Australia Day honours 2020: Ian Healy an Order of Australia winner
Ian Healy has come a long way from his school’s B-grade ranks, and a dream of playing five games for his state side.
As a six-year-old, Ian Healy was given permission to leave class early to play cricket in the school’s ‘B team’, alongside boys twice his age.
Four years later, he was striding out onto the field as a fill-in player for men’s teams while also making the Queensland Under-11 team.
Despite his early success, the cricketing great, who has been bestowed an Officer of the Order of Australia, never expected to play for Australia and had a dream of playing five games for Queensland.
After playing his sixth first-class match for his home state, Healy was called up into the national team in 1988.
“It all fell my way,” Healy, 55, told The Australian. “I was the number two wicketkeeper in Queensland when I was selected to play for Australia.”
Support from captain Allan Border and selector Greg Chappell helped elevate the young Healy into the Test team to tour Pakistan, ahead of Queensland’s first choice keeper Peter Anderson, and he held a stranglehold on the position for more than a decade.
“I had that sort of support early in my career,” Healy said. “It’s a representative team, so you don’t have any right to be in there if you’re not performing.
“You had to be a valuable part of what was building. From the late ‘80s to the early ‘90s was part of a 20-year period where we were very successful. I had so much fortune.”
He went on to play more than 100 Test matches for Australia and 168 One Day Internationals, including eight as captain, and was picked in the Australian Cricket Board’s Team of the 20th Century.
Healy, who retired in 1999, said he was honoured to be named an Officer of the Order of Australia for his “distinguished service to cricket at the national and international level as a player, to the broadcast media, and to the community”.
“I think it’s a surprise but it does feel like an honour, I reckon,” Healy said. “I’m very proud to be an Australian and to live in Australia, so to be recognised is great.”
Healy said he was glad to be given the opportunity, through the platform given to him by his sporting profile, to be able to help nurture younger generations of cricketers.
“It would be hard to justify this award for just a sporting career,” he said. “It’s got to be the work in the community that packages up with a sporting profile. Using your sporting profile for good, does have impacts.
“Whether you’re contributing for fundraising for great causes or actually changing lives by mentoring or creating stuff, it’s just very valuable in society.”
The South Brisbane resident said his wife Helen had made his achievements possible.
“That kind of support is critical,” he said. “Gee, she’s been good.”
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