Article - The Age - July 30th, 2006
On a fresh wicket
Jason StegerJuly 30, 2006
Actor William McInnes has written his first novel.
William McInnes is probably still best known as an actor. Just. Think of him in SeaChange, Blue Heelers, or Shark Net. Or even the feature film Look Both Ways, which was written and directed by Sarah Watt, who happens to be his wife.
But things might be changing. Last year he published a memoir, A Man's Got to Have a Hobby, about his eccentric father and growing up in Queensland. It was an immediate success and an impressively resilient presence in the bestseller lists.
Now he was written his first novel, Cricket Kings.
It is a tender book, imbued with sentiment rather than sentimentality. A gentle, humorous and nostalgic look at life in the western suburbs that revolves around a cricket match between the Yarraville West fourths and Trinity. But it deftly and gently manages to say much about the state of Australia and Australians today. "A war cry for reasonableness," he calls it. Whether his tongue is in his cheek is not entirely clear.
Its hero is the good-hearted gallumphing team captain, Chris Anderson, who yells a bit too much and sometimes drives his friends and family to distraction. (Readers might recognise a bit of McInnes' father Col in the character.)
Then there are his teammates, such as the emotionally stagnate doctor returned from harrowing work in Africa, the butcher with a chronic case of wind, the simple boy who makes up the numbers and wants only to score a run and be able to spot the first evening star, and the bus driver who likes to field in the deep so he can listen to the tunes played by a girl having her music lesson in a house overlooking the oval.
McInnes is a fan of the suburbs and thinks they get a bit of a rough go. After all, most Australians live in them and, he says, a lot of the times the values espoused in them aren't bad.
"The book's also a picture of a place that's in transition," he says. "I live in an area of Melbourne, which I would say is probably Australia's most multicultural city. It's like a melting pot. I can walk down to the train station and I've walked past three-quarters (of the nationalities) that are represented in the UN.
"I thought it would be interesting to have that old archaic Australian game, colonial Australia, plonked down in the middle of an idea of what Australia is like - this collection of people from different nationalities and races and religions."
McInnes comes from a strong Labor background - his father was a persistent candidate at all sorts of elections and never won office - but is modest about his views, which are clearly carefully considered. When he is holding forth it's as if he catches himself in full flow and is self-conscious about what he hears; as if it's not his place to express views about such things.
"I'm not embarrassed by it. I'm acutely aware of coming from an industry where people blow smoke up your bottom quite profusely and I don't like getting above myself."
He reckons Australia is much more layered and complex than it is generally given credit for.
"The idea of generosity and openness walks side by side with meanness and narrow-mindedness."
But he won't blame the Federal Government for this.
"The government we have now reflects Australian sensibilities." His theory - "my peculiar theory" - is that it all stems from federation. There was one of the most advanced social networks - 40-hour week, universal suffrage, a safety net - and at the same time the White Australia policy and sectarianism.
"So you had the social advances but also these great hinderances," he says. "It's a funny thing and you can't just lay the cause on either side of the political fence; it's equally shared and I think it's still apparent in Australian society. That's what I thought I'd like to show."
At the heart of the book is cricket, a game that McInnes sees as both meditative and revealing.
"My old man used to say in cricket you think you're doing nothing and all of a sudden you see someone do something and you certainly work out something about that person. It's a game that teaches you to talk and to listen and to watch."
McInnes has always played. While growing up in Redcliffe near Brisbane, he played for Woody Point and Scarborough. In Melbourne he hopes to be back for Yarraville fourths this coming season, having missed last year because he was rehearsing a play. But work doesn't always knock the game on the head. When he was in Western Australia making Shark Net he played half a season for a local team.
He turned to fiction - "I'm no Steinbeck" - because he wanted to write not only about the suburbs but also sport. He knows how good the Americans are at writing baseball and celebrating sport and fancied trying an equivalent. He clearly has an ear for dialogue and says as an actor he has to be an observer; that helps with his writing.
"I heard someone outside today say 'you're as useless as a Turkish ferry in Lebanon' - how does that get so quickly into the street talk?"
William McInnes is a guest at the Age Melbourne Writers' Festival. Cricket Kings is published by Hodder.
posted by WilliamWatch at 6:50 PM
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