On Aussie Dads
The first in a series of regular Ashes newspaper columns from an anonymous former Australian Test cricketer
I see the Poms are at it again, sauntering into Perth like they own the joint, bleating about the age of the Australian squad for the first Ashes Test, calling them ‘Dad’s Army’. This from a nation whose idea of a new monarch is someone in their seventies. Spare me.
Well, let’s get one thing straight. Dads are the best bloody thing about this mighty land down under. Right after mums, who are the other best bloody thing about it. Maybe even better, because they smell cleaner and remember your birthday.
Aussie dads cleared scrub, laid roads and built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Aussie dads survived floods, fires, droughts and Dan Murphy closing hours. Aussie dads fought venomous brown snakes, ravenous salt water crocodiles, redback spiders, box jellyfish, swooping magpies, blue-ringed octopi, boxing kangaroos and the political career of Pauline Hanson. And Bazball is supposed to scare us? Get real.
When Gilly became a dad, he could suddenly fix anything with a roll of duct tape and a can of WD-40. Pidge as a father could resurrect a dead lawnmower with a firm talking-to, reverse a boat trailer in one go while half the caravan park watched, and cook a perfect snag on the barbie while watching Bathurst, drinking a beer, and explaining to a second cousin from Tuscany that drop bears are absolutely bloody real and you’d better get that Vegemite behind your ears if you wanna stay safe from them.
Aussie dads - heroic father figures such as Dizzy or Binga or Boof - can do it all, without complaining and without sooking. Without a single HR meeting or emotional support animal. And without once asking for directions.
And in between working their guts out, an Aussie dad will find the time to bowl to their kids in the backyard from the day those little buggers can stand. Over after over. Hour after hour. Relentless as a Nullarbor headwind. An Aussie dad doesn’t need to be fast - he just needs to know where you’re weak. And believe me, he knows exactly where you’re weak.
And let’s talk about armies, you pasty-faced galahs. Let’s talk about Gallipoli, where you mongrels sent us on a suicide mission, only for us to turn that military disaster into a critically acclaimed film starring Mel Gibson. A cinematic classic that, at its very heart, riffs on the idea of spring-powered legs, if you can imagine such a thing in 1915, almost seventy years before James Cameron invented Terminators. That’s the kind of army you’re dealing with.
The Australian soldier is pound-for-pound the best fighting man the world has ever seen. That’s not me saying it - that’s Rommel, that’s the Japanese, that’s everyone who’s ever had the misfortune of facing us, from the Viet Cong to the US America’s Cup yacht team.
Frankly, age is just a number, anyway. And, as the Queensland educational system made very clear to me in my many years within - numbers aren’t real. Instead, as Tugga once explained to the entire 1999 World Cup squad before we won the whole bloody thing, numbers are, intrinsically, philosophical constructs - abstractions of isomorphic identities. Now does that definition sound like it makes one scrap of difference to how well you play cricket? Stone the crows, Shane Warne couldn’t do long division to save himself, and he took 708 Test wickets in between dressing room durries every other drinks break.
Age is meaningless. George Bailey could pick a team of literal babies and still retain the Ashes. That’s the power of the baggy green. Imagine eleven teeny-tiny babies with itsy-bitsy baggy greens on their still unhardened skulls. That’s bloody adorable. Like watching Marto bat, or a baby wombat learning to dig.
And I’d back these brave Aussies tots in. Because those adorable little baggy green babies have true blue Australian DNA coursing through their teeny-tiny veins.
But you’re not playing babies, you moaning bloody Poms. Although you’d like that, wouldn’t you? An opposition that drools as much as your selectors do whenever they spot another county player with an average of 32? Honestly, I wouldn’t let Zak Crawley near a baby for fear he’d edge it straight to second slip.
No, you’re not playing against infants, you cowardly lickspittles. Your Jofras Archer and Marks Wood and Guses Atkinson won’t get to bounce babies on a hard but cracking WACA surface, as much as they might pray for such an opportunity, the sick maniacs that they are.
No, instead you’re up against a dad’s army. Which means you’re up against battle-hardened veterans with the fighting spirit of the finest soldiers ever to wear a uniform, powered by the paternal strength that comes from years of carrying grocery bags in one trip because two trips is for quitters, from explaining why we can’t stop for McDonald’s when we’ve got food at home, and from fixing the WiFi by turning it off and on again.
A team of blokes who can bat for six hours in 40-degree heat because they’ve spent thirty summers working on the roof. Of bowlers still firing them down in the final hour of the fifth day of the fifth Test, even though the baking sun’s hotter than a stolen Torana, because they’re fuelled by the fury of refereeing countless fights between siblings on six hour road trips. And of fielders with reflexes trained by years of stopping toddlers from touching hot things, grabbing sharp things, and putting God-knows-what in their mouths. Reflexes that allow them to snare anything within arm’s reach, like Punter at cover point before your lot turned him into a commentary robot.
We’ve driven to Bunnings three times in one afternoon for the same bloody project. We’ve scraped off sunscreen and sand after a day at the beach, until the bathroom looked like the Sahara. We’ve plucked bindies out of our bare feet after mowing the lawn without shoes and removed huntsman spiders from the house with our bare hands. We’ve wrestled wheelie bins in cyclones and eaten burnt toast that our kids made us for Father’s Day. We’ve watched Frozen 47 times.
We are fear incarnate. An army of sunburnt, stubborn, pigheaded Aussie dads. Good fucken luck.
And welcome to Australia.