Christos Tsiolkas in conversation

At the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, author Christos Tsiolkas speaks about the themes and ideas that underpin his writing, in particular The Slap.

Following his conversation with chair Antony Loewenstein, he takes questions from a feisty audience, mostly on the topic of the gendered nature of The Slap's reception and the 'likeability' of its characters.
Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, October 2010

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Ubud Writers & Readers Festival



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The future of the Australian media Part 1 & 2

Man Bites Murdoch, this distinguished panel of speakers (Bruce Guthrie, Caroline Overington, Eric Beecher and Paul Barry) discusses the future of the Australian media. They also debate the global influence of Rupert Murdoch, and how News Corp's decisions will affect the future of newspapers in general. Bruce Guthrie is the former Editor of The Sunday Age and the Herald Sun, and author of Man Bites Murdoch. Caroline Overington is an author and Walkley award-winning journalist, currently at The Australian. Eric Beecher is a former newspaper editor and Publisher of Crikey and Paul Barry is an award-winning journalist, current host of ABC’s Media Watch, and James Packer’s biographer.

Presented by MUP and Readings, BMW Edge, November 2010


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Melbourne University Publishing





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Newcastle takes to fresh spin on markets

It’s the weekend and your to-do list is full, as usual.

Meet a friend for brunch, buy groceries, choose a birthday present and fit in time for some afternoon gardening.

But forget about trudging through a shopping centre – you can pick up everything you need while enjoying a day outside at your local market.

Hinton resident and director of NSW Farmers Markets Kevin Eade claims to be one of the first in the country to kickstart a revitalisation of traditional farmers markets.

He said markets across the Hunter now served as a day excursion and an experience to be enjoyed, instead of just a stop on a weekly shopping trip.

‘‘It’s a social experience. You can meet friends down there and it’s a nice ambient showground [at Newcastle],’’ he said.

‘‘It’s about creating a public space and giving life to that, through having people there.’’

Maitland Fair Markets organiser Catherine Blanch said markets were a living, breathing, reflection of what was important to a community.

She believed people were drawn to them because they represented the cultural diversity of a region.

‘‘I would bet that if you go on holidays in a different country and you’re told there is a local market on, you would go, because you want to get a feel for the local community,’’ she said.

‘‘Markets themselves are a reflection of community values and needs at any given time.’’

Ms Blanch said people were interested in taking a new look at the traditions of supporting small business, meeting suppliers and eating healthily.

Stephen Choularton agreed, adding that ambience was the secret to a good market .

Mr Choularton is a director of Organic Food Markets, which organise the Hunter Street markets.

‘‘Not many people hang out around the checkout at a supermarket having a good natter,’’ he said.

‘‘But at the markets you have somebody selling coffee, food to eat on the trot and, because people come regularly, they meet new people and see familiar faces and bring their friends.

Mr Eade prides himself on creating an experience at Newcastle City Farmers and Craft Markets that keeps shoppers coming back for more.

His father was a beef and dairy farmer in Wauchope and he understands the struggles involved with making a living from the land.

‘‘I’m aware of the French markets and Turkish markets that have been running for about 1000 years and have stood the test of time,’’ he said.

‘‘I don’t agree with the fundamentalist model of just having farmers there, but also clothing and toys that make a market interesting.’’

The Newcastle City Farmers and Craft Market features a diverse range of toy and jewellery makers, boutique wineries, plant suppliers and paper goods.

‘‘We aim to make it a one-stop shop, with products to appeal to every customer’s taste,’’ Mr Eade said.

It is these one-of-a-kind items not available in the average supermarket or shopping centre that have helped the markets to evolve into more than just places to stock up on foodstuffs.

Mr Eade conducted a trial market in Morpeth in November 1999 and received an ‘‘overwhelming response’’ from residents interested in buying directly from farmers.

In 2000 he was approached to run a market in the Honeysuckle Railway Sheds but the venture lasted for only nine months because the corporation wanted to start weekly markets.

Mr Eade established the Newcastle City Farmers and Craft Market in April 2004.

He started holding it on a monthly basis, increasing to every fortnight. Last year it became a predominantly weekly event.

The thousands who visit can speak directly to farmers, find out about the food’s origin, how to cook it and even taste-test while perusing pavilions in a village-green atmosphere.

There are now about 140 stalls, including 75 farmers or gourmet food producers selling lamb, beef, trout, barramundi, oysters, fruit and vegetables, preserved foods, jams, sauces, cheese, olive oil and stuffed olives.

‘‘It’s about a social connection, putting a face to the food as the Japanese call it,’’ Mr Eade said.

‘‘People have had enough of over-manufacturing of food and want to directly purchase from someone they trust.’’

Mr Eade said market shoppers liked supporting regional producers while helping to create sustainable communities.

‘‘Let’s say I get pork at [a supermarket]. The girl at the checkout is not going to tell me how to cook or care for the meat,’’ he said.

‘‘People want to be engaged. It’s part and parcel of why this idea works in so many different areas of the world.’’

Hunter Valley Pasta Co has been a stallholder since the markets started and has one of the longest counters at the showground.

Co-owner Meg Panov said the company had designed three new dishes – pork ravioli and rocket salad, roast vegetable salad as well as pasta salad – especially for lunchtime customers at the markets who are looking for a healthy option.

Resident chef Stephane Pois is at the markets every week to demonstrate recipes to adults and children and re-educate customers about healthy eating habits.

‘‘These markets will be an evolutionary process over time,’’ Mr Eade said. ‘‘From initiation, haven’t we come a long way in five years? In another five years I expect it to be twice as vibrant.’’

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Stats analysis: Steve Waugh - An Ashes superstar and much more

Steve Waugh was outstanding against England, and his batting stats in his last 11 years were among the best in the world

Some cricketers are so hugely talented that they have greatness thrust upon them from the moment they begin their international career. Steve Waugh was not one of them. Several months into his career, Waugh was thought to be a moderately talented player - a gutsy middle-order batsman and a useful medium-pace bowler with a huge heart and excellent temperament. What he achieved in his 18 years in international cricket far exceeded those expectations, which is a huge credit to Waugh's skills and his resilience.

Greg Chappell, a national selector when Waugh made his Test debut, admits that Waugh wasn't ready for top-flight cricket when he was first selected, but by the time he finished, he was a run-machine in the mould of the finest batsmen to ever play the game, becoming only the third one to touch 10,000 Test runs, and finishing with an average of 51.06. His ODI stats pale slightly, but only when compared to his Test numbers. He was a member of two World Cup-winning teams, and saved his best for crunch occasions in both tournaments.

Just how consistent he became in the second half of his career can be gleaned from the fact that in nine of his last 11 years, his annual Test average exceeded 49, and in seven of those years it was more than 59. (Click here for Waugh's career summary in Tests.) However, he was much more than merely a batsman: as captain, he moulded Australia into a ruthless unit for whom winning became such a habit that they won a record 16 Tests on the trot. Under his leadership, Australia went from being a very good team to one of the all-time great ones.

As a batsman, his was a career of two parts. In his first seven years, his stats were strictly passable, with an average touching 36 in 46 games. His medium pace was a useful option, fetching him 46 wickets, but at a fairly high average. The only time his performances reached truly remarkable levels was in that famous 1989 Ashes, when he scored 506 at an astonishing average of 126.50; at one stage in the series he had scored 393 runs without being dismissed even once, racking up unbeaten knocks of 177 and 152 at Headingley and Lord's. Both those knocks came in huge wins which set the tone for an utterly dominant Australian performance through the series.

That series was widely expected to kickstart Waugh's Test career, but it didn't quite transpire that way, as the next three years were largely forgettable. That 1989 series was one of three instances - out of the 13 series he played before 1993 - when his series batting average exceeded 50. Exclude that Ashes high, and Waugh's average during this period was an uncomfortably low 29.64, with two centuries in 40 Tests. Not surprisingly, he even had to make way for his twin brother, Mark.

In 1993, another Ashes tour beckoned. Steve Waugh got another chance, he made it count, and then never looked back. His displays in 1993 were almost as good as four years ago - 416 runs at 83.20 - but what transpired thereafter was a huge contrast from what had happened four years back. There was no slump; in fact, Waugh used that as a launching pad to truly show his talent on the world stage, scoring runs in South Africa, Pakistan and West Indies, apart from doing well at home.

The watershed was the tour of the West Indies in 1995, a time when West Indies were still the best team in world cricket. In the third Test, on a trecherous surface in Port-of-Spain, Waugh refused to back down in the face of a fearsome onslaught by Curtly Ambrose, scoring an unbeaten 63 even as the entire team was bundled out for 128. That was to be the only half-century of the match, though West Indies ended up winning the match by nine wickets to level the series. In the last Test, in Kingston, Waugh played arguably his greatest Test innings, scoring 200 and helping Australia clinch a convincing win which sealed the series, and ended West Indies' reign as the best Test team. Waugh ended the series with a tally of 429 runs at an average of 107.25. The next-best for Australia was Mark Waugh, with 240 runs at 40, while the best performer for West Indies was Brian Lara, with 308 runs at 44.

A Test career of two parts

Period	Tests	Runs	Average	100s/ 50s	Wickets	Average
Till Dec 1992	46	2166	36.10	3/ 13	46	44.47
Jan 1993 onwards	122	8761	56.88	29/ 37	46	30.41
Career	168	10,927	51.06	32/ 50	92	37.44

Waugh got used to ODIs much faster, scoring an unbeaten 73 in his third innings and 81 in his sixth. The big difference between the first and second parts of Waugh's ODI career was the amount of bowling he did: till 1992 he bowled nearly seven overs per match and averaged close to a wicket per game; after 1992 he averaged only about three overs per game and took a wicket every three matches.

Waugh's ODI career

Period	Matches	Runs	Bat ave	Strike rate	Wickets	Bowl ave	Econ rate
Till Dec 1992	134	2622	30.48	72.25	129	30.79	4.44
Jan 1993 onwards	191	4947	34.35	78.00	66	42.25	4.74
Career	325	7569	32.90	75.91	195	34.67	4.56

During his peak years in Tests - from the beginning of 1993 to the end of his career - Waugh had a staggering average of 56.88, which was next only to Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid. After scoring only three centuries in his first 46 Tests, he scored 29 in his next 122. Of the 14 Man-of-the-Match awards he won in his career, 13 were during this period of his career. He was clearly a lesser force as a bowler, but that was a trade-off Australia would have happily accepted.

Best Test batsmen between Jan 1 1993 and Jan 6 2004

Batsman	Tests	Runs	Average	100s/ 50s
Sachin Tendulkar	91	8180	61.50	28/ 33
Rahul Dravid	75	6546	57.42	16/ 32
Steve Waugh	122	8761	56.88	29/ 37
Ricky Ponting	75	5821	55.97	20/ 21
Brian Lara	97	8873	53.77	24/ 40
Jacques Kallis	75	5356	52.00	14/ 27
Inzamam-ul-Haq	87	6614	51.27	18/ 35

Throughout his Test career, Waugh relished the challenge of playing traditional rivals England. The two outstanding series in his early years came against them, in 1989 and in 1993. In all he scored 3200 runs in Tests against them, which, among all Australians, is next only to Don Bradman and Allan Border. Waugh's average of 58.18 against them is second only to Bradman's among those who scored at least 2000 runs against them. Of the 32 centuries he scored, ten were against England, including his first two. Fittingly, he signed off with a hundred too, scoring 102 in his last Test against them, in Sydney in January 2003.

Surprisingly, Waugh the batsman was far more effective against England in England than at home: in England, he averaged 74.22 in 22 Tests; in Australia, that average came down to 47.48 in 24 matches. His best Test against them also came in England, in 1997 at Old Trafford, when he scored 108 and 116 in a low-scoring game in which no other batsman scored a hundred, and only one made more than 55. More importantly, that performance completely swung the momentum of the series Australia's way - trailing 1-0 at the time, they levelled at Old Trafford and ultimately wrapped up the series 3-2.

England remained a favourite venue for him in one-day internationals too: in 25 ODIs in England he averaged 54.13, which is his highest in any country.

Best Australian batsmen in Tests v England (Qual: 2000 runs)

Batsman	Tests	Runs	Average	100s/ 50s
Don Bradman	37	5028	89.78	19/ 12
Steve Waugh	46	3200	58.18	10/ 14
Allan Border	47	3548	56.31	8/ 21
Arthur Morris	24	2080	50.73	8/ 8
Mark Waugh	29	2204	50.09	6/ 11
Bill Lawry	29	2233	48.54	7/ 13
Ricky Ponting	31	2363	48.22	8/ 8
Greg Chappell	35	2619	45.94	9/ 12

Through most of his Test career, Waugh batted at No.5 - 142 out of 260 innings came at that position, as did almost 62% of his total runs. His average of 56.28 is the highest among batsmen who scored at least 3000 runs at that position. And his aggregate is the highest too: Shivnarine Chanderpaul is next more than 2300 runs behind him.

Best No.5 batsmen in Tests (Qual: 3000 runs)

Batsman	Innings	Runs	Average	100s/ 50s
Steve Waugh	142	6754	56.28	24/ 29
Graham Thorpe	78	3373	56.21	10/ 18
Michael Clarke	68	3416	56.00	11/ 16
Andy Flower	82	3788	54.89	9/ 22
Mohammad Yousuf	78	3774	53.15	13/ 19
Shivnarine Chanderpaul	100	4409	52.48	11/ 25
Allan Border	70	3071	52.05	9/ 15
Mohammad Azharuddin	94	4346	48.83	16/ 13

Apart from No.5, Waugh also played plenty of times at No.6 - 79 innings, 3165 runs, at an average of 51.04. All those innings at Nos. 5 and 6 also meant Waugh batted lots of times with the lower-order batsmen - Nos. 8 to 11. In all he added 4065 runs with them in 161 partnerships, thus making him the only batsman to score more than 4000 runs with the last four batsmen.

Batsmen with most partnership runs in Tests with the tail (Nos. 8, 9, 10 & 11)

Batsman	P'ships with tail	Runs	Average stand
Steve Waugh	161	4065	26.74
Mark Boucher	134	3559	27.59
Allan Border	131	3301	27.06
Daniel Vettori	146	3079	21.53
Alan Knott	133	3019	23.59
VVS Laxman	104	2942	30.02

Through much of the best part of his career, Waugh was a part of a very strong Australian side. It was a team that was very successful, and Waugh played his hand in those victories, averaging almost 70 in wins. Among batsmen with at least 4000 runs in wins, only three have a better average.

Waugh has also been a part of 86 Test triumphs, which is third in the all-time list, after Ricky Ponting and Shane Warne. In fact, the top eight players in the list are all Australians, which tells the story of their domination quite eloquently.

Highest Test batting averages in wins (Qual: 4000 runs)

Batsman	Tests	Runs	Average	100s/ 50s
Don Bradman	30	4813	130.08	23/ 4
Inzamam-ul-Haq	49	4690	78.16	17/ 20
Kumar Sangakkara	42	4282	76.46	15/ 15
Steve Waugh	86	6460	69.46	25/ 25
Sachin Tendulkar	59	5393	69.14	20/ 20
Rahul Dravid	51	4557	65.10	12/ 22
Graeme Smith	44	4086	63.84	15/ 14
Mahela Jayawardene	49	4200	63.63	14/ 14
Jacques Kallis	68	5390	62.67	18/ 26
Ricky Ponting	98	8314	60.24	28/ 36

Forty-one of those 86 wins came during Waugh's captaincy, which makes him the second-most successful captain in terms of number of victories, after Ricky Ponting, who has 47. In terms of the win-loss ratio, though, Waugh is right on top: Australia lost only nine of the 57 matches in which he led, giving him a win-loss ratio of 4.55, which is the highest among those who captained in at least 25 matches. (Mike Brearley is next with 18 wins and four defeats.)

In almost all the tables listed above, Waugh is at or near the top of the pile. However, there was one area of his game that was surprisingly poor - his record in fourth innings of Tests. For someone who relished a challenge and enjoyed batting when the odds were most stacked against his team, Waugh's fourth-innings stats are surprisingly poor. Given Australia's domination during most of his playing days and his position in the line-up, he didn't need to bat in the last innings of a Test that often, but on the few occasions when he was required, he didn't do a lot. In 31 fourth innings, he scored a mere 613 runs at an average barely touching 25, and scored only two fifties. Among batsmen who've scored at least 500 fourth-innings runs - and there are 92 of them in this list - Waugh's average of 25.54 is - hold your breath - the poorest of the lot. In those 31 Tests, Australia lost 13, and in those games Waugh scored only 170 runs. In the 29 matches they won, his average was 30.33. For some reason, batting in the fourth innings was one challenge Waugh could never master.

Lowest averages in fourth innings of Tests (Qual: 500 runs)

Batsman	Innings	Runs	Average	100s/ 50s
Steve Waugh	31	613	25.54	0/ 2
Marcus Trescothick	33	678	26.07	1/ 2
Virender Sehwag	25	570	27.14	0/ 4
Stephen Fleming	29	709	28.36	0/ 6
Dilip Vengsarkar	25	613	29.19	1/ 3

His overall ODI numbers are significantly poorer than his Test stats, but there were several occasions when Waugh stamped his ruthless presence on games, with both bat and ball. Australia won two World Cups when Waugh was around, and on both occasions he played significant roles. In 1987 he played a bigger hand with the ball, nervelessly bowling the last over in tight run-chases twice: against India in Madras, against New Zealand in a shortened game in Indore (when New Zealand needed seven runs with four wickets in hand and managed only three). In the semi-final against Pakistan, he did his final-over trick with the bat, scoring 18 runs off Saleem Jaffer, which was exactly the margin of victory. In the final, Waugh's bowling again made a huge difference as England, needing 19 from the last two overs, managed only two runs off the penultimate one, bowled by Waugh.

In the 1999 World Cup, Waugh bowled only 18 overs in the entire tournament, but batting and his captaincy were immense. The stand-out performance of that tournament, and Waugh's best inings in ODIs, came in the Super Sixes match against South Africa, a game Australia had to win to qualify for the semi-finals. Needing 272 to win, Australia were struggling for 48 for 3 when Waugh scored a magnificent unbeaten 120 off 110 balls in a stunning display of controlled aggression under pressure.

Overall, Waugh's World Cup record was much better than his overall ODI stats: in 33 World Cup games he average 48.90 with the bat and 30.14 with the ball; he is also one of only four allrounders to score more than 500 runs and take more than 25 wickets in World Cup matches.

Allrounders with more than 500 runs and 25 wickets in World Cup games

Player	Matches	Runs	Bat ave	Wickets	Bowl ave
Sanath Jayasuriya	38	1165	34.26	27	39.25
Steve Waugh	33	978	48.90	27	30.14
Imran Khan	28	666	35.05	34	19.26
Kapil Dev	26	669	37.16	28	31.85

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Gideon Haigh on Steve Waugh - One hundred per cent Australian

Steve Waugh is an Australian Living Treasure. That is not the airing of an opinion but a statement of a fact: he is one in a list of about a hundred nominated and elected by this country's National Trust. It's an eccentric and obviously subjective list. Hazel Hawke, an erstwhile prime minister's wife, is there; the erstwhile husband who left her for a younger woman, Bob Hawke, is not. Hugely popular, widely admired and softly spoken indigenous athlete Cathy Freeman is there; hugely popular, widely admired and extremely noisy indigenous athlete Anthony Mundine is not. In other words, this is no place for controversialists. It is a pantheon in which Steve Waugh fits snugly.
When he first arrived, Steve Waugh was compared to the stylish and attacking Stan McCabe

The martial air of his name extended to the field, where he was as ruthless and relentless as he was self-effacing off of it

No Australian has played more Tests or one-day internationals than Steve Waugh. It's a record as uncompromising as the man himself, and the team he led to success upon success. It was built, moreover, in a relentless forward march. "What about the next game, Steve?" asked a journalist after one night game in January 2000. "Who are we playing?" Waugh responded, adding amid chuckles: "We just get on a plane and go somewhere and find out who we're playing." 

Yet for a figure whose cricket was so embedded in the now, the terms in which Waugh is usually understood are deeply traditional. No sooner had he appeared on the scene than Bill O'Reilly was describing him as Stan McCabe reincarnate; he became known for his friendships with past masters Hunter Hendry and Bill Brown. When he made his first real impact as a Test batsman 20 years ago in England, the praise was for his model technique, of a purity no local batsman could emulate. When he came to the Test captaincy a decade ago, he was lauded for his regular appeals to the past, and an almost demagogic espousal of the cult of the baggy green. Even in articulating the doctrine of "mental disintegration", Waugh was seen as following time-honoured Australian mores: he was the old-fashioned indefatigable Aussie who did not give up a chip of a bail, while expecting what happened on the field to stay there. 

His career knew torrid times. There was the claimed catch of Brian Lara in April 1995, for which, as he put it, he was "carved up" by the likes of Michael Holding and Viv Richards. There was the manipulation of the points system in the World Cup a decade ago, in an attempt to progress the West Indies at New Zealand's expense, after which Waugh famously explained: "We're not here to win friends, mate." Nor did he shore up relations with the media when he muttered, less famously but more pithily, that his press conference inquisitors were a "bunch of cockheads". 

Yet this was a rare dropping of the guard: for a cricketer who played so ruthlessly, and whose team was wont to push the line of acceptable aggression, his career had few personal black marks. He never transgressed the ICC Code of Conduct himself, and was once even its beneficiary. Ian Healy's suspension in South Africa in March 1997 smoothed his path to the vice-captaincy. A stroll through the index of his magnum opus, Out of My Comfort Zone (2005), underlines how seldom he became part of public disputes. One lights hopefully on "moped incident, Bermuda", only to find it refers to minor hijinks at the end of the 1991 Caribbean tour rather than being Australian cricket's secret Pedalogate. 

Off the field, in fact, Waugh maintained an almost sunken profile. In person quite a shy and self-effacing man, he was instrumental in welcoming wives into the Australian team's fold as a kind of civilising influence, receiving the phone call that offered him the Australian captaincy while watching Sesame Street with his daughter. When Shane Warne publicly dissed Adam Gilchrist's leadership aspirations by philosophising that a captain should be more like the Fonz than Richie Cunningham, it was possible to fit Steve Waugh into the scenario as a kind of Howard Cunningham, all rumpled integrity, paternal wisdom and comfortable domesticity. 

Speaking of Howards, the period of Waugh's ascendancy in Australia was encompassed by the prime ministership of John of that ilk, self-styled "cricket tragic" who cheerfully acknowledged himself the most conservative leader his conservative party had ever had. Waugh was not an exact fit with this period. He welcomed the compulsive innovator John Buchanan into his team's inner circle; he sought, with a touch of the New Age guru, to "get to know the guys as human beings and not just cricketers". As his fame grew, and he was compelled to become a public figure, he became as famous for exchanging words with Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela as he did with Curtly Ambrose, putting his reputation to use in a variety of philanthropic works on the subcontinent. 

Yet in an age of compulsive extraversion, Waugh cut a taciturn, even an inhibited figure on the field, lean, dour and unsmiling, to complaints about which he retorted: "If you're in your office trying to work, do you smile all the time?" Instead of flamboyance, the keynote of Waugh's captaincy was continuity. He existed, even in an age of abundance, as a reminder of harder, leaner days in Australian cricket, the last of his generation to have an Ashes defeat on his conscience. He pressed also to create "new" traditions, having a special cap minted for the first Test of the 2000s modelled on the cap worn in the first Test of the 1900s, involving himself in the manufactured memorabilia industry as a shareholder in the firm Blazed in Glory. 

Nor was it just the surname that lent his leadership a martial air. His Tests were frontal assaults, carefully plotted, relentlessly executed. No captain to lead their country in more than ten Tests has a higher proportion of wins or a lower proportion of draws. He believed in rank, in esprit de corps, even in the power of a uniform, embodied in his storied cap, so distinctive in an era of helmets and sunhats. His nationalism was of the same unselfconscious, celebratory if sometimes defensive character that flourished during the 11 years of John Howard's premiership. "I'd like to see Australian people own more of Australia and not sell it all off to overseas companies and corporations," he told an interviewer 15 years ago. "It seems to me that the Japanese own half of Queensland - that's one thing I'd like to see changed." But if all the John Williamson songs and odes to the Southern Cross sometimes seemed contrived, nor were they easily imitable. Waugh initiated the numbering of players' headgear and attire, inviting eminent past players to hand new caps over to Test debutants, beginning with Bill Brown's welcome to Adam Gilchrist 10 years ago. England have tried something similar, but watching Nasser Hussain hand Jonathan Trott his new lid at The Oval was, quite clearly, qualitatively different. Taking his team-mates to Gallipolli sat more naturally with Waugh than with any other leader; when England dropped in on Flanders last year, it looked phoney even before Andrew Flintoff elected to drink for his country. 

	Waugh's baggy green: also an Australian symbol

Quite why Waugh reinforced his captaincy with so many props and symbols is an intriguing psychological question. Some saw it as self-promotion; even now, Waugh has a quiet caucus of detractors in Australian cricket, who see him as out primarily for number one. Waugh himself has answered to the charge: "Life as a full-time professional teaches you to be selfish in many ways." Yet a personal suspicion is that Waugh coveted the captaincy before quite grasping what it entailed, and as a self-contained man found it at first an uneasy fit. The activities and artefacts with which he surrounded his leadership were a means of distributing the burden; he could thereby make himself less an individual, more the representative of a lineage. 

Waugh was famous for his diaries and his photographs. Both can act as means of ordering and controlling experiences, putting a comforting distance between the act and the observer. Sport, of course, is replete with ego, and Waugh could not have competed without a sizeable one. But his wife Lynette, who writes as perceptively of her husband as anyone, has noted: "Stephen has never - even as a baby, I'm told - liked a lot of attention." And it's telling, I think, how swiftly and completely Waugh has receded in public consciousness since that final, rather fevered farewell season six years ago; not for him the love of and comfort in the limelight of his most eminent contemporary, Shane Warne. "Treasure", of course, is something proverbial tucked away, not necessarily recognised as such, even when in plain sight. In this sense, the National Trust truly knew its man.

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