by Mayukh Ghosh
“Good operator”
That’s how David Frith describes Max Bonnell.
Anyone who has read Max’s books need to be really biased to disagree with that.
The ‘usual’ topics and ‘famous’ names fail to interest Max. He never gets the energy if it’s been done before. Fresh, interesting, and somewhat obscure. That’s what appeals to him.
His most famous work so far has been a book on Tibby Cotter. A book he co-wrote with Andrew Sproul.
And a decade later, they again joined hands to write another book charting Western Australia’s startling Shield win in 1947/48.
But before getting into the book, it is important to understand Max and Andrew’s backgrounds and views.
In Max’s own words:
“I was born in Sydney but my family moved to England when I was six months old. Later we moved to Uganda for six years, then back to England and then back to Australia. There was no organised cricket at the schools I went to then, although sometimes I’d knock a ball around with my brothers. The first great cricketer I knew about was Sam Walusimbi - my father coached him at school and for some years he was the best all-rounder in the country. He opened the batting for East Africa in the 1975 World Cup.
”I didn’t really follow the game until I was 12. But after I turned 12 there was the remarkable 1974-75 Ashes series, which I followed avidly. The player who most captured my attention was Doug Walters - his unique combination of brilliance and fallibility made him compelling to watch.
”My problem was I had no idea how to play, but that summer I spent hours bowling at a single stump in the ground, imagining that I looked like Dennis Lillee. When I finally saw photos of my bowling action it was a rude shock. I was never fast but I learned to move the ball around and bowl accurately. I got into the school team and after that I played twenty years of Sydney Grade cricket as well as some University cricket in England and a season in the Birmingham League. I was an ordinary player but I got to play against some good ones, which was the beauty of the Australian system at that time. I bowled Mark Waugh for 99 once - he was only 17 or so and it was his first season in First Grade. And I opened the bowling to Adam Gilchrist, who played out two unnecessarily cautious maidens. He would have taken me apart on the second day, but he was gone - off to join the NSW Under-19 team.”
Max was introduced to cricket books fairly early in his life and he was not greatly impressed by the junk that was systematically produced by the ‘rich in literature’ sport.
“As far as cricket books were concerned I read all I could but there was a lot of rubbish! I always admired David Frith’s writing though, and his concern for accurately recounting the game’s history made a big impact on me.
”Good cricket writing was not plentiful when I was young. Half the books in Australia seemed to be written by RS Whitington, and they were dreadful - full of inaccuracies, and with strange digressions in which he aired his reactionary political views and whatever grievances he was engaged in at the time (usually with Bradman or anyone who disagreed with Prime Minister Menzies). He was also a terrible apologist for South Africa's apartheid. Jack Fingleton was always engaging and interesting, although (like Whitington) his loathing of Bradman often got in the way of whatever he was trying to say. Then there were endless tour books, and ghosted autobiographies. I can't say I was greatly influenced (except negatively) by the cricket writing of my youth!”
But Max had a great interest in the history of the game and all the ordinary writing couldn’t deter him from trying his own luck in the same field.
“I was always interested in writing and when I went to university (initially to study English), I decided that there wasn't enough reporting on Grade cricket. This was back before the internet, when print media were still important. So, I wrote stories on Sydney grade cricket, which ran in the Sydney Morning Herald, and then I covered Sydney Grade for Ken Piesse's Cricketer magazine. Ken let me run features from time to time, and two of those won NSW Cricket's media awards for the best story on Sydney Grade cricket (something which probably didn't please the real journalists). One of those stories was on Jim Sullivan, whom I interviewed when he was in his nineties - not a well-known player, but his Grade career spanned the years from 1918 to 1944, so he started playing against MA Noble, and later bowled to Bradman. I was interested in the history of the game, and when I started working at a law firm, I was aware that one of the early partners of the firm was Reg Allen, who had played one Test for Australia in 1886-87. So I decided to dig up the story of how that happened, and it turned out to be very interesting. I turned that into a story which Richard Hutton agreed to publish in the English Cricketer (Allen was the uncle of Gubby Allen, and there seemed to be a rule that the Cricketer would run anything about Gubby Allen).
”What that experience told me was that about half of published cricket history at the time was wrong. Maybe that's harsh - but an awful lot was wrong. The first person to write the story tended to be believed later, and in Australia, the first person to write the story was often Whitington, who was unbelievably slipshod, or Jack Pollard, who was a great spinner of yarns but never cared all that much for facts. And what I found was that when you went digging for facts, the true story often turned out to be really interesting. A lot of writers on cricket history will tell you that it's the research they enjoy most - and the trick in writing is not to let your book become the story of your research process. I think David Frith was one of the first writers to look behind the conventional story and dig up unexpected truths, and those of us who have done the same thing since really stand on his shoulders.
”The other pattern that was set here was that I enjoyed writing about things that I found interesting but were, let's say, a touch obscure. Reg Allen? One Test, 44 runs. A first-class batting average of 12.32. Who cares about that? But it was the unexplored areas of cricket history that appealed to me. Who wants to read the 37th biography of Bradman?”
It's been thirty years now and most of the books Max has written are very highly rated by critics as well as the serious aficionados of the game.
Andrew, on the other hand, besides being a keen cricketer, was primarily interested in the British Maritime History.
“I am a History Graduate from the University of Western Australia - I was principally interested in British 20th Century Maritime History. So when I was reading a book about British Cavalry in WW1 and the author mentioned the Battle of Beersheba was where the only Australian Test cricketer was killed - naturally I was curious to learn more - but I was surprised and disappointed to learn - that there was virtually nothing written about him.
”I teamed up with Max Bonnell and we wrote Tibby Cotter - Fast Bowler, Larrikin, ANZAC - which won Australian Cricket Book of the year in 2012. More significantly, the Albert Cotter Bridge was opened in 2015 that crossed Anzac Parade to the Sydney Cricket Ground - I would like to think that our book + awaking the Australian Public to Tibby's loss - was significant in the naming process.
”As a Life Member of the Applecross Cricket since 1980 I would like to play more but time my enemy these days! One of my favourite memories was on a hot afternoon in 2006 the same Saturday when Gilchrist hit the English for a 57 ball 100 I batted out the afternoon for about 23 - ensuring we at least didn't get beaten outright!!”
When I asked Max about the origin of this new book, he said, “Andrew Sproul started it, I suppose. We collaborated on a book on Tibby Cotter over ten years ago. It has had quite a surprising life: I signed a number of them for a bookseller a couple of weeks ago, which is pretty unusual for a book of its type and age.
”Anyway, Andrew wanted to try another book together, this time on the players who played for Australia during the World Series years – he’d known Sam Gannon quite well. I said it was a good idea, but it had already been done – Barry Nicholls wrote a book on this a few years back, and I couldn’t see the room for another. We tossed a few other ideas around, and I suggested a book on Western Australia’s first Sheffield Shield season. We were approaching the 75th anniversary of that event, so there was a bit of a hook for it.
”No-one has really told the story before, and I remember saying to Andrew that some of the players from that season might still be with us. Most of my cricket writing has been on the period before the 1939-45 War, but I’m highly conscious of the need to capture people’s stories while there’s time to do so.
”So, the research process began with tracking down old players. We did this during Covid, so it helped that Andrew lives in Perth and was able to move around freely. Remarkably, when we started out, two of the WA players from 1947-48 were still alive, which was fantastic, but Fred Buttsworth was unwell and he died before we reached him. But Andrew spent a lot of time with Basil Rigg, an all-rounder who made his WA debut that season. Basil not only played in the decisive match in Brisbane, but also has in his home a stump that he grabbed when WA took the last Queensland wicket. I’m not sure that we’d have had a book without Basil.
”And there were two more surviving players from that Sheffield Shield season. I spoke at length with Neil Harvey, one of Australia’s greatest batsmen, who played for Victoria against WA that season, and then made his Test debut later in the season. And Ken Archer, who played for Australia a little later, was in the Queensland side in 1947-48. Both of them were extremely generous with their time and their recollections. The book wouldn’t have been possible without the input of the people who were there.”
Andrew shared his experience of talking to Rigg.
“Basil Rigg - yes I spent quite a bit of time with him - he is the last man standing out of the WA side that won the 47/48 Shield.
”He is a remarkable man - he just turned 97 (his wiki page is a bit out!). He still lives at home with his son Denis is his carer - Denis must be doing a good job as Basil suffered a significant stroke in 1989 which significantly compromised his mobility + independence.
Äs far as the interview process is concerned - Denis + his other brother Brendon were a great help - with the old family 'war stories' to keep things on track. Interestingly, he was more interested in talking about the WA vs an Australian XI which was basically the 'Invincibles' - the all-conquering team that Toured Britain in the Northern Summer of 1948 - which is hardly surprising as he scored 65 in the first inning and got hit in the head with a Keith Miller Bouncer.
”We managed to get an Australian newspaper to do a story about Basil which was published on the 24th of December last year- a really proud moment for the family. See below the image that was published - note the wicket - it was from the winning game against Queensland! It resides amongst a pile of boxes in a corner of his bedroom!”
Talking to people in their 90s and recording their memories is always a tricky task but Max thought that on this occasion it was quite rewarding.
“You can’t just go in and ask things cold - what do you remember about this game or that player? You need to know all the basic facts and use those to scaffold their memories. But of course, the way memory works is that often people retain strong memories of things that happened long ago while forgetting events of a few weeks ago.
”What we found was that the old players we spoke with recalled all kinds of details that you just don’t find anywhere else - what Bradman or Miller said to them, how certain players interacted, how shortages and rationing made it hard to find cricket gear - that kind of detail that adds life to the bare facts.”
Given that the subject was the 1947/48 season in Australia, despite the active presence of the likes of Bradman and Miller, Keith Carmody had to be the central character.
“There’s a good book by Tony Barker on Keith Carmody, but otherwise no-one has written much on the 1947-48 season – which of course is the attraction for me, because if it’s territory that has already been covered, there’s nothing new to say. We relied very heavily on contemporary records, including the newspapers.
”Carmody plays a major role in the book, because he really was the single most important player in the WA team. He was the leading batsman, the captain, the coach – and when the Western Australians went in to the season hoping not to be embarrassed, Carmody went in trying to win.
“Carmody’s thematically important to the book as well, because one of the issues we explore is the manner in which so many players were affected by the war. Carmody was profoundly affected: he had a very traumatic war, but as soon as it finished, he was expected to carry on as if nothing had happened. The result was that he was deeply damaged, although in some ways he continued to function at a very high level. He wasn’t the only one; his team-mate, Ken Cumming, was twice listed as “missing, believed dead” after escaping from exploding battleships.”
A book like this needs to be structured properly, to retain the interest of the readers and, at the same time, state everything that must be stated.
Also, there was a small matter of an Indian team visiting Australia that summer.
“Structurally, it’s chronological, month by month – but it’s not linear, if that makes sense. We do trace the Western Australian season as a focus, but that’s broken up by reference to what was happening in the rest of Australian cricket and in the rest of Australia. I think of the structure as being like a mosaic – you’ll read a paragraph and perhaps not see, in isolation, why it’s there, but when the whole picture forms it should make sense.
”We pay quite a lot of attention to the international season. It was the first tour to Australia by the Indian cricket team – in fact, the first tour India made anywhere after independence and partition. And they travelled to a country that, at the time, was governed by something called the White Australia Policy. That’s not something you can ignore – you need to ask, how did that feel to the Indian tourists, and what was the attitude of white Australians at the time to people of other races?
”So suddenly, the Black Swan has a lot of work to do as a metaphor. It’s the State emblem of Western Australia, but it’s also a metaphor for an event that occurs even though it was considered impossible – and, on top of that, there’s a racial connotation as well.
”While the Indians were touring, there was a black American boxer who called himself the Alabama Kid, who was fighting against a deportation order. So, we look at that contrast: the Indians were treated well, because they were only visitors, but had they wanted to stay, they may well have been treated no better than the Alabama Kid.”
Finding a publisher for such a book would always invite trouble and there was no exception here until Pitch arrived.
“Finding a publisher is a perennial problem. We offered the project to a few Australian publishers and couldn’t attract any interest at all, but Pitch picked it up as soon as we suggested it, and they’ve been very supportive. There’s an Australian distributor, so I hope the book will make its way into Australian bookstores, and Pitch are very efficient at using online marketing platforms. I googled the book to see where it’s available and saw that it’s in online bookshops in places like Norway, Denmark and Japan (where I’m not expecting vast sales).”
And finally, Max outlines the strength and weakness of the project purely from the business perspective.
“One problem with the book is that its appeal might not be immediately obvious – OK, there was a domestic cricket season 75 years ago, so what? Personally, I think the book tells a really interesting story and has a lot to say about the kind of place Australia used to be. But as one the authors, I’m obviously biased.”
The Max and Andrew partnership worked very well ten years ago and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t once again.
The book is available from Pitch Publishing as well from all usual online and physical outlets.