Almanac Literary: A Rare treat in Dunkeld – ‘Book’ your trip now

 

An intro from John Harms:

 

I first met Warwick Hadfield years and years ago – in the mid-1990s. He was a senior sportswriter at The Australian when I was offered a Monday sports column. Being the all-rounder he is, he could turn his hand to anything from news, to features, to snippets of interest (he still can!) And this wasn’t just in sport. He once published a photo of my cat Ablett in a footy jumper (a cut-off sock) that I made for her (yes, Ablett was a female feline).

So it was one of the added bonuses when, having been invited to do a few panels at the 2024 Dunkeld Writers’ Festival, I discovered Warwick would be another of the featured writers. It was a brilliant weekend;  an intimate gathering of friendly people organised magnificently by the committee led by Mary-Ann Brown and Roz Greenwood. (Roz Greenwood is an Almanac member)

Warwick and I had caught up from time to time over the years in that long-distance sort of way. But you are never far from Warwick, because he’s a fixture of Breakfast on Radio National.

I really enjoyed this year’s DWF too. The sports team included Tracey Holmes and Andrew Rule.

During the weekend, I suggested Warwick send some of his scribblings to the Almanac, which he has done. His first piece was a review of a recent Paul Kelly concert in Melbourne.

In this new piece, which acts as many things in one, including an invitation to next year’s DWF, he writes of his visit to Roz Greenwood’s charming (and well-stocked) shop in Dunkeld: Old & Rare Books.

Dunkeld is a picturesque town at the foot of the Southern Grampians, half an hour east of Hamilton. It sits beneath the famous bluff of Mt Sturgeon. It’s well known for the Royal Mail Hotel, which Warwick describes. Dunkeld also holds a race meeting each November – another weekend to experience.

The 2026 DWF will be held in late August.

Thanks Warwick – and Roz and Mary-Ann.

Please sit back and enjoy an old pro’s writing…

 

 

 

“So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world. I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening… like a light in the midst of the darkness.” – Vincent van Gogh 1887

 

It is a joyous coincidence that a few of the important bits of the façade of Old & Rare Books in Dunkeld are yellow, and there is sometimes a pinkness to the sun setting on Mounts Abrupt and Sturgeon. The pilgrimage to this vibrant arts and culture centre, and foody and oenophile nirvana, is happily becoming an annual one thanks to Mary-Ann and Roz, two of the prime movers of the Dunkeld Writers Festival, where scribblers of various genres, abilities and pretensions gather to chat about writing.

This year, with Tracey Holmes, I was a late locum tenens for the much-admired Helen Garner, a late withdrawal.

It was noted wryly from the stage that given Tracey’s determination to get the answers from her interview subjects we had gone from Monkey Grip to Squirrel Grip. Tracey has out a new book, The Eye of the Dragonfly, a fabulous weave through some pretty amazing sports stories in which she keeps turning up as a vigorous antagonist, and we filled the hour and barely touched the sides. Tracey’s book is not yet in Roz Greenwood’s second-hand bookshop just across the palindromic highway from the Royal Mail. But according to another author of renown and fellow Almanac and Dunkeld traveller, John Harms, when the times for it come to the second-hand world, Roz will be full bottle on everything about it, including where to get it, and what it still worth.

 

 

There’s no way, as I once managed to do at a second-hand book store in Crow’s Nest, of slipping a cheap Wisden past Roz. The tweedy store owner in Crow’s Nest must have thought the scorecards from which to conjure soft English summers, or harsh Australian, Caribbean, sub-continental and African ones, looked like the leftovers from Einstein’s chalkboards. Which immediately recalls the story of the English cricket correspondent – “never call me a journalist” – E.W. Swanton when a prisoner of the Japanese during last century’s Second World War. (We live in diminishing hope there will not be even a First World War this century.) Swanton found comfort in the little apricot cricket book after convincing his captors it was not some secret military code.

Roz’s heady knowledge of books of all shapes and subjects has allowed her to fill bookcases and shelves that dutifully bend in the middle and create an aroma as worthy of imbibing as any of Allan Myers KC’s fabulous cellar at the Royal Mail. I once took the greatest of Australian wine writers (sorry Harmsy, not you yet!), James Halliday to a Trans-Tasman wine challenge at the hotel. Peering from under his forested eyebrows, and raising one in admiration, he described the in-house wine list as the best private collection in Australia. And he would have been privy to Rupert’s in the cellar under the dining room at the homestead out near Conargo in the Riverina.

 

 

Now there’s a night to remember, well some could, the crème de la crème of Australian, and The Australian’s, journalism, given full access. Allan Myers’ wines, and the assembled writers, are both ample reasons to be in Dunkeld, but they are equalled and maybe even a bit more by a visit to Rare Books, especially when Roz has hidden a stash of cricket ones under an old wardrobe in the corner. Three were purchased: Neil Hawke’s autobiography is a plainly written record of his rise from champion local South Australian footballer and cricketer to Test opening bowler, sharing the new ball with Graham Mackenzie with an awkward action modern coaches would have tried to bend into production line conformity.

For all his success as a sportsperson, Hawke was unlucky in life, struck down by terrible disease. To help cover the costs of his treatments, he arranged for a fellow South Australian who was going to England to take his career memorabilia and sell it at auction there, with the hope of fetching a much better price from Cricketana lovers. He was horrified to be informed the ship had sunk and all was lost, only to later discover the courier had stolen his goods, sold them, and kept the proceeds. As well as the criminal penalties, the courier ended up on the front page of one of the London tabloids as the “Bastard of the Week,” or as many of Hawke’s old mates put it, a weak bastard.

Book two: Jack Ryder, his story told by Marc Fiddian, was the other king of Collingwood, taking over in summer when Jock McHale left off. For his time at Collingwood, McHale is the greatest of AFL coaches, or as Kevin Sheedy put it in his magnum opus The 500 Club, “the ghost of coaching who hovers above us all”. As well as Collingwood, Ryder served Victoria and Australia as an accomplished all-rounder, and the latter and as a selector, for many far too long when he insisted on picking a club cricketer named Les Joslin to play for Australia, even to tour England, after which he disappeared from view.

 

 

Book three:  The pick of the lot in the bottom of the wardrobe was Douglas Jardine’s monograph on the Bodyline series, with a foreword by the Bard himself, John Arlott. I was unaware Jardine had done one and in it he comes across as far more likeable than the legend created about this stoic product of Winchester School with its cold showers and his apparent cold shouldering of cricket’s niceties that fateful summer. It was worth alone the $20 pencilled inside the cover for the introduction to Chapter 7, the inevitable one on leg theory bowling, a ditty:

 Australia’s writers show their claws

Her backers raged, her batsmen shook

Statesman consulted – and the cause – ?

Our bowling to too good to hook.

It was a poetic way to call Australians whingers without actually saying the word. He noted that to do what his Englishmen did to Bradman et al that summer, the bowlers, one in particular, H. Larwood, had to be particularly skillful at a theory that was hardly new. He also noted before and after the witty ditty that plenty knew Bradman didn’t like the short stuff. In the Larwood biography purchased from Roz the year before, the man himself said it, but again like Jardine in a roundabout way: “Archie Jackson never backed away!” No prizes for guessing who might have. Larwood carried out his captain’s orders pretty much perfectly, as Jardine was carrying out orders from on high to both stop Bradman, and to win the Ashes. “England expects Douglas!” When the brown stuff hit the fans – cricket and governmental – the givers of those orders on high, the Pimm’s brigade at Lord’s, promptly tossed the captain and Larwood under a bus, which the entire population of Australia cheered to the echo, but one which has fallen away over time.

As a schoolboy, I struck up a conversation with an old bloke on the even older Hill at the Sydney Cricket Ground. He told me he had played out there in the middle. The penny slowly dropped, it was Larwood. Eventually, he was allowed to sit on the other side of the ground, in that wonderful doll’s house Members Stand. Jardine’s writing is precise and even occasionally whimsical and I, on reflection, ought not to have been surprised at the latter. Bill O’Reilly told me, having developed a severe dislike of the blighter during the Bodyline series when Bill often wondered if he would get home from a Larwood bombardment to see his beloved Molly, he had been surprised to find Jardine charming and affable when they shared a press box.

Back to the weekend in Dunkeld, where the – what is the collective noun for a bunch of writers, let’s go scribe!? – the scribe of writers was taking the credit for ending the drought, there was also a small but pleasant frisson that I already had many of the other books, rare and not so, in the Greenwood stash. Given the prices nearly written in pencil inside the front cover of some of these, my shelves, while not yet bending, have a price as well as a Wildean value. In the modern milieu, not everyone reads cricket books. Unless it is on their phone, not everyone reads. For those who do, driving for two and half hours past the metal ghost gums dutifully supplying their power to the Victorian grid, or even longer from the vines of the Barossa, it is worth it, even without a writers’ festival.

And to go with Roz’s Rare Books, there is always Allan Myers’ wine collection to, as they say, wash down a top-class meal at the Royal Mail.

To all of which by now a well and truly cheered-up Vincent van Gogh might say “ear, ear!”

 

 

The journalism and sports-writing career of Warwick Hadfield OAM spans half a century. He is also a songwriter, poet, author and playwright. He is the sports correspondent for ABC Radio National Breakfast.

 

 

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