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