First Test match of the summer: December 1, 2011 and Paul Kelly’s voice sang From Little Things Big Things Grow across the Gabba.

Nathan Lyon, in his first Test spell on Australian soil, dismissed Kane Williamson before lunch, caught by Usman Khawaja, who had been a Test cricketer for a few months. David Warner and Mitchell Starc were on debut.

Starc was replacing Patrick Cummins, who had just broken down after his second Test match. Steve Smith, freshly minted as a Test player, was ironing out his flaws in the Sheffield Shield, where his teammates included Josh Hazlewood, soon to get his national call-up. Seven NSW products received their baggy green caps within months, amid the wreckage of a home thrashing in the Ashes and the Argus review. Twelve years on, today all seven remain in Australia’s first-choice Test XI.

Warner will be the first of the seven to retire, which invites reflection.

Their road has been long but never flat, which could be a Paul Kelly lyric. Among the seven, none have played every match since 2011. Lyon (dropped briefly in 2013) came closest. Injuries interrupted the fast bowlers’ careers, sandpaper Smith’s and Warner’s, while Khawaja turned out to be an acquired taste in the selection room.

The period is shadowed by two events. Phillip Hughes was their contemporary, identified as the pick of that rich crop – a more precocious talent than Warner, Khawaja or Smith – and had been capped two years ahead of the others. He was playing his 16th Test match in Brisbane when Warner, partnering him, was playing his first. Hughes’s death affected all of those teammates in ways that will continue to dawn on them as they get older. The Australian team’s development since 2014 will always contain the mystery of what else it might have been.

David Warner and Mitchell Starc celebrate the wicket of New Zealand’s Brendon McCullum at the Gabba in 2011. Credit: AP

Nor can the disgrace of Cape Town in 2018 be outlived. That event forced Australia into reckoning with their loss of perspective, a naivety about winning at all costs, that had been gathering for decades. One of the better wins of the last five years has been Australia’s victory over their own instincts. The team now led by Cummins, with an ethos led by bowlers rather than batters, plays with more of a bowler’s attitude: more accepting of the ups and downs, less self-centred, more knowledgeable that whether you win or you lose, tomorrow you’re still going to wake up with aches and pains.

As a playing group, their collective achievements have been almost great, just half-a-shelf below the top. They didn’t manage to win an Ashes series in England, whereas their gilded predecessors won four in a row. They couldn’t beat India away and eventually not at home either, whereas the Mark Taylor-Steve Waugh teams reigned unbeaten on Australian soil and won the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, once, in India. The Taylor-Waugh teams dominated South Africa, whereas this team lost to the Proteas at home and away. That said, their 2014 away win was a highpoint for them and particularly for Warner, who scored two brilliant centuries and showed he could prosper outside Australia. Mitchell Johnson bowled pretty well too.