Cricket-captain-turned-cricket-commentator Richie Benaud died in Sydney this morning. He would have been 85 next October. That last pair of sentences contains, believe it or not, two of the most crucial facts in modern Australian history.
As of the last (2011) census, approximately 24 million people lived in Australia. It is a fair bet that (whatever the Fourth Estate supposes) fully two-thirds of them would struggle to remember – on the optimistic assumption of their ever having known – who Malcolm Fraser was, or who Gough Whitlam was. (From the mere fact that voting at Australian elections is compulsory, it need not follow that voting at Australian elections is literate.)
But every single Aussie now alive, and sentient enough to avoid 24/7 medical care, knows who Richie Benaud was. Solely through 45-year immersion among the Trappists might you have avoided Benaud’s distinctive tenor-cum-baritone, in televised cricket’s commentary box, chauntering with invariable gentlemanliness through the soundtrack of your antipodean life.
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