Peter Roebuck: 2 years gone: A Final Letter

Dear Peter, 

It is 2 years now and I still miss your voice. I click on the sports section in the smh and there’s still a part of me that expects to see your lively pieces. It took me a year to listen to my favourite broadcast of cricket on the ABC because I knew that I wouldn’t be hearing from you. As a writer, you were supreme in the field of cricket journalism. Your opinions were certainly open to question from time to time, but the way you wrote them was everything a reader could hope for.  

I loved that you were a literate cricket writer. I loved that you had so obviously studied history, I loved that you were an erudite man. Here was an intellectual who loved cricket, my uncle was the intellectual in our family, but he always scorned me for being so enamoured of sport. You were my bulwark against the idea that I was wasting my talents by following games like cricket.

Your comments and your articles helped me realise that cricket was a part of the world, and a part of the history of the modern world, and that the game reflected them both very well. One can study cricket and see many of the great themes of modern British, Commonwealth and Australian history writ large through it. May I take a moment to recommend Ramachandra Guha’s superb A Corner of a Foreign Field for any who doubt just how thoroughly cricket is entwined with history?

I admired your passion for the difficulties playing cricket at a high level presented for ordinary people in the West Indies and in Zimbabwe. You placed cricket in the world, rather than trying to separate the two.

After a day’s play, I would stay awake until the clock ticked over midnight, so I could log on to the smh.com.au and read your latest account of the great deeds and world changing events that had occurred the previous day between 11 and 6. For they were great deeds, there was always a feeling in your articles that the events of the previous day had mattered, they were a chapter in a much larger, more important story than just the runs that were scored or the wickets that were taken. Sometimes I felt that desire to fit those events into an expansive narrative caused you to get some additional exercise in jumping to conclusions, but that was all part of the fun. 

My biggest criticism of you was for your article demanding Ricky Ponting be sacked, which I felt was a huge overreaction as I detailed here. But it certainly demonstrated your influence as *everyone* picked up on that story. I think you realised it was an overreaction later on, as I don’t recall you ever being especially critical of Ponting subsequently. You were saying nice things about his batting after it had become clear to my Ponting biased eyes that the great man was past it!!

 

But, there was another side to you besides the great writer. The fact that you had gotten in trouble for caning an adult student of yours was well known and created quite a controversy. At the time I was terribly worried that the smh and ABC would distance themselves from the scandal in the most straightforward manner, by giving you a termination notice. It was, I felt at the time, a reflection upon the good sense of both organisations that you were encouraged to carry on. And years passed, and I continued to enjoy your writing, and the question that story raised, of had it happened again, wasn’t one that I paid much attention to.

However, ignoring something doesn't always mean it will go away, as soon as I heard of your suicide I suspected something similar was afoot, as did many others, Adam Shand later produced a detailed, thoughtful, balanced profile that made it very clear that the term predator was not an unreasonable label to apply to you without forgetting that you were human and the evil co-insists with the good.

Thank you,  Peter,  for the writings and commentary that I so loved. I'm sorry you didn't feel more comfortable with yourself as you may have been able to find what you needed from people who were genuinely able to give consent. Adults they may have been, but their poverty left them with little choice but to do what you wished, irrespective of whether they personally wished to engage in such activities. I hope that they find peace as they go forward in their lives and that when people remember you, that they speak of you as you were, not as you wished to be. 

Lindsay Went

Australian Test team

No huge surprises here, I can't say I'm thrilled with George Bailey being selected, I like the guy and respect his performance in the shorter forms of the game, but I don't think his performance in the longer forms, especially last season, justifies his selection. I'd have preferred Phil Hughes, who's been dropped far too often despite reasonable results in his Test career.

I think we could give England a game here and there, but an England series victory is certainly expected. It really sucks having a crap team!

Going forward as a writer

Writing fulfils me in ways that few things ever have. The artist in me is a writer or he is nothing, the creative impulse has only ever expressed itself in me through writing. Yet I write so little. 

 I want to write children’s books, to be a children’s author. Partly because I think I’ve got still got a fair connection to the boy I was, partly because I feel far more comfortable around kids than I do around adults, which is not to say that kids can’t unnerve me now, just as they did then.

Maybe it’s because many of my favourite moments in teaching have come from reading stories to kids – how much better would it be if I was reading them some of my own?!

 I’m not too old to be a successful writer. And success in writing, for me, is not such a huge thing – being read, finding an audience, would be a success. I don’t need to be a Mem Fox or a Paul Jennings or a John Marsden. Finding an audience for my work would be great and committing myself to that work!

I want to be a creative person, I want to be a writer, to let myself be expressed through my keyboard, to spend quite a bit of that time which remains to me making connections, connections that may stretch beyond my own brief journey. 

There is just one obstacle blocking my path to being a successful writer.

Me.

I have been lazy while writing takes effort, writing takes work, it takes sitting down at the keyboard and coming to it with real focus and intensity. It requires a decision to spend far less time playing games and far more time creating.

I know full well that I possess the capacity to write things that will attract and hold an audience. I know because I’ve done it before and because I have read enough to understand the rhythm of language. My understanding of that rhythm is good enough to trust, given a willingness to work hard at it.

Another truth: I am slowly building a scenario where the time will continue to be there to write, a successful tutoring business is developing and it’s not going to take that many hours compared to some other jobs. Additionally, it’s not impossible that some of my creative writing could earn money. Not lots of it, sure, but a few dollars here and there is a useful hobby.

The reason I haven’t written more is that I am afraid to do the work, afraid to open myself up and COMMIT to that relationship, to write with my whole heart, to let writing be the driving passion of my life other than my wife and family. 25 years ago, when I wrote those essays in my diary, I realised that writing had its hooks in me.

Ever since, I have played the coward, too scared to get out there and play, too afraid to do the work to make it happen.I haven’t truly engaged with my writing. Consequently, I have written nothing of consequence and allowed others, possibly no better than I, to connect with their audiences while I dreamed of having an audience.I didn't dream of finding an audience because finding an audience implies that you might do some work to find it!

Audiences don’t come to you through dreams, you have to build them, you have to commit to who you are and admit who you are. The only way to be a writer is to write. Every day that I live there is time available – turn the glass teat from something to suck into something to fill, be the breast, not the nipple.

Writers write, Lindsay Edmond, and for too long now, you have played at writing, afraid to commit yourself to it. WHY? It’s not like you’re committing yourself to anything else, you’re not going to be a politician, you’re not going to be a teacher and your tutoring business is very much a means to an end. A means you believe in, yes, but a means nevertheless.

Currently, when the time comes, all I have to say that I was here and was of some benefit to this world, is Kristy and Cassie. Not a worthless legacy, granted, but less than it might have been. 

If I reach my father’s age, will I be pleased I was a Bejeweled Blitz champion, will I gain great satisfaction from the hours spent on ICC after all my friends left?  Will I rejoice in how often I blasted the computer on Warcraft III as a human player? The obvious answer may be no, yet I give a different answer every time I play those time wasters.

 

I opened my blog post topics folder and there’s a good 50 potential posts listed there and this piece here is one that also belongs there – I’ve kept these types of pieces for my private journal, but the blog is the right place for many of them.

My blog doesn’t need to be focussed on a particular theme, if I write with consistency and passion then regular themes will develop over time and attract an audience. There are clearly some themes in that list of blog topics.

 Going forward, then, I must commit myself, I have the ideas for my blog, so I must seek to write something for it every day, not post every day, but write every day.

Ideas for writing more generally will come, I need to start writing down those ideas and then attempt to bring them to fruition, I recognise that the overwhelming majority of my initial attempts to write fiction will be shit, but out of  that manure will come compost for future writing crops.

I propose to post a minimum of 3 blog posts a week for the rest of the year, equalling a total of 21 blog posts by December 31.

My specific goal for longer term writing is to create a list of ideas to write about and to have made a start on some of them by the end of January.

The needs of my business actually will take some time up over that period but the time will be there, should I but choose to use it!

Either I choose to be a writer, or I choose to keep doing what I have done best, which is bullshitting myself and everyone else.  

You can’t write well with a strait jacketed soul.