By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
From David Boon sinking 52 tinnies on a flight to London to an ageing Bob Hawke’s SCG skoll, Australian cricket culture has always been soaked in beer.
But under captain Pat Cummins’ leadership, the Australian men’s test team has changed, and so has its relationship with beer. By which we mean that it isn’t just VBs and XXXX getting cracked in a dressing room that is now embracing the odd craft beer.
In fact, CBD can exclusively reveal that Cummins has become the first investor in Mountain Culture Beer Co, a Blue Mountains-based craft brewer based a stone’s throw from the skipper’s childhood home.
Pat Cummins with Mountain Culture Beer Co founders DJ and Harriet McCready.
“Mountain Culture is from where I grew up [in the Blue Mountains]. Their new brew pub in Emu Plains is right across the road from where Dad worked for 30 years, and I drove past that site basically every single day in my childhood,” Cummins told us.
Founded by DJ and Harriet McCready in 2019, Mountain Culture has been an upstart success, achieving 33 per cent year-on-year growth. The pair approached Cummins after seeing him drinking the beer. He’s a big fan of the moon dust stout.
Cummins’ crafty investment is another sign of the vibe shift he’s brought to the captaincy – piping up on issues like climate change (to the ire of a few barely relevant right-wing pundits), taking time out for family all while leading a team that has won everything it could under his leadership. Asked about balancing expectations placed on a captain with being his own man, Cummins described it as a “wrestle”.
“Cricket’s very traditional, and it’s been very prevalent in Australia for decades. So all of us players have an eye on what’s been done in the past,” he told CBD.
“But the reality is times change, we change, we’re different people. So when I was given the job of being captain, I wanted to make sure that I did it my own way.”
With all eyes on this summer’s blockbuster Test series against India – always a hard-fought contest – CBD wanted to know which opponent Cummins would be most keen to share a post-game beer with. The answer – one of the opposing pacers.
“Maybe one of the bowlers in the India line-up will sit down and have a beer after the series and talk seam position and things like that. It’s not very glamorous,” he said.
Your move, Jasprit Bumrah.
Buy the Book
US vice president-elect J.D. Vance’s evolution from New York Times bestselling author and fierce critic of Donald Trump to the MAGA heir apparent has been a masterclass in political about-facery and boot-licking.
It’s also been good news for the News Corp empire. In July, after Trump made Vance his running mate, copies of Hillbilly Elegy, the 2016 memoir which made the now Ohio senator liberal America’s favourite white working-class cultural translator, began flying off the shelves, much to the benefit of its Murdoch-owned publishers HarperCollins.
Vance’s book sold 877,000 units in July alone, and according to News Corp’s quarterly results, it moved 1.5 million copies across all formats during the full quarter. Vance’s tome also helped the book publishing division boost revenue $21 million, or 4 per cent compared to the previous year, according to last week’s results. Bible sales remained “robust during a time of acute political uncertainty and intense global conflict,” News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson told investors last week.
Departure Lounge
We return to Canberra, where in recent weeks, the biggest political story has been the issue of flight upgrades, and what freebies our elected representatives are getting from airlines.
Last year, as Qantas lurched through its year from hell and chief executive Alan Joyce scurried for an early exit, a few MPs, including teal independent Monique Ryan and jacked ACT senator David Pocock tore up their memberships to the national carrier’s exclusive Chairman’s Lounge.
The release of former Financial Review columnist Joe Aston’s new book on the airline (coincidentally titled The Chairman’s Lounge), and the subsequent backlash over politicians’ flight upgrades, has triggered another exodus of MPs from that exclusive club.
Teal independents Allegra Spender and Kate Chaney have promised to quit the lounge. And last week, fellow teal Sophie Scamps, who recently told this masthead she took up Qantas’ offer only after struggling to get work done at a departure gate, has quit the lounge, according to her register of interests.
Not like anyone actually needs time in a lounge when commuting between Sydney and Canberra. But the gesture was certainly noted.