The Don’s letter to PM is an inflated case of revisionism

Sir Donald Bradman watching cricket in Adelaide.

Because Sir Donald Bradman was Australia’s most successful sportsman, it’s probably not surprising that his has become among our most disputed posthumous reputations. Sport excites our passions, and also our protectiveness of them. Mix them with politics at your peril.

Thus this week’s strange interlude in which, almost half a century after the relevant events, Bradman was tossed back and forth in a culture war contretemps, beginning with an overegged story in The Smage from an over-estimated archival retrieval by an overexcited academic.

It transpires that in the aftermath of the election of the Fraser government in 1975, Bradman in his capacity as a private citizen and company director wrote a letter of congratulation to the new prime minister – who, it may be recalled, had won 56 per cent of the two-party preferred vote.

The Smage described this letter, effectively in quadruplicate, as a case of Bradman having “personally intervened at the most explosive juncture of Australian political history”, his “stridently advising then new prime minister Malcolm Fraser on how to dismantle the platform of his predecessor Gough Whitlam”, his having “bluntly instructed Fraser to take a stand against socialism, unions, the media and Whitlam’s legacy” and choosing “deliberately to get involved in steering Australia away from the Whitlam era.”

Had Bradman acted as Fraser’s back channel to Sir John Kerr? Had he mustered a fascist fifth column at the South Australian Cricket Association? No, what Bradman did was express sympathy for the position of private enterprise, for which “the great enemy today is inflation”, and which he hoped in future would be seen as “entitled to rewards as long as it obeys fair and reasonable rules laid down by government”.

In that spirit, Bradman deprecated what he saw as the excess of antitrust and trade union regulation, and hoped that Fraser would concentrate on “vital principles” rather than “trivial matters”.

And that, a few rhetorical flourishes apart, was that. Scrape away the journalist’s adverbial diarrhoea of “personally”, “stridently” and “bluntly”, and one was left with some unremarkable sentiments entirely typical of the period, to which Fraser, far from being “instructed” in anything, sent a cursory and noncommittal reply.

First, two observations. Bradman was a prolific letter writer. An intensely private man, it was probably his preferred form of communion with the world. Many of us, I dare say, cannot remember the last time we sent a letter: for Bradman, whose lifetime mailbag was almost certainly Australia’s biggest, it was a reflex.

Writing to the prime minister was no biggie either. People did it. A lot. Martin Lyons has just conjured a fascinating book, Dear Prime Minister (2021), out of a lifetime of correspondence to Sir Robert Menzies.

Bradman’s specific beefs about the government’s control of the economy, moreover, were then subjects of lively debate – and 15 per cent inflation was a problem for cricket as well as commerce.

Bradman referred, for instance, to his distrust of the Prices Justification Tribunal, and by implication for the government control of prices that had been subject of a December 1973 referendum.

Jenny Hocking reminds us in His Time (2012) of the concern that this referendum, with its “connotations of monolithic socialist governance”, spread about “a pattern of government control over business practice”. It was defeated, as, in fact, Whitlam, at odds with Caucus on the matter, had preferred.

Bradman also referred to the new Trade Practices Act. Again, this is hardly surprising. Thanks to Christine Wallace’s The Private Don (2004), we know that in 1975 a company Bradman chaired had lately sought advice on the act’s application to its business.

One lawyer had advised one thing, another advised the opposite, and the Trade Practices Commission counselled that it would not know until the matter was tested in court, where a heavy fine would be payable in the event of noncompliance. Gee, I wonder why Bradman wasn’t a fan.

The academic who shared the letter with The Smage is convinced that Bradman’s remarks show him “taking that neoliberal perspective that government should only interfere with capital where it is needed to prevent fraud”.

This shows a remarkably cartoonish view of politics – you can be concerned about the regulatory burden on your business without being a disciple of Ayn Rand, the same as you can criticise the regime of offshore detention without being a communist. It is but a short step here to “Bradman’s owning bedsheets reveals sympathy for Ku Klux Klan.”

So far, so silly. But there is literally nothing these days that social media cannot render less informed and more stupid, and so it proved here, thanks first to that strand of progressive thinking dedicated to policing thought crimes of the past.

In these sometimes painfully enlightened times, anything that smacks of a conservative cast of thought is chum in Twitter’s turbid waters. Lengthy correspondence was entered into on the question, more or less, of whether Bradman was, well, nice, or someone of whom we, that is the keyboard classes, should approve.

The consensus, for various off-the-cuff and half-remembered reasons, was, predictably, no. Even m’learned friend Phillip Adams was in there stirring, gaining generous rounds of virtual applause for decrying Bradman as a ‘RWNJ’ – that’s ‘right-wing nutjob’, to those of you not up with the lingo.

Given the iron law that any progressive overreach must generate an equal and opposite pearl-clutching, a core of Bradman defenders then rallied about the Don being “cancelled’’, former deputy prime minister Michael McCormack entering the lists with: “They’ll be wanting Bradman’s statue torn down next.”

All this was, of course, eagerly reported, as was a further bizarre Twitter bust-up, apparently in relation to Bradman’s attitude to apartheid, between Adams and … Kamahl. Coming soon: the Skyhooks reunion with Ossie Ostrich replacing Shirley Strachan.

With the proviso that the straightforwardest answer to the question of whether Bradman was nice is that it hardly matters, let’s try introducing a little nuance.

The nearest we have to a considered take on Bradman’s politics is Wallace’s uneven but useful book, based on Bradman’s 24-year correspondence with liberal journalist Rohan Rivett.

Wallace’s conclusion is Bradman was, as he professed in his letter to Fraser, a political sceptic.

“I guess politics are important,” he told Rivett, “but they sicken me because of their insincerity.”

Bradman’s disapproval of Whitlam might be seen as of a piece with his referring to Sir Robert Menzies as “Ming’’, to Tom Playford as “Uncle Tom’’, and professed unease with their contemporaries Gorton, Calwell and McMahon.

Such self-conscious abdication from party politics is, it’s arguable, a species of conservatism, but Wallace makes the additional observation that Bradman observed affairs “essentially through an investor prism”, noting that his criticism of policies “came under both Liberal and Labor administrations, without discriminating between the two.”

It’s true that sometime Australian Cricket Board member Clem Jones referred to Bradman as “right-wing” – indeed, he did so in an interview with me in 2006.

But from the perspective of Brisbane’s charismatic lord mayor, who grew up amid singalongs of The Internationale round the family piano, I dare say that most people probably were to the right.

The question of the Board and apartheid, on which Adams and Kamahl skirmished, is also more complex than appears.

Jones was the solitary dissenter when the Board, in January 1971, voted privately that a tour by South Africa should go ahead the following season; Jones also kept a contemporaneous note of the confidential advice Bradman gave the Board eight months later when, in the wake of the unruly Springboks rugby tour, it publicly reconsidered.

Jones’ note shows that Bradman was not above a bit of politicking himself. Bradman reported “a long discussion” with the prime ministers of each country, both of whom “had expressed the view and the desire that the tour should not take place”; the Board, however, “must not be seen to be acting on the direction of government” and “to have made our own decision’’.

In this sense, Bradman deserves less credit than he has received from his more ludicrous fan boys for the tour’s cancellation, for the decision was clearly a matter of expedient.

On the other hand, Bradman’s correspondence with Rivett, and also with the anti-apartheid campaigner Meredith Burgmann, also suggest that he took constructive counsel on the issue. Best he could do, seeing he lacked the benefit of Twitter’s massive galaxy brain.

Posterity treats sporting relations with apartheid South Africa as an open and shut case, a decision that was simplicity itself. In fact, 17 years elapsed between the Sharpeville Massacre and the Gleneagles Agreement, and in that period there was extensive to and fro.

Australia had deep historic, economic and diplomatic ties with South Africa. Rightly or wrongly, many grappled uneasily with the idea of severing sporting links. As late as March-April 1976 an International Wanderers XI featuring both Chappells, Dennis Lillee, Ashley Mallett and Max Walker toured South Africa under the management of Richie Benaud.

Ian Chappell’s published view in Chappelli (1976) was: “I am a cricketer and I will play cricket where and against whom I wish.” His view of apartheid makes for interesting reading too: he believed that “total quality between coloured and whites” would be “too much too soon”, because “the majority of coloured South Africans need to be led, rather than lead”.

Stinting to nobody in my admiration for Ian Chappell, I’m inclined to regard his favouring continued sporting relations with South Africa as, shall we say, open to better information and further evolution; and in granting that indulgence to him, I must extend it to others. But the idea that opinions develop and change is something for which we now seldom allow: the requirement is to be “right’’ instantly, on all things, and forever. Not claiming to have any particular insight, but I wonder how our attitudes to relations with China will look some 50 years hence.

Save as a cricketer, I hold no particular brief for Bradman. But praising or blaming his attitudes seems almost entirely pointless unless we are prepared to do the work to understand them better. Unfortunately, we seem at a point where he’s become a kind of Rorschach inkblot: our analyses reveal more about our obsessions than his.