Glenn McGrath Line and Strength Read online

  ‘I didn’t hate guns, but like a lot of parents I was nervy about the kids using them,’ says Kevin. ‘The boys’ mother was more concerned about it than me, but I just wanted them to realise to be careful and to appreciate they were dangerous. I didn’t want them to use the gun until they were old enough to take responsibility and to take notice of what I had to say on the subject.’

  While McGrath knew the men spent the darkened hours shooting and killing foxes, he was still shocked by the scene that confronted him before breakfast one morning when he opened the door to his father’s workshop. The sight of three animals sprawled on the grease-stained concrete floor made him recoil in horror. While McGrath had seen dead stock before, this was different – not only because their bullet wounds were still fresh, but also because they’d been killed by his father’s hand. For the first time in his life, McGrath felt scared at being so close to death.

  ‘The rifle fire sounded exciting,’ he says. ‘However, when I saw those three dead foxes on the workshop floor that morning I felt a bit ... well, I felt a bit scared of them ... of their being dead.’

  Despite the fear he felt for those three foxes, Glenn and his brother were eventually called upon to join the men in the firing line.

  McGrath’s first night shooting was during the lambing season. When they shone the spotlight into the darkness, the boy could see what looked like hundreds of foxes surrounding the sheep and their lambs. And then everyone started shooting.

  ‘Someone would flick the spotty on, I’d sight the fox, shoot, kill it and reload,’ he recalls. ‘The light would go on again and I’d shoot again. Sometimes they’d bolt and we’d chase them. It was my first shoot and I still remember the adrenaline rush. It wasn’t the thrill of the kill; it was the idea I was helping to save the lambs.

  ‘We covered about 5000 acres over the three nights and we killed a total of 99 foxes, which gives you an idea of how rampant the foxes are out there. Like the pigs, they were an introduced species and they’re doing terrible damage to the environment. I know people have varying ideas on shooting, but the feral animals are doing lots of damage out in the bush.’

  Despite Kevin’s loathing for shooting, the McGrath family is steeped in the traditions of the sport. In the early 1900s, his grandfather Jim and four uncles formed the McGrath Brothers Rifle Team in the Hargraves District near Mudgee. For competitions the fab five wore military tunics and slouch hats of the style favoured by Australia’s colonial troops during the Boer War. When they moved en masse to Cooyal, the New South Wales National Rifle Association granted them permission to form a new club, for which the lads were careful to select the safest spot possible – the paddock of local farmer Andrew Baker. As Muriel Marks notes in Cooyal Stories, ‘It is an ideal site for a rifle range, with the high mountain in the background where there is no danger of stray bullets doing any harm.’

  Glenn remembers his grandfather Lyle McGrath’s many shooting trophies. ‘But my dad didn’t share his father’s love for the sport. He was anti-guns and would get very angry whenever he found out Dale and I had sneaked his.22 rifle out of the house to shoot at some targets in the back paddock. It was a rubbish gun. The firing pin was worn out and it was a bit like playing Russian roulette in that it’d only fire every 20 shots. We’d take it in turns to take aim at the target and squeeze the trigger, only for it to go click, click, click, bang !’

  Despite Kevin’s best attempts to steer Glenn and Dale away from shooting, they embraced it.

  ‘Glenn was absolutely mad on it from the start,’ Kevin says. ‘I noticed when he went overseas on cricket tours, he would always be photographed or filmed talking to the guards in places like India or South Africa and asking about a submachine gun. He has a photo album of wild pigs that he has shot ... That’s a bit different.’

  The brothers became accurate shots and sure-footed hunters, and made good money from selling fox and feral cat skins to the wool traders. Skinning the animals was messy work, but it was much more profitable than their alternate means of making extra cash – collecting aluminium cans to trade for one cent each.

  McGrath soon set his sights on wild pigs, which he grew to admire for their intelligence and heartiness. But that did not spare them from the bullet, for they massacre lambs. Wild pigs are said to kill and eat up to 40 per cent of the lambs born in some areas.

  ‘They crunch through the lambs like we do toast,’ says Dale about the old enemy. They also damage crops and fences, and can carry diseases like foot-and-mouth disease as well as a variety of parasites, including the screw-worm fly.

  As he matured as a hunter, McGrath would challenge himself not only to stalk the wild pigs, but to sit in their midst and observe them.

  ‘That to me is the thrill of the hunt,’ he enthuses. ‘If I’m hunting something that is 400 metres away, I’d rather stalk it than take it out with a long-range shot. That’s when skills come into play. It’s then a matter of tracking the prey, studying it, observing its actions and then making my move. It’s a process, a calculated one at that, and when I make my decision to take the shot – it’s the only thing that matters in that split second, and I do everything to ensure it is a clean shot. Sometimes I don’t fire. If the pig is a mother with babies that can’t fend for themselves, I won’t take it. There are some blokes who shoot everything they can, but I don’t.’

  For McGrath, hunting is as much about mateship as any thing else. Some of his best friends are hunters. ‘They’re not rednecks that go around shooting anything that moves,’ he says. ‘They’re actually responsible, community-based people and environmentally conscious. They’re some of the best people you could ever hope to meet.’

  In 2005, Glenn McGrath and two cricket mates, Brett Lee and Jason Gillespie – the cream of Australia’s fast bowling talent – were sitting around a campfire in outback New South Wales discussing everything from their sport to the day’s hunting. They were at McGrath’s 34,000-acre property outside Bourke, one of the trappings of his success as the world’s leading strike bowler. Divided by the Cuttaburra River and reaching the Queensland border in some parts, the property was where McGrath would go to reinvigorate his body and spirit after a gruelling cricket campaign. On this particular night, with the smell of ash in the air and a billy of tea boiling on a low flame, the trio marvelled at ‘the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars’, as Banjo Paterson had described the night sky over a century earlier in his poem ‘Clancy of the Overflow’.

  For Gillespie, hunting with McGrath had been a tough experience. He was more comfortable targeting batsmen’s wickets than feral pigs, but he was happy to be with two of his mates from the Fast Bowlers’ Cartel (the team within the Australian team whose membership was restricted to individuals who could hurl a ball from one end of a wicket to the other at speed in baking heat, when they were bone-weary and mentally hammered).

  ‘I think I shot the gun twice in the four days I was there,’ says Gillespie. ‘I’d never really been around guns before; the first time was when we were in Zimbabwe and I went with Glenn to a couple’s place in the middle of nowhere – it was Tarzan territory. But going to his property was brilliant.’

  Lee – a self-proclaimed country boy from Wollongong, south of Sydney – understands McGrath’s passion for pitting his tracking and shooting skills against the beasts.

  ‘It’s not the hunting,’ Lee says. ‘For me, it’s being out there in the open and camping ... getting away from the cricket world for a while. I’m definitely a country boy at heart – any chance I get to go out to the wilderness and sleep in a tent, do some fishing, and be in a place that’s without electricity, well, it’s great fun. Glenn loves it. It seems to me to be where he’s most relaxed.’

  For the teenage McGrath, stalking and hunting vermin was a lot more enjoyable pursuit than attending school. Shyness made the blackboard jungle a place of absolute terror.

  5

  Harsh Lessons

  As One We Succeed

  Narromine
High School’s motto

  For all his gun-slinging boldness at Lagoona, when it came to school Glenn McGrath was crippled with shyness. Bev was happy to hear her elder son’s Year Five teacher comment at the annual parent–teacher night on his good manners, quiet nature and the steady progress he was making in class. However, in the same breath he mentioned an action he had taken to help Glenn overcome his acute shyness, which disturbed her. As was the way of the era, Bev kept her thoughts to herself for fear of offending the teacher.

  The teacher told Bev that Glenn didn’t mix well with the girls in his class, so he sat Glenn next to a girl. But Bev didn’t agree with this approach.

  ‘I didn’t think it was the teacher’s place to do that because Glenn was just a normal boy, shy, but he was like most of the other boys who hung around with each other, just like the girls would stick together.’

  The experience didn’t scar McGrath, but his acute shyness made school a challenge. ‘I was an A-student, but I was painfully shy and I allowed it to build into something it should never have been,’ he says. ‘I struggled to speak in front of people; I would have done just about anything to get out of it. Even when I knew the answer or might have had something worthwhile to add to the class, I couldn’t express what was on my mind. It was awful, but I was like a lot of teenagers and conscious of what the others thought of me. Stupid really.’

  Narromine High School’s Year Ten English teacher couldn’t possibly have realised the torment she put McGrath through whenever she’d ask him to read a passage from a novel or answer a question about a sonnet by Shakespeare – or she’d have left him in peace. While McGrath was both a clever and good student, he would be overwhelmed by what he described as a ‘dread’ whenever he was forced to participate in the lesson. McGrath would hope against all hope not to be called upon to speak in front of his peers because he’d choke with nervousness at the thought of how his classmates might judge him. As he stammered his way through the latest task, McGrath thought he could read their thoughts: He sounds stupid; What does he know?

  The shyness that plagued McGrath in the classroom would remain a problem for years to come. It would even prevent him from making the most of some early opportunities he had to gain a media profile as an aspiring fast bowler at Adelaide’s Australian Cricket Academy, where he’d run and hide from a camera crew or avoid journalists as if they had a contagious disease. When McGrath eventually overcame his shyness, he realised the last thing that would have been on his classmates’ minds as he mumbled his way through John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men would have been thoughts of him – let alone judgements about him.

  Even so, McGrath’s fear of talking in front of people was so deep-seated it had a bearing on his decision to leave school after Year Ten. He was spooked – not by the increased study and workload required to obtain the Higher School Certificate (HSC), but by the graduation ceremony. The mere thought of having to attend the Year Twelve leaving ceremony terrified him. Year after year McGrath would watch the HSC students stand on the stage in front of an auditorium crammed with other pupils, parents, extended families, local politicians and anyone else who cared to applaud them and wish them well for the future. He’d squirm miserably in his seat at the mere prospect of one day being among them.

  ‘I couldn’t think of anything worse than having to speak in front of the crowd – put me in front of a firing squad instead,’ McGrath confesses. ‘One very real reason I left school in Year Ten was to avoid all of that.’

  However, his school days in Narromine were mostly enjoyable. He made some firm friendships, gained good grades and was in the A class every year of high school, but perhaps the greatest legacy of McGrath’s state-school education was his love of reading.

  ‘When I was on the farm I’d read a lot because I found it a great escape from reality. I still read quite a lot of fiction.’ McGrath’s favourite authors include Wilbur Smith and Jack Higgins, and Australian authors Matthew Reilly and Tony Park, who has written a number of books set in Africa. ‘On the 1999 tour of the West Indies I ploughed through 12 books because of the amount of free time we had,’ McGrath recalls.

  Melinda Gainsford-Taylor, a year behind McGrath at Narromine High, remembers him simply as a ‘quiet boy’. He was a quiet kid, happy to keep his nose clean. While McGrath was popular enough, he didn’t have what he would call a ‘best mate’ in the playground. His cousin Craig had been his best friend, but he was sent to boarding school at Bathurst, which left McGrath feeling a sense of loss.

  ‘That was tough,’ says Bev of Craig’s departure. ‘They did everything together and then he was gone.’

  ‘I was one of those guys who moved about groups,’ says McGrath. ‘We had a tremendous bunch of blokes in my year. I could name my entire class.’

  McGrath’s physical education teacher Chris Harding (who once played rugby league for the famous English team Featherstone Rovers) remembers his school’s most famous student for being, well, remarkably unremarkable.

  ‘Glenn was a nice kid,’ Harding recalls. ‘He was well behaved, never in trouble. He came from a good family and was good at all the sports he played. Back then it was golf, volleyball and basketball. However, he was very, very shy. I always thought Glenn would make a better basketballer than cricketer. I think I’m right in saying he was never picked in a schoolboy cricket team, but I remember he was quite a good bowler. He blossomed later and we are proud of what he has achieved.’

  Bev was always pleased to read Glenn’s school reports because the teacher’s comments simply reinforced what she knew: her elder son was growing into a mature, well-mannered and rounded young man.

  Photographs in McGrath’s old school magazines show he was a gangly, enthusiastic member of the school’s basketball and golf teams. He also ran in Narromine High’s cross-country team. While he had no trouble running kilometre after kilometre around flat-as-a-tack Narromine, McGrath was ‘cooked’ early in the inter-district meet at Oberon, where the hills took a heavy toll on his skinny legs.

  The school rarely played his favourite sport, cricket, because there weren’t enough teams in the district to compete against.

  McGrath’s height and natural hand–eye coordination allowed him to adapt easily to life on the basketball court, and his talent was recognised early when he was picked to compete in the then-burgeoning State League. One trip that made an impression on him was when the Far West representative team competed in Sydney and was based at Kings Cross, the notorious centre of sleaze and spice.

  ‘It was a shock for a group of kids from the bush,’ McGrath recalls with a laugh. ‘We’d never seen anything like it. There were plenty of what I guess you’d call “colourful characters” hustling out on the street. There were also, um, working girls, but none of our parents needed to worry about our moral fibre because I think we were all scared of them. I know I was. Anyway, I was safe because my mum drove the team mini-van – there was no way she was going to let me misbehave in any way during our time in Sydney.’

  In the summer of 1986, McGrath had to make a decision about his future: he wanted to leave school after his Year Ten exams but he wasn’t sure of his career path. That year was also significant because, after 16 years of his parents’ favourite country and western songs, he heard rock music for the first time on a compilation tape. He was hooked after hearing the first few notes of ‘Manic Monday’ by the Bangles. It was a new world, but he had to make a decision about his future. McGrath realised that despite his great love for the land, his heart wasn’t in farming. Four of his classmates were joining the police force but that didn’t appeal to him either.

  ‘I toyed with the idea of joining the force, but it was only fleeting,’ he says. ‘What turned me off that as a job was the prospect of having to deal with things like domestic violence and telling a parent their kid had been killed in an accident.’

  Instead McGrath enrolled in a carpentry course at the local TAFE. As he threw himself into the theory and practice of the course
, he became excited by the prospect of one day becoming a builder. When he couldn’t obtain an apprenticeship, however, he got work as a labourer on a cotton farm. Toiling under the blazing sun was hard yakka. As his hands blistered and his back became sore, opening the bowling for Australia from the Paddington end of the SCG seemed a much better career option.

  6

  The Heart-to-Heart

  We just enjoyed our cricket, had no grand plans of playing for Australia or whatever. We didn’t have grand plans for anything, most of us. But, yeah, Glenn wanted to play for Australia. Kept it a secret and, to his credit, every opportunity that was given to him, he took it with both hands and literally ran with it.

  Narromine cricketer Mark Munro,

  ABC TV 2007

  One more Saturday afternoon spent roaming the boundary for the Rugby Union XI cricket side frustrated McGrath to the point that he went against his notoriously shy nature and approached Brian Gainsford for a ‘chat’ about cricket. Or, more to the point, to ask Gainsford (Melinda Gainsford-Taylor’s father) whether he should even bother to keep playing. After sweltering under the sun and waiting for the batsman to hit the ball in his direction – or for the call that rarely came from his captain to roll his arm over – McGrath had spent most of the afternoon wondering whether it would be wiser to listen to the people who suggested he focus his attention on shooting hoops in the burgeoning bush basketball league.

  ‘It seemed as if everyone thought I was wasting my time playing cricket,’ McGrath says. ‘Basketball had just started to become popular in Australia, so there were opportunities starting to open up. The National Basketball League was up and running, it was getting good airplay on television and the Kings enjoyed a huge following in Sydney.