to a kid. I thought the balls were unhelpful – marked by a sloppy line and length – but I was also struck by the earnestness of the boy’s movement. In pads and helmet, he batted with an exaggerated action – not so much meeting each ball on its own terms but communing with the signature strokes of his heroes, whether these throwdowns deserved it or not.

There it was: consciously or not, the simple striving of youth. Earnest, passionate, emulative. Here were the strokes made by someone who’s seen them played by others but is yet to feel them himself and thus occupies that path to confidence in one’s craft by first passionately mimicking the established.

Stevie emulated his heroes too. Certain shimmies and feints. And then he was gone.

It’s a lot, I guess. Thinking about all this under the tree. But “thinking” isn’t the right word, is it? Perhaps better to say that here, in the shade of this tree while watching boys play cricket, I saw a meteor shower of memories of which I tried, but failed, to make sense.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 6, 2025 as "The view from here".

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