Malcolm Knox's Blog, page 2

An Australian on the Ashes: We've got other things to be proud about

Team sport prowess and national pride have always been inseparable in Australia – but this might mark a turning point

Now that you know what it feels like to be us, we're starting to realise what it feels like to be you.

Australians, historically unable to separate national self-esteem from prowess at competitive sports, have suddenly found other grounds for pride. As our cricket team was put out of its misery this week, Sydney psychiatrist and author Tanveer Ahmed pointed to our "11 Nobel prize winners, the cochlear implant, Google Maps and internet Wi-Fi", not forgetting our economy and currency that are, in the local patois, crapping all over yours. (Of all the Barmy Army's songs, most noticeable is the deleted one: "We're fat, we're loud, three dollars to the pound.")

It may be hard to credit, but there is a plurality of acceptance in Australia about the Ashes defeat, as there has been in recent years about our decline in tennis, Olympic sports and the rugby codes. Only in Australian Rules, which the historian Manning Clark once called "the ballet of the working class", do we still rule (take that, Ireland!)

Have we outgrown not only the narrowly Anglo-Australian pacifier of Ashes cricket, but our reliance on sport itself? There would be something epochal in it if so. Australians, a materialist people, have loved sport because it's based on numbers. Now our chest-thumping goes to other numbers: our 3% GDP growth, our US101-cent dollar, our squillion-dollar mining companies.

Something is changing in the Australian physiology, and it is a growth in what might be called vigorous pastimes. The fastest growing sports in Australia are running, cycling and gym – for exercise, not competition – recreational surfing, snowboarding, mountain-climbing and skateboarding. Men are not deserting their families on Saturdays to play cricket; rather they are taking them on walks, swims and rides. Traditional team sports, in terms of popularity and participation, are flatlining.

But humility, from us, is hard to trust. Vince Lombardi was an American, but he might have been referring to Australians when he said, "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser." We're not really good losers. Not for long, anyway.

The AshesCricketAustraliaMalcolm Knox
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Harbour nights: Camping in the middle of Sydney harbour

There are six islands in Sydney harbour but only one where you can camp - and enjoy some of the best views in the city

As you follow the Parramatta river inland from the Sydney Harbour Bridge, there are fewer and fewer of the usual picture-postcard images of the famous harbour. Instead of the Opera House's sails, the craggy majesty of the harbourmouth and the tall pine trees of Manly, the journey west reveals varied reminders of Sydney's mixed past as a working and convict port.

Cockatoo Island, just eight minutes by river cat from Circular Quay, doesn't even look like an island. Most of the other five harbour islands are wooded national parkland, but Cockatoo is dominated by a concrete water tower, flat stretches of wharf and derelict factories. From a distance it seems to merge with the industrial shoreline, but though it might not be pretty you sense that it has a story to tell.

And indeed it has. The island has been a prison, a workhouse, a reformatory for wayward girls, a quarry, a prison again, a shipyard, a military installation, a contaminated post-industrial site and now, incredibly, it has been reclaimed as a party venue and campground, the only island in Sydney Harbour where overnight stays are allowed. And that is why we are here: to do what until last year very few Sydneysiders had ever been privileged to do - camp in the middle of the harbour. "We" are myself and my wife, our six-year-old son and five-year-old daughter and this is our first night together in a tent; I cannot think of anywhere better to spend it.

One of my least pleasant childhood memories is of camping trips in Australia. My father, an engineer, took us to places of great interest to himself: campgrounds by massive dams, hydroelectric stations and other engineering triumphs. The bad memory is not of the sights, which even I got to enjoy, but rather when my father was putting up the tent and muttering or swearing at my mother, myself, my brother, or the stupid bloody tent.

Resigned to the similarities between father and son, I've been avoiding camping partly because I don't ever want to erect a family-sized tent. Fortunately at Cockatoo Island the tents are ready assembled, arrayed in khaki rank and file on the island's grassy northern flank like an army camp. Self-inflating mattresses are provided, and we only have to bring our sleeping bags, pillows and clothes. There is a cafe at the landing stage no more than 50m from our tent. It's all probably an affront to the purist camper, but purity be blowed; I want to break this family into camping gently.

After "setting up camp" - dropping our bags in our tent - we walk around the island. It takes no more than an hour. The children are fascinated by the rusty cranes, dry docks and ghostly buildings now used as backdrops for film sets, industrial-themed parties, music festivals and fashion shows.

There are not a lot of organised activities on the island, the most appropriate for keen young campers being kayaking around it. A lap, taking about 45 minutes, is enough for our wobbly efforts, but the more serious kayaker could poke around for hours amid the slipways and docks while taking in views of Balmain and Birchgrove to the south, Woolwich to the north and Darling Harbour to the east. My son points out the Harbour Bridge and city skyline, and it's hard not to be infected by his excitement: these are incredibly beautiful views from an angle not commonly enjoyed.

After kayaking, we shower in the new amenities block and collect our "barbecue pack" from the island's Muster Station Café. This is civilised camping. The pack consists of T-bones, sausages, salad, bread, plates and cutlery. Alcohol may not be brought on to the island but it is served at the cafe, and from all indications is consumed in the liberated style we Australians tend to associate with being on an island.

What follows is an enlightening evening, anthropologically. We mingle with campers in the barbecue area, sharing hotplates and tongs and tables and benches. Everyone we talk to is a local. Sydneysiders seem to have just found out about the place, and those who are here are keen to make a night of it. We don't mingle quite as much as some - the place has an exciting effect on the many teenagers. We wrangle our own extremely stimulated children into bed and under our (supplied) camp lantern play a game of (supplied) Scrabble. The evening ends with a spectacular and momentarily worrying electrical storm, but our tent holds fast and we drift off to sleep to the accompaniment of music and snatches of conversations from the passing Saturday night harbour cruise boats.

The next morning the children are up at first light. We find them sitting on the boulders that ring the island, watching the boats and talking to our neighbours. We spend Sunday wandering about, eating a very worthwhile full cooked breakfast at the cafe, and taking an official island tour. The island's central plateau is cut through with a network of echoing tunnels, through which the children run wild.

Every bit of our camping weekend is enjoyable, even the late night and early start, and my daughter pronounces it her "most favourite weekend in the whole universe". A five-year-old is prone to exaggeration, true, but the sentiment is not open to debate. As we look from Cockatoo Island to the shore and see the massive houses and gardens sloping down to the water, we realise that their owners paid millions of dollars just to get the same views and smell of saltwater that we have here.

• Sydney Ferries (sydneyferries.info) from Circular Quay to Parramatta River and Woolwich stop at Cockatoo Island several times a day; one-way tickets cost $5.20 for adults, concessions $2.60. Camping (0061 2 8898 9774, cockatooisland.gov.au) costs A$45 a night if you bring your own tent, A$75 for a pre-erected tent including two mattresses, two camping chairs and a lantern. From 1 May prices are changing to $30pn midweek/A$45pn weekend for site hire and A$75pn midweek/A$95pn weekends for the full camping package. For twice-daily 90-minute tours of the island ($18 per adult), self-guided audio tours ($5) and kayak hire, call +2 8969 2100 or go to the Muster Station Café (+2 9810 2733, musterstationcafe.com.au).

• Malcolm Knox's novel Jamaica is published by Old Street, £10.99.

SydneyAustraliaCampingMalcolm Knox
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Trouble in Australian sport

For years, Australia has been pound-for-pound the greatest sporting nation, winning golds, grand slams and World Cups, taking particular pleasure in crushing England. But cracks have started to show. Here an Aussie explains where it's gone wrong and how failure is affecting the country's psyche

Thirty years ago, if you flew over an Australian city what would surprise you was not the swimming pools, but the tennis courts. Australian suburban backyards of every demographic stripe had one, or had one within reach: grass, sand, clay, sometimes concrete. Particularly in affluent suburbs, but elsewhere, too, most Australian kids were in walking distance of a tennis court.

These days, they are gone. There are no fixed statistics on the number of backyard tennis courts in Australia, but authorities ranging from the national tennis body to former Davis Cup captain John Alexander confirm that it has been a catastrophic wipeout, a virtual extinction. The home tennis court has fallen victim to the 10-metre swimming pool, to the subdivided block, to the granny flat, to the stack of apartments. A culture of leisure has transformed itself into a culture of property development.

Community tennis courts still exist as a legacy of the mid-20th century boom in the sport, but few new ones are being built and the extant ones are seldom booked up. The Australian home tennis court - which doubled as a cricket pitch, a football ground, a basketball court - is a seriously endangered species.

At the same time, we Australians see a reason behind the decline in our national tennis prestige, where grand-slam tournaments pass without an Australian player, male or female, reaching the second week and with a mere scattering in the first. Once, we owned tennis: 15 Davis Cups between 1950 and 1967; a further six since then; seven Federation Cups; 18 male grand-slam winners with 77 singles titles between them; four female grand-slam winners with 42 titles; arguably the best male player (Rod Laver) and best female (Margaret Smith Court) the game has known. But, since the 1970s, tennis has been a drying riverbed, momentarily replenished by Pat Cash (one grand slam), Pat Rafter (two) and Lleyton Hewitt (two). Five grand-slam singles titles since 1980, and few second-week appearances outside of those three players. Looking at that change and at the decline of the family tennis court, you have to conclude the two phenomena are connected.

Deep social change has upended Australian tennis - just as, in a completely converse way, a different species of social change has raised the sport in eastern Europe. So what can be said about the rest of Australian sport, which appears to be going through one of its periodic ebb-tides? This year our Olympians brought home their lightest bag of metal since before we started spending up big for our home Olympics, Sydney 2000. Our cricketers lost to India and limped past New Zealand, and many believe England could beat them in next summer's Ashes. Our once-unchallenged netballers and hockey players are among the ruck. Our surfers and squash players, who once brought home world titles like duty-free gifts from foreign airports, are among the hunters, not the hunted. Even the trustiest standby, when all else goes wrong - our rugby league team - has just lost the World Cup for the first time since any of the current players were born.

Not only can Australians scratch their heads over failure in the present or immediate past, but failure of a kind is already factored into the future. On 4 December, when the British government announced it would commit £304m (A$571m) to its Olympic athletes for 2012, the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald was 'Half-price heroes: we can't compete'. Australia, spending A$213m on its Olympic programme, had effectively given up the fight before it had started.

We may pretend it didn't, but losing all those cycling races to the British in Beijing - and falling behind Britain in the medal table - stung the national hide. To see that Britain will, for 2012, spend four times as much as us on rowing and cycling, and three times as much on swimming and athletics, sticks in the antipodean craw, because money spent is generally thought to be directly proportional to medals won, and if we are already surrendering to Britain, what hope is there?

It has to be added here, without fear of generalisation, that Australians can tolerate losing to many different nations: in cricket to West Indies, in swimming to the United States, in tennis to Spain, in rugby to New Zealand. But there is something about losing to Britain, and England, in any sport, that just cannot be borne. Even those Australian cricket pundits and fans who were most ambivalent about the team's image and manner of winning during the past 15 years were able to set their moral objections aside and rally behind the flag when it came to an Ashes series. Witness the size of the crowds, and the sheer glee, when Australia won the last series 5-0. To the boors and the sledgers and the poor sports in our team, all was forgiven.

When Britain's Olympic spending figures were released in December, enough was enough. Heads of Australian sporting bodies lined up in an orchestrated protest. 'We have to decide upfront whether as a nation we want to be successful,' said Andrew Dee, chief executive of Rowing Australia. 'You can't join the space race with a hang-glider.'

The president of Cycling Australia, Mike Victor, commented: 'We'd love to have some of the things [the British] have and be able to run things like a professional road team. But we just can't at the moment.'

Danny Corcoran, the chief executive of Athletics Australia, said the difference between Britain's funding and Australia's was 'a monster, a huge gap. The UK team were amazed by what Australia was able to do in Beijing with our resources, and it is now getting worse... For us to try and compete against not only the UK but many other countries spending more than us, we can't continue to compete with our hands tied behind our back.'

When discussing Australians and sport, distinction must be made between tips and icebergs. At community level Australians are an increasingly sporting people, living up to our international image. We are devoted to fitness - walking for exercise and going to the gym are far and away the most popular fitness pursuits, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and two in three Australians participate in some sporting activity, including about one in three in an organised sport. Among men, the most popular organised sports are golf and cycling (both 8.8 per cent of the male population), swimming (8 per cent), running (5.4), tennis (4.9), soccer and cricket (both 3.9). Among women, the top organised sports are swimming (10), netball (4.8), tennis (4.7) and cycling (3.9).

Nor is there any sign of complacency or slackening off in the country's investment in sport. The total value of construction works - public swimming pools, football grounds, stadiums and so on - has increased from A$869m to A$2.23bn in the past decade. Four-fifths of that spending comes from the private sector. Households spend a total of A$6.3bn a year on sports equipment and activities, including tickets to events. There are 9,256 sporting organisations in Australia, which give paid employment to 111,000 people and make the use of 181,000 volunteers.

These numbers are all on the rise. According to a report by the researchers Sweeney Sports, the most popular sports in Australia for 'interest' and participation are tennis, swimming and cricket - interestingly, three sports where our national performance is notably in decline.

So much for the iceberg, which is massive and growing. In any society, though, there is an intriguing connection between the mood of public participation in sports and the performance of the elites. How much impact do the symbols of national prestige have? When Dawn Fraser won swimming gold in three successive Olympics from 1956 to 1964, there was a boom in pools to turn us into a nation of Dawns. No doubt everybody who swam felt they glided along the water with the gold medallist's amphibious grace.

If that is true, the converse is also: when our Olympians don't win, we all feel a bit more sluggish. When our cricketers are beaten by England or India, there is a little less strut on every Saturday-afternoon pitch across the nation. Great champions inspire a nation; failure at the top has a slight depressive effect on the masses.

Australia suffered a national sporting depression once before, and it galvanised a response that produced the most profound change in the history of our sport. The 1976 Olympics in Montreal are seen as the nadir of Australian sports: one silver medal, four bronze, and 32nd place in an overall medal tally depleted by the African boycott. The construction of the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, which was already under way, was finished by 1981. The AIS, designed along 'scientific lines' to prepare elite athletes, initially covered eight sports, six of them Olympic.

Outside the communist bloc and some private academies in America, the AIS had no parallel. It harnessed the best knowledge on training, nutrition, medicine and psychology, and enticed coaches from every corner of the globe, to hothouse a tiny elite of athletes in a full-time professional environment. It led the non-communist world for total commitment and was given credit for Australia's recovery in subsequent Olympics, right up to 1996 and 2000, when we were among the top five nations in terms of medals won.

In time the AIS's activities were decentralised from Canberra among the states, where replica institutes were set up, some of them specialising in individual sports. One of these satellite institutes was the Australian Cricket Academy in Adelaide. Its formation was announced in 1986 - the year Australia lost to New Zealand at home, drew with India at home, and lost a second successive Ashes series. That year was our cricketing Montreal. The academy model became the envy of the cricket world when in the 1990s it became recognised as a production line that turned out a generation that dominated the sport.

Adam Gilchrist, who attended the cricket academy in the early 1990s and emerged with contemporaries such as Damien Martyn, Justin Langer, Michael Bevan and Stuart MacGill, says the academy is still doing its job but the benchmarks of success might have shifted. 'The first thing you've got to say is that the rest of the world hasn't stood still, and the more other countries have copied our cricket academy, the less advantage it gives us.' Countries such as England and India have imitated the Australian model, even, in England's case, to the point of poaching the Australian academy's most influential early coach, former Test wicketkeeper Rodney Marsh. But it is not only in the levelling of the international playing field that Gilchrist sees warning signs.

'I think the academy will keep on producing cricketers with high technical skills,' he says. 'Where you might be a little bit more concerned is how these guys are schooled in life outside cricket. Because they're being identified so young and taken into this environment, they're not getting the exposure to life that pre-academy cricketers had.' Gilchrist himself, although part of an early academy intake, played with seasoned adults from his early teens. It was always part of the education of an Australian cricketer, this exposure to hard men 10, 20, 30 years their senior.

'I certainly learned a lot of new words from playing with grown men,' Gilchrist recalls. The grade cricket competitions across Australia, city and country, earned a reputation for hardening young players in an intense environment, not only technically but competitively. 'When you were representing your suburb or area against another, with all the men against each other, you knew you were in a game,' Gilchrist says. But also, it gave an education broader than just cricket. Gilchrist partly attributes his ethical approach to cricket - walking when he knew he was out, for instance - to the fact that he used to play grade cricket alongside his tough but deeply moral father, Stan, a schoolteacher. 'Men like that wouldn't let you get away with any nonsense.'

Now, however, the best young talents tend to skip over their years of grade cricket, being recruited to the academy or elite State squads from their mid-teens and pushed forward into Sheffield Shield cricket before they have played much grade cricket at all. Gilchrist says he does not know how this cultural change - a kind of hothousing, or early-life specialisation - will ultimately affect Australian sporting standards.

This transition would play itself out later in Gilchrist's career. The Australia team were a mix of academy babies (such as Ricky Ponting, who went to the academy at 16) and a few who had come up outside the system (Matthew Hayden, for instance, had been shunned by the academy because Marsh said he only wanted to take cricketers who had a future as first-class players).

Once these players became adults, together in the one team, they would realise how different their life experiences were. When John Buchanan became Australia coach in 1999, his credo was: 'I want to help you become not just better cricketers but better people.' It was as if, at the highest levels, there was a recognition that the precocious hothousing of professionals was leaving their education incomplete, a gap that had to be filled in later.

Competitors will say that that single-mindedness, even narrowness, was precisely what made our teams so rugged. In the British caricature of Australians, we are beady-eyed and granite-hard and our humanity has been winnowed down to a thin, adamant stratum of competitiveness. That is said to be our strength. But it's a long way from the truth about how Australians see ourselves. Generalising again, the beer-drinking, pizza-eating, womanising persona projected by Shane Warne was admired in Britain for what it was thought to say about Australian sporting masculinity. We are simple, we are upfront, we are laidback, we are pretty stupid actually, but with a ball in our hand we express our national genius.

Meanwhile, Warne was never as popular in Australia as in Britain. To many here - including the decision-makers at the national board who denied Warne the captaincy - Warne reminded us all too painfully of what we had left behind. He was the unreconstructed 1970s man, not particularly funny, and when he did not have the ball in his hand he was a national embarrassment. His off-field 'bogannness' was the price we had to pay for laying claim to his genius at cricket. But he personified the national character in the 2000s no better than Edna Everage or Dennis Lillee.

Caricaturing Australians in this way, of course, licensed the British to congratulate themselves on their sporting failures. Mike Atherton and Derek Pringle did not do much on the field against Australia, but at least they were cultured human beings, university-educated and articulate and almost above it all. Would you be proud to have a losing Mike Atherton or a winning Glenn McGrath? The English might well have been happy with what they had and, if they saw Australians as too obsessed with winning at all costs, then winning itself could become another sign of Australian inferiority.

Yet this was a battle of caricatures, not truths. In England, a tough new cricket academy and a streamlined, more competitive county system were under way. In Australia, Buchanan was trying to round out the education of our Test cricketers by taking them to historic battlegrounds and asking them to write poetry. Hayden wrote a cookbook and McGrath worked on developing a new barbecue sauce. Was all this a new sign of Australia's degeneration?

Others believe that elite international sport has changed so vastly, in the era of wholesale professionalism, that there is no longer a meaningful relationship between the sporting prowess and fitness of a culture and the performances of its national representatives. Do the exploits of Rafael Nadal and the Davis Cup winners, not to mention the European football champions, mean the Spanish have suddenly become a faster, fitter people? Are Novak Djokovic and Jelena Jankovic the standard bearers for a nation of superhuman Serbs? And conversely, does decline among the professional elites throw any light at all on national sportiness?

The Australian Institute of Sport has 700 scholarship-holders this year, a historic high. Yet the competitive nature of sport means that a country may be going backwards even when it is going forwards: that is, it may be raising its standards against fixed measuring sticks, but other countries may be raising their standards faster. The anxiety in Australia is that while our AIS has become a model for the western world, we are suffering early-adopter's syndrome: we are standing still while the others are, comparatively, moving forwards with newer facilities and fresher approaches.

One person who has observed the fine detail of change in several fields is sports analyst Mark Morgan. A Commonwealth Games gold medallist in the 100m freestyle in 1978, a lawyer and a long-time accredited swimming coach, Morgan has compiled figures to test different theories about Australia's reputation for 'punching above its weight' internationally. 'For a start, this is a bit of a myth that we pat ourselves on the back for,' he says, 'this idea that for our small population [20 million] we do so well. The fact is, Australia is an affluent country with a favourable climate and education systems that expose children to many different sports and sporting opportunities, we spend a lot of money on sport and we value sports very highly, so in sporting terms we're not quite the small country that our population suggests.'

Morgan believes Australia does punch above its weight in most sports, but not perhaps as impressively as we like to think. In swimming, the sport Morgan knows most intimately, he says that Olympic results never reflect the health of the sport generally: 'Olympic results are generally assessed by medals won, and medals are won by freakish performers. Without Ian Thorpe in Sydney and Athens, and without Stephanie Rice in Beijing, Australia's swimming results would have been comparatively moderate, in terms of medals won. But then again, if America hadn't had Michael Phelps, Australia's results would be much better without Australia having done a single thing differently.'

Rather than look at Olympic results, Morgan's analysis goes to age-group times in national and regional championships. 'Age-group records are being broken in Australia at a ridiculous rate,' Morgan says. 'The times are getting significantly faster every year. They are on par with American results and better than any other country. This may never be reflected in Olympic medals, but it's a fact that swimming in Australia is getting stronger and stronger.'

The sophistication of swimming training and coaching has increased appreciably in the three decades since Morgan was the fastest swimmer in the country. 'From the 1970s there was a move towards huge volumes of swimming. Heated indoor pools had just been built, so swimmers were training in winter as well as summer for the first time, and the thinking went, "Five kilometres a week is better than two, so 10 must be better than five, so why not 40, 50, 90 kilometres a week?"'

The attitude of coaches, Morgan recalls, was: 'You throw all the eggs at the wall and the couple that don't break, they're the good ones and you'll persist with them.' Weights training was similarly crude. 'Nautilus machines and the like had only just come around, and coaches would put you on dumbbells and bench-pressing and essentially the same weights programme as a shot-putter would do. Not only did it burn sprint swimmers out, but it was counter-productive, building muscle bulk that wasn't good for swimmers.'

The transformation to more targeted training - core-strength exercises, a focus on recovery, and splitting swimming groups into distance and sprint swimmers, as well as separating their training by stroke - was pioneered in countries such as Australia and America with the strongest swimming traditions, but during the 1990s there was also a greater sharing of knowledge internationally that levelled the pool, so to speak. Also, the freer traffic of coaches between countries - Australia kindly donating the best of its coaching talent to Britain - and the influence of the internet meant that while one country might be improving its coaching techniques, its ability to keep those techniques secret as a competitive advantage was diminished. Globalisation was a rising tide that raised all the boats.

'With those influences,' Morgan says, 'I think you shouldn't be saying how Australian swimming has lost its dominant position, you should be saying how remarkable it is that Australia, and America, have stayed ahead of the field.'

Older coaches spy something deeper at work: in Australia, there is such a saturation of sporting opportunities that sports are constantly in competition with each other. 'Scouts from all sports are going around schools and spotting talent,' Morgan says. 'There's nothing a parent and a kid like more than someone coming up and saying, "You've got the perfect physique and speed and skills for basketball, or Australian rules, or netball, so here's a scholarship for you and you're on your way."'

The identification of talent, he says, is happening at such a young age and spreading among so many sports that Australians' natural tendency to fitness and the outdoors are going to be diluted.

'It's not like China, where someone will come to a village and pick out the gymnasts and that will be their only pathway out of poverty,' Morgan says. 'In a relatively affluent country like Australia, the most talented young sports people have lots of sports to choose from, and it's inevitable that your national teams in the traditional sports might be weakened, because nowadays the kids aren't all playing cricket, or all going swimming, or all playing the same code of football. And it's not a pathway to affluence. A good number of the most talented kids in any sport are going to become doctors and bankers. They don't need sport to get them out of where they've come from.'

Hence one solution to the apparent paradox: while Australians are growing demonstrably fitter and more involved in physical exercise, the achievement of our national teams in traditional sports may slide. Couple this with the boom in popularity of non-competitive physical pastimes and 'extreme sports' - skateboarding, surfing, mountaineering, off-road cycling - and you have a fair portrait of today's Australians: fitter than ever, sportier than ever, as rugged and sunburnt as we always were, but just not so focused on beating England at cricket. And not so worried at having no locals competing in the tennis grand slams. As Tennis Australia points out, for all the decline in Australian participants in the grand slams, attendances and television ratings for the Australian Open have never been higher. Perhaps we're just not as parochial as we used to be.

It's a rosy, laidback picture and there's only one thing that might conceivably change it: getting smashed in this year's Ashes series and getting left behind by Britain in cycling and rowing and swimming and track and field in London in 2012. Then we might get serious again.

Australia cricket teamAustralia rugby leagueAustralia rugby union teamAustraliaMalcolm KnoxOSM
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Bad people are best (at least in books)

Likable be damned: great books are rife with monstrous characters. Literature would be hard to swallow without the scummier morsels

I spent my childhood wanting the wolf to eat Little Red Riding Hood, the three little pigs to be left on the street and for Hansel and Gretel to be lost forever. In the Bible, I had a favourite character from each Testament: Cain and Judas. I learned to love reading and went back to stories again and again out of a hope that one day, if I read often enough, I would open up the New Testament to find that Judas came out the winner and the author, for once, could spring a surprise and show some mercy.

It never struck me, until recently, that readers "identify with" a character for their goodness and really do want to see the good win and the bad redeemed. This may seem a yawning hole in a life of reading, a kind of moral autism, but I am stuck with it. As a child, I thought good won because writers, like parents, had to say what they thought we ought to hear. They lied to us about life, but I could see through those lies.

While never identifying with characters, good or evil, I tended to cheer for the bad ones because they seemed more interesting - and because they had no friends but me. I felt sorry for them and wanted to spend more time with them. I never believed they were harsh or evil, just misunderstood.

I never questioned my favouritism for the dark side until I became a writer and began to hear the voice of true wickedness, the potpourri-scented evil that comes down on a novel like a pink crochet blanket, the voice that whines: "These characters are not likable enough."

I don't think I've ever written a likable character. Perhaps I am evil. Borges said that no writer can create a character with more good qualities than he has in himself. But I prefer to hope that I am not evil. Rather, my sympathies lie with those children whom only their mothers could love. In bringing them to life on the page, I can be their mother, subjecting them to all life's ordeals, saddling them with imperfections, denying them any fairytale-formula "redemption", yet loving them all the same. If I have tried to pull off any magic trick as a writer, it is to reassert what we all know in our lives but recoil from in literature: that the great challenge is to love those who have nothing lovable about them.

I'm not alone, at least. Raskolnikov murdered his landlady. Proust's narrator-hero moped around and pretended he was sick to trick his lover into staying with him. Malcolm Lowry's Geoffrey Firmin, a crapulous hero whose only redeeming feature was that he was interesting, got drunk on mescal and ruined his life. There are thousands more, infuriating and upsetting and appalling, who populate the greatest books. Only their authors could love them - unless there are readers too who can embrace the despised.

If you took out the unlikeable characters, the atrocious ones, the filth and the scum, where would literature be? If, on the other hand, you took out the likable ones, the only risk would come from asking readers to search their hearts a little deeper.

"Likability first" - it's a pox on writing. Judas and the Big Bad Wolf will never win, and some of us will have to live with that regret for the rest of our lives. But the hours we spend with the monstrous creations of the greatest authors is the next best thing.

FictionLiterary fictionMalcolm Knox
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Making the pitch

He battled his way out of a dead-end town, but alcohol and gambling almost destroyed him. Now Ricky Ponting is the world's best batsman. His next challenge: to regain the Ashes

The Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar, in Sydney's red light district, never closed. For a start, it had no doors. Opened in 1968 to attract American GIs on leave from Vietnam, it was the city's nocturnal destination of last resort, as popular with pimps and crooks as with tourists and office workers out on the town. One Sunday night in January 1999, Ricky Ponting dropped in at the Bourbon after another poor performance against England in a one-day international. He was 24 and in his third year in - and often out - of the Australia team (he had been dropped and reinstated four times). His confidence was fragile after a wretched season. He was gambling more than he should and drinking too much. There was a feeling that he had risen too fast and that the team management could not keep protecting him from his worst excesses.

That Sunday night Ponting had been drinking with team-mates when he met a young, dark-haired woman. She was not Kellie Sainty, his long-term girlfriend from Tasmania. Together they went to the Bourbon where, later, Ponting tried to hit the dance floor with Carlotta, a famous drag queen. The details of what happened next may have remained hazy were it not for the presence of an off-duty photographer from Sydney's Sun-Herald newspaper, Julian Andrews, whose photographs of Ponting stumbling out of the Bourbon with one-and-a-half black eyes were published later that week. It emerged that Ponting had been punched by a bouncer following an altercation. Carlotta said the cricketer had taken exception to a barman refusing him a drink. As he left the bar, supported by his 'mystery date', Ponting looked every bit our Tasmanian George Best. The most talented young batsman in Australia seemed set on self-destruction.

With the efficiency of a bank securing its investment, the Australian Cricket Board hauled Ponting in, showered him down and paraded him as a repentant AA convert. At a press conference in the Grand Chancellor Hotel in Hobart four days later, Ponting, his eyes still bruised, conceded that he had an alcohol problem and would seek counselling. He uttered all the required bromides, apologised to his state and country, and then went to cricket practice. It was a sad and unconvincing performance from a troubled young man. We had seen this kind of flawed character before, it was said. Nothing could save him. You could take the boy out of working-class, asbestos-clad Tassie, but you couldn't take Tassie out of the boy.

I met Ricky Ponting in 1996 when I became cricket correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. Our relationship, at best, can be termed 'professional'. I didn't like Ponting and he didn't like journalists. During the next three years, I can't recall exchanging a single word with him outside formal interviews and press conferences.

My first impression of him was a reminder that many great batsmen, from Bradman to Lara, are small men. Ponting seemed shorter than the 5ft 10in the stat sheets gave him and he couldn't have weighed more than 11 stone. He was still a boy.

Every team has its careerists and its wild boys, and Ponting, whose love of the racetrack and greyhounds earned him his nickname 'Punter', gravitated to the latter. He was soon a member of the Australia team's 'in' group. Led by Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, this clique shared a set of attributes - risk-taking, flamboyance, cockiness that verged on arrogance - that was buoyed up by their remarkable sporting talent. Talent was their insurance against the consequences of misbehaviour. As Warne has shown repeatedly, self-belief on the field can blur into a kind of sociopathy off it.

When I met Ponting, he was still a fresh arrival in the team. A teenage prodigy from Tasmania, he had scored 96 on his Test debut against Sri Lanka in 1995 before being given out leg before by the Pakistani umpire Khizar Hayat, who had his own colourful history (he had been the second umpire, with Shakoor Rana, in Mike Gatting's notorious Faisalabad flare-up in 1987).

In his second summer, the boy was given a man's job: the number-three position vacated by the retiring David Boon, the pioneer Tasmanian player and Ponting's spiritual guide. It was a sign of respect for his talent that he should be expected to fill such an important position against West Indies' ageing but still potent Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. He failed. Within two Tests he was dropped, the wonder boy sent back to finishing school.

It was the first real setback Ponting had experienced. As an 11-year-old he had scored centuries against men at the Mowbray club in Launceston, a town in northern Tasmania. A working-class suburb of mainly public housing, Mowbray was rough-edged even by Tasmanian standards and had the archetypal blue-collar cricket club. Mark Ray was an imported first-class player from Sydney in the 1980s who represented the Riverside club, in Hobart. He describes himself as 'the perfect target for Mowbray to hate and destroy', and the rivalry within Tasmania, particularly Launceston, was as fierce as any he experienced during a decade of top-level cricket. 'Mowbray were rough and tough, aggressive, and liked a scrap,' he says. 'But there was a substance behind it. They played good cricket and I liked to have a beer with them after the game. Once I suggested going into the Mowbray dressing room and the Riverside boys said, "You've got to be kidding!" So I went on my own. By the time I left Tasmania, we had a booze-up and I think 10 Mowbray blokes turned up and only one or two from my own club.'

Ponting's parents - Graeme, an outstanding golfer, and Lorraine - enjoyed the club atmosphere of sport, a drink at the end of the day and a touch of class warfare. The cricket was tough. Troy Cooley, a Mowbray player and England's bowling coach from 2003 until his return to Australia this year, remembers Ponting 'hanging around outside the changing rooms' as a young teenager. 'We were the working-class club and Launceston was the private-school club,' he says. 'The rivalry was pretty hard.'

Nine years older than Ponting, 6ft 3in and then one of the fastest bowlers in Australia, Cooley says he can't remember the kid ever backing away from him in the nets. 'He was scared of nothing. He came to the club as a dasher, a risk-taker, and the batsman you see now was the batsman he was then. He was fearless, never scared to play his shots, never took a backward step. And he was extremely ambitious. He was one of those kids who lived for sport and was good at anything he tried: football, golf. We're lucky he chose cricket because he would have succeeded to the same level in anything else.'

As a stylist, Ponting is an aggressor who loves to confront bowlers; superbly balanced, he has a strong array of shots to every part of the ground. His greatest strength is also his only weakness: he can be too aggressive.

Graeme and Lorraine Ponting gave Ricky nothing but encouragement. Graeme has told the story of how he promised Ricky a new bat if he scored 20 runs in a game as a tiny boy against older players. 'He was only little and couldn't hit the ball very far but he kept playing these straight drives and good proper shots that got him to 20. So I had to go out and buy him a new bat.'

As a student at Brooks Senior High School, Ponting was, like most sportsmen, in no way academic. The usual career path was from school to the dole queue. The fast track out of Mowbray was sport. Brooks Senior High fed the local cricket and Australian rules football clubs, and in the Ponting home sport gave Ricky a sense of purpose and structure. His talent was noted early. Tasmanian cricket commentator Neville Oliver told a reporter from Hobart's Examiner newspaper: 'We've got a 14-year-old who's better than Boon - but don't write anything about him yet, it's too much pressure.' At 16, Ponting was plucked out of Mowbray and taken to Adelaide to be nurtured by Rod Marsh at the Australian Cricket Academy. By the age of 17, he was representing Tasmania in the Sheffield Shield. It was 1992. Full professionalism was new in Australia. Ponting was among the first crop of teenagers who could aim at doing little else in life but play cricket.

The gilt of prodigy shone from Ponting, but the shadow of Mowbray followed him. After being dropped in his second year of Test cricket, Ponting returned with a triumphant century at Headingley in 1997. But he faltered again in Australia the next summer. His father was causing embarrassment, too. The then chairman of the Australian Cricket Board, the late Denis Rogers, was concerned about the number of times Graeme Ponting would get merry at cricket functions and rave noisily about how great Ricky was. Then, touring India in early 1998, Mark Taylor's team lost their first series since 1994. For the clique to which Ponting belonged, the subcontinent was an unhappy place to tour. As one Australia player complained: 'There are no TABs [Australia's betting agency for horse racing] in the whole country.' Nor were there the other standard perks of the job: eager groupies, in-house adult movies, good golf courses. The players were suffering acutely from what journalist Mike Coward called 'the curse of insidious and self-defeating Indophobia'. Australia lost the first Test in Chennai and then, in the second, in Calcutta, suffered their biggest defeat since 1938. Ponting struggled in both Tests, scoring a total of 89 runs in four innings.

He liked the game to be played at pace, and India required patience. Frustrations piled up. The night the Calcutta Test finished, some of the players gathered in the bar of the Taj Bengal hotel and watched satellite coverage of the final of a pre-season Aussie rules competition, between St Kilda Saints, for whom Warne had played as a junior, and the North Melbourne Kangaroos, who were Ponting's passion. Warne and Ponting both once had dreams of playing Aussie Rules, and, in some ways, each has brought the physicality of that contact sport to cricket. The bar - and particularly the two players - grew noisy as the game progressed. Ponting's team won. Most of the team went to bed. Amid a dismal tour, Ponting decided to let off some steam and went to a local nightclub, the Equinox.

En route to Bangalore for the third Test, we heard that an Indian newspaper was carrying stories about Ponting's bad behaviour in the nightclub. The team management met Ponting that same morning. The manager, Steve Bernard, told journalists that Ricky couldn't remember doing anything wrong, but they fined him all the same.

Sohini Sarkar, a woman who had been at the Equinox, spoke to me about how Ponting had been behaving in the bar. 'With one woman,' she said, 'he rubbed himself against her. With another, he was pulling his zipper up and down, drawing attention to his zipper. One of the management asked him to leave and Ponting assaulted him.'

I wrote the story for the Sydney Morning Herald. As former Australia wicketkeeper Ian Healy once said, journalists were expected to be 'part of the effort'. If you weren't with 'the boys', you were against them. In giving the victim of Ponting's behaviour a voice in the Australian media, my transgression was a major one. I was ostracised by the entire squad. But then an interesting thing happened. Two weeks later, after top-scoring in a one-day game against Zimbabwe, Ponting gave a press conference. It was the first time I'd been anywhere near him since becoming his tour-wrecker. We began tensely. If this was Mark Waugh, he would have refused to answer my questions. Shane Warne would have blathered emptily, without seeking to hide his contempt. Steve Waugh would have snapped sarcastic monosyllables. But Ricky Ponting, who was 23 years old and had just been embarrassed in the papers, looked me in the eye and answered each question expansively. He shook my hand and showed no sign of malice. It was, in that context, a more impressive performance than the century he had scored. It was at that point that I saw why people considered him a future captain.

His turmoil wasn't over: the Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar, gambling problems and more form slumps lay ahead. Even today, the old Ponting isn't completely dead. He rose during the 2005 Ashes with his on-field outburst at coach Duncan Fletcher, during the fourth Test at Trent Bridge, over England's use of substitute fielders. He rose again in the first games of the 2006 season, in Malaysia, which everyone treated as meaningless one-day jamborees - everyone except Ponting, that is, who was twice in trouble for questioning umpires' decisions.

Ponting is under constant pressure approaching a season in which Australia will strive to regain the Ashes that his own team lost. Former Test batsman Greg Ritchie recently said Australia couldn't win the Ashes under Ponting, because his captaincy had been so poor 'you wouldn't expect it from ... [an] under-14'. Ian Chappell, the 1970s captain who never lost a series, would rather that Shane Warne had the job. Chappell has said that while, in 2005, Michael Vaughan made 'his players believe it was all under control ... with Ricky you'd see a meeting of three or four guys and it would go on for three or four minutes. I don't think he's an indecisive person, but with guys like Warne, [Adam] Gilchrist and [Glenn] McGrath around him, great players, he didn't feel comfortable telling them, "Piss off, I'm running this show".'

Mowbray is not another country for Ponting; it is not even the past. He will never bury or escape the memory of the toughness of those early years and probably, like Allan Border, will get crankier with each new grey hair. Yet something did change in Ponting after the nightclub affrays. Perhaps he finally realised that he had too much to lose, too much talent to waste. 'He was just growing up,' Troy Cooley says now. 'You knew he was going to fulfil his talent as long as the wheels didn't fall off, and he just did a few things that would be typical of any young guy in his situation.'

Perhaps it was as simple as romance. Ponting used to be teased that his old Tasmanian girlfriend still clung to him even when he was an international star; but instead of following Warne down the path of excess, he found Rianna Cantor, a woman he adores. He extols his 'beautiful wife' and blows kisses from the field to her, rather than to the dressing room. When she met Ponting, in 2001, Cantor had no idea who he was - which, he has said, was the best thing for him. She was a law student at the University of Wollongong, graduating after they married in 2002. In his book Ashes Diary 2005, he wrote of her: 'You are my inspiration, my love, and I am so proud to have you in my life. No matter what happens on the field, as long as I have you beside me then I know everything in the world is right.'

In his books, he thanks her family, middle-class and aspirational, rather than his own back in Tasmania. There is a sense, here, of a man who prefers where he is now to where he came from.

Rather than fulfil the template of uneducated working-class youth rising too fast and being destroyed by fame, he has more than fulfilled his promise and is acclaimed by many as the world's best batsman - he averages 58 in 105 Tests, a record that places him in the all-time elite.

Since losing to England last summer, Australia have played 12 Tests, winning 11 and drawing one. In spite of the grumbling of Ian Chappell and others, Ponting has become an increasingly poised and respected leader, 'a solid citizen' as Cooley calls him. Ricky and Rianna have bought a big house on the southern Sydney waterfront, where their neighbours include the Waugh brothers and swimmer Ian Thorpe. They are settled and happy. In public, Ponting seems more at ease and serene than he has for many years, even if, on the field, the old rough edges are sometimes still exposed, which is as it should be for an Australia cricket captain. No one would like to think that he has gone soft. His mission now could not be clearer: to lead his hugely motivated team to victory over England and thus reclaim the Ashes.

· Malcolm Knox is a former cricket correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald. His most recent novel is Adult Book (Bloomsbury)

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Confident Tyson predicts a Williams knockout

Mike Tyson arrived in Louisville yesterday and immediately predicted that he would knock out Britain's Danny Williams when they meet on Friday.

Tyson, dressed in a Brazilian football shirt, brushed through the airport, answering a few questions from a band of reporters before departing in a limousine.

The 38-year-old former heavyweight champion and convicted rapist arrived via a private flight, pronounced himself in great shape and anxious to take on Williams.

"I'm just ecstatic to be here," Tyson said. "I'm looking forward to doing my part and giving them a good show."

Friday's fight will be the first of a two-year, seven-match plan to help Tyson get out of more than $25m (£13.5m) worth of debt but, according to Julius Francis, he could be in for a surprise.

Francis has fought both Tyson and Williams and has backed his fellow Londoner to spring a momentous upset in the heavyweight division.

"I believe Danny can go out there and cause an upset because he has absolutely nothing to lose. As much as I like and admire Tyson I think he is five or six years past his best," said Francis who beat Williams on points to claim the British title in 1999 but lasted just four minutes in a five knockdown fight against Tyson the following year.



"The years are catching up on Tyson and wear and tear is inevitable," he added. "And I believe Danny can rise to the occasion."

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Wake up Australia, racism is a problem

Malcolm Knox on the home truths revealed by the Lehmann episode

The Darren Lehmann case has exposed a double standard in the Australian cricket community. Normally, moments of the highest pressure in sport are held to reveal character. Steve Waugh's toughness and Shane Warne's genius are revealed precisely in the heat of the moment. Conversely, the touring Englishmen have been stripped naked - weak, timid, lacking in technique - under high heat. We beat the drum of our own supremacy because we're tough when it really matters.

Yet for Lehmann, the logic has been reversed. His defenders cannot reconcile his outburst against his Sri Lankan opponents with his reputation as a "good bloke". Team-mates and associates have described Lehmann's slur as an "out of character" act, committed "in the heat of the moment" by someone who is "universally regarded as a nice guy". Instead it is the Sri Lankans who are rendered villains, oversensitive and unmanly to complain.

How is it that for Lehmann the rule is waived? How is it that in the heat of the moment, he did something supposedly out of character?

The answer, of course, is that he did not. To believe this was the first time Lehmann used this terrible language about black people is to show the indulgence of a parent who believes their teenager's "it was my first joint" defence.

Lehmann's misfortune is that he is the man who got caught revealing the unwitting racism that infuses not only Australian cricketing culture but mainstream Australia.

Lehmann's supporters cannot understand the difference between calling someone a "cunt" and a "black cunt". Nor, presumably, can they understand that it is offensive for our media commentators to speak of the Sri Lankans as "babbling" in the field, as "leaping about with great big smiles" or as "little guys". Monkeys babble. Little black sambos have great big smiles.

We're not yet at a stage of cultural maturity where we even know what racism is. Our prime minister John Howard is supposedly a decent man who hates the racist epithet. Yet each year he sanctifies the white man's military tragedy (Gallipoli) while denying or excusing the black man's military tragedy (the colonisation massacres).

Racism in Australia is insidious, unadmitted. We have few proud racists. There is no open Klan or National Front here. Our white supremacist fringe - the 10% of voters represented in the late 1990s by Pauline Hanson but who, in the 2001 election, swung back into step with Howard's dance of Arab-phobia - do not admit to racism.

Hanson's platform of cutting non-white immigration and government assistance to Aborigines was coded as a call for "fairness" (no pun intended) from "mainstream Australia". When Howard talks of pre-emptive strikes against terrorists in Asia, and of de-democratising the rights of non-white asylum seekers, his favourite phrasing is "ordinary Australians think...". All ills can be cured if everybody just stops whingeing and swallows the (white, male, resolutely middle-class and anti-intellectual) panacea of 'mateship'.

By raising this, one risks being labelled politically-correct and a troublemaker. Three years ago, when India toured Australia, I interviewed Indian-Australians who were supporting India. I found two reasons.

One was that it is natural not to let go of one's birthplace. Presumably those Australians who impose cultural-assimilation policies upon new arrivals are not the ones who slag Greg Norman for his American accent; presumably those who say Muslims should renounce their language and religion once they become Australians are not the ones who accuse Clive James and Germaine Greer of "selling out" their Australian-ness to Britain.

Yet a more pungent reason for those Indian flags at the Sydney Cricket Ground was that fathers resented the exclusion of their sons from local and school teams. Every family I interviewed had a story of a boy who had been shut out of the "in" group because of his race, or his teetotalism, or some other cultural difference.

Lest this be taken as paranoia, one need only look at the make-up of Australian cricket teams at senior levels. The most common name in the Sydney phone book is Lee - and they're not relatives of Brett - yet all our teams can boast is the occasional Kasprowicz or Di Venuto. If you want a cultural snapshot of Australia in the 1950s, look no further than our cricket.

Rather than shame, our cricket community tends to feel pride in this ethnic wholeness. Yet the Lehmann case has shown that an excess of our greatest strengths - unity, certainty, simplicity - has become our greatest weakness.

Australian triumphalism masks the fact that we lag a generation behind England in resolving the race debate. While English sporting clubs struggle to harmonise different cultures, Australian clubs fix the problem by leaving non-whites out.

When controversy about England's racially diverse cricket teams has broken out, Australian cricketers tacitly agree with those who say recent teams from the old country are "less English", and therefore weaker, than in the 1960s or before. Their prescription for England's ills is to revert to "English" (i.e. Boycottian, Illingworthian) traits. We fail to recognise England's change as much as we fail to acknowledge our own.

When I wrote about the Indians who felt shut out of Australian cricket, I was taken to task for "inventing" trouble where none existed. Yet I'd seen racism with my own eyes. On a tour to India, I heard two Australian cricketers call the locals "niggers". I saw Australian cricketers coming across Indians sleeping on a railway platform in Jamshedpur and nudging them awake with their feet in order to take a happy snap.

No malice was intended, and if you can understand that the cricketers involved were both "good blokes" and yet-to-be-reconstructed racists, then you go a long way to comprehending the incoherence amid which most Australians live.

· Malcolm Knox is a former chief cricket correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and is the author of the novel Summerland, published in the UK by Picador.

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