Richie Benaud: perfect example of the educated Australian speaker

Cricket commentator Richie Benaud’s voice was almost the last perfect example of what we once called educated Australian.

Illustration: John Kedulka

Like everyone else, when I heard of ­Richie Benaud’s death I felt as though I had lost a friend. I never met Benaud and we should be cautious about judging, even judging well, people whom we know only through their electronic presence. TV is an intimate medium but it is easy for this intimacy to be fraudulent. Saints on camera can be beasts off, and vice versa.

But even leaving aside all the tributes to Benaud from those who knew him, I feel in my bones a confidence about his equanimity, his good temper and good sense. Cricket broadcasts are surely close to unique in television, running as they do for six or seven hours a day across every day of every Test of a long summer, and in all the one-day games as well.

I think Nine and the ABC both make a mistake in changing their cricket commentary teams for the Twenty20 matches. The things we like about the commentators who are so familiar to us can save a dull game and make a grand game even better.

All the decades of watching and listening to Benaud gave you an unmistakable sense of an intelligent man blessed with common sense, urbane and fair-minded. One remarkable thing about Benaud was his voice, more specifically his accent. Benaud’s voice, it strikes me, was almost the last perfect example of what we once called educated Australian.

For one memorable year in high school I studied as a formal subject the art of speech. It was taught like music, with theory and practice both.

Educated Australian was the high point at which we aimed. It was once achieved routinely by ABC news readers. It is the sort of accent you hear on old newsreels of Robert Menzies or indeed Don Bradman.

This was a very specific Australian accent, classless, correct, clear and without trace of social or regional background. It was not the faux larrikin exaggerated working-class Jimmo and Micko and Davo bonzer bewdy mate stuff that you get at one end of the scale, nor was it the affected, upper-class, Oxbridge Australian, which is happily less popular these days, or the cringe-making anglicised affectation of a Geoffrey Robertson, or even the exaggerated long As and twee political correctness, often enough adenoidal, of the earnest, modern, inner-city Green.

Educated Australian was clear, crisp, correct — like the sound of a ship’s bell on a hot summer’s day.

I did not know until his death that Benaud was born in Penrith, certainly when he grew up no centre of particular affluence nor yet of particular poverty. Any intelligent Australian could aspire to speak as well as Benaud. Of course Benaud’s speech patterns were updated a bit from Menzies and Bradman.

Too often Australian speech, not least on TV, is characterised by a certain slovenliness. For some, there is a lingering echo of the antique and always foolish notion that to speak roughly somehow implies a bold rejection of English class values.

Educated Australian is a bit like a good batting technique. It doesn’t rob you of colour. It allows you to inject colour precisely where you want it, through emphasis, pause, rhythm. And of course the very occasional and judicious profanity in the context of educated Australian is all the more telling a verbal blow. The last mainstream Australian politician to practise this kind of plain, clear speech is John Howard.

He was never regarded as a great orator, like Menzies or Gough Whitlam, or even Bob Hawke in rhetorical combat. But Howard, like Benaud, almost always projected a clear, straight, true sound, in which the quality of common sense and fair judgment seemed to inhere in the very shape of the words themselves.

I interviewed Howard a lot and was struck by how seldom he used the ten-dollar word. He would “stick up” for things; a good policy was “practical”.

Like Benaud’s, his diction was clear, unhurried without being ponderously slow. He had pet phrases but gave you the impression of speaking normally in an educated conversation.

I’m not suggesting everyone should speak like Benaud. Educated Australian was always an ideal rather than a common practice. But it would be no bad thing if a few more of us tried for the ideal.