The first hint that today would be different was a rumbling far off, somewhere over the surrounding hills. Was it thunder? Not likely. The sky was diamond bright, the air hot. It was mid-afternoon on the kind of Canberra summer day that dries out your nostrils and turns your boogers brown.
Everything, in other words, was normal. Except for that odd growling in the distance.
Michael Bachelard’s summer or rolling cricket pitches was rudely interrupted.Credit: Alamy
The problem insoluble, I put my head down and returned to my task.
I was making considerable noise myself. Or more accurately, the mechanical cricket pitch roller that was inching me one way up 22 yards of turf, then back down it again in reverse, was making the noise. I was simply enduring it. Yard after footsore yard.
Fresh out of school, I’d been appointed for one week in December as a groundsman at the Royal Military College Duntroon. The job – my first involving actual payment – was to help spruce up the grounds for Christmas. It was 1985 and the $272 wage seemed an unimaginably generous sum. It would buy presents for my whole family.
By February, I was still working there. My aim was to sock away as much cash as possible for my gap-year Europe trip starting in June. On this particular day, my task was rolling cricket pitches. Sometimes, though, I struggled to work out if I was achieving anything at all.
The pitch was one of four on an expanse of adjoining ovals. This one looked more like a patch of springy backyard grass than the rock-hard turf that adult cricketers might expect to play on when they turned up in laundered whites on the weekend.
The roller was heavy, loud, smelly and slow. But as soon as it had passed over a patch of ground, the turf popped back up again, more or less as before. I switched the vibrator on, gave it more oomph. The sound was appalling, the ground quivered under my boots, the grass remained unmoved.
I was toiling to make it pitch perfect. But then the commandos choppered in
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02.01.2024
The first hint that today would be different was a rumbling far off, somewhere over the surrounding hills. Was it thunder? Not likely. The sky was diamond bright, the air hot. It was mid-afternoon on the kind of Canberra summer day that dries out your nostrils and turns your boogers brown.
Everything, in other words, was normal. Except for that odd growling in the distance.
Michael Bachelard’s summer or rolling cricket pitches was rudely interrupted.Credit: Alamy
The........
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