John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Twenty years ago Australia lost one its greatest cricketers and most endearing characters, William Joseph O'Reilly—better known to all as Bill O'Reilly. O'Reilly's nickname was 'Tiger', and it is an apt description of his attitude to sport and life. He was a ferocious competitor on the field, and a fearless commentator on the game. We should remember such a life and celebrate such a character.

Bill O'Reilly was born on 20 December 1905. His father, Ernest, a school headmaster in Western New South Wales, and his mother, Mina, raised four children. Perhaps the circumstances of Tiger's early life give us an inkling of his adult character. Perhaps Bill's competitive nature was nurtured at home where, being the youngest of three brothers, he had to struggle against his older siblings. Indeed, O'Reilly himself once said the reason he had focused on bowling was that his two elder brothers monopolised the batting.

In 1921 O'Reilly was sent to board at St Patrick's College, Goulburn. There he excelled academically and athletically, representing the school in rugby league, tennis and cricket. At a time when university remained out of reach for so many with limited means, O'Reilly, on graduating, won a scholarship to Sydney Teachers' College, Sydney University. While in Sydney he began playing grade cricket with North Sydney and, based on a single performance against Gordon, he was selected for the 1927-8 New South Wales squad.

Not long after, during a state trial at the SCG nets, legendary test spin bowler Arthur Mailey suggested that if O'Reilly ever wanted 'to get anywhere in the game' he should change his bowling grip. O'Reilly's terse reply was, 'I think I shall continue with this grip thanks, Mr Mailey'. The irony was that O'Reilly had already learned much from Mailey. In the early 1920s, O'Reilly's brother Jack had written to Tiger describing Mailey's technique based on his observations of Mailey bowling in the North Sydney practice nets. Having studied his brother's letter, Tiger maintained that within days he had perfected the art of changing the spin of the ball without any discernible change in hand movement.

This was typical of O'Reilly's approach to cricket—self-taught, parochial. His transient early life meant that he remained free of coaches' corrections. His technique was a unique product of his own efforts. The result was spectacular. As Jack Pollard put it, he:

... loped to the wicket, wrist cocked, arms flailing, face strained with emotion ... with his first and second fingers wrapped around the ball and the other fingers folded on to the palm of his vast hand, he bowled a leg break, a bosey and a top-spinner at disconcerting pace, turning the ball enough to find an edge or beat the bat, bouncing some deliveries like a tennis ball. He had an awkward stoop at the moment of delivery caused by bending his right knee. But there was remarkable rhythm in all the grotesque aspects of O'Reilly's delivery.

This grotesque rhythm would propel O'Reilly on to represent both his state and his country. In 1931-32 he emerged as the successor to Mailey in the New South Wales side. A poor showing for New South Wales playing South Australia was followed by figures of 7-132 against Victoria. Based on this performance, New South Wales captain and fellow spin bowler, Reginald Bettington, declared that O'Reilly was the greatest bowler in the world. Bettington made himself unavailable for the next game to ensure that O'Reilly would not be dropped. In the same season, the Tiger would take 10-127 against South Australia, and he was selected to represent Australia in the fourth test against South Africa.

In 1932-33, O'Reilly became a regular member of the test side, playing throughout the infamous Bodyline series. In a series dominated by England's controversial tactics, O'Reilly was Australia's leading wicket-taker with 27 wickets. This included a match-winning 10-wicket haul in the second test at Melbourne. One commentator described O'Reilly's performance as 'the first flexing of that most menacing genius.' But despite his efforts with the ball and Bradman's endeavours with the bat, Australia lost the series. In 1934 Australia toured England and regained the Ashes. O'Reilly, along with Clarrie Grimmett, dominated the bowling. He finished the series with 28 wickets. In 1935 he was named one of Wisden's cricketers of the year.

O'Reilly would represent Australia for much of the rest of the decade. In a career interrupted by the outbreak of war, he played his final international series in 1946, where, aged 40, he captained an Australian tour of New Zealand. He finished his career with 144 test wickets at an average of 22.59.

After O'Reilly's death, Sir Donald Bradman described him as the greatest bowler he had ever faced or watched. Bradman's accolade is astonishing, because although their careers developed in parallel, neither man saw eye to eye. Their association was turbulent and longstanding. Their first encounter is the stuff of legend. In 1927, O'Reilly's train passed through Bowral on the way to Wingello. At Bowral, O'Reilly was persuaded to fill in for Wingello in their match against the hosts. On the opposing team was a 17-year-old Donald George Bradman, a boy with pads up past his navel, who would finish the day 234 not out, having been dropped twice by Wingello's captain, Selby Jeffery, early in his innings. On the first occasion, Jeffery, fielding at first slip, was hit in the chest by the ball while lighting his pipe. The second chance was grassed by the skipper who, in the words of O'Reilly, failed to see the ball amidst 'a dense cloud of bluish smoke'. Of course, Bradman and O'Reilly would go on to play Test Cricket together. Of his relationship with Bradman, O'Reilly was to write:

On the cricket field we had the greatest respect for each other. But off the field we had not much in common. You could say we did not like each other, but it would be closer to the truth to say we chose to have little to do with each other ... Don was a teetotaller, ambitious, conservative and meticulous. I was outspoken and gregarious, an equally ambitious young man of Irish descent.

O'Reilly's comments remind us that early last century Australia was a different country—a country where sectarianism and class divisions shaped much of the social mores of the age. These once-deep divisions, if not now all but forgotten, have certainly been much diminished. O'Reilly and Bradman in many respects represented opposing sides of this divide. O'Reilly was proud of his working class Catholic heritage, and he fiercely defended those he thought had been unjustly treated by what he saw as a very prejudiced establishment. Many in this chamber would understand Gideon Haigh's parliamentary analogy: 'While Sir Donald walked the corridors of cricketing power, O'Reilly was the rambunctious backbencher'.

Bill O'Reilly brought this same rambunctious irreverence to his career as a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald syndicated in the Age. O'Reilly criticised Australian Captain Ian Johnson during the 1956 Ashes tour. The Age reacted to this attack on a Victorian, and when O'Reilly refused to back down, his column was dropped by the Melbourne broadsheet.

Bill O'Reilly was published across the cricket-playing world in India, South Africa, England and New Zealand. He watched on disapprovingly as the gentlemen's game turned professional, and he remained until the end an ardent critic of what he characterised as `pyjama cricket'. He wrote eloquently and passionately for over 40 years, saying:

As a writer on the game it has always been my one consuming resolve to tell my readers ... exactly what my personal reactions were to the events of the day. Not once did I ever spend time racking my brain on what was the nice thing to say or the thoughts I should not let come through on paper. In my opinion that would have been cheating.

On 6 October 1992, Bill 'Tiger' O'Reilly died, aged 86. In 1988, the Sydney Cricket Ground's Pat Hills Stand was renamed in his honour. In 2000, he was named in the Australian Cricket Board's Team of the Century. But Bill O'Reilly was much more than just a cricketer. He was a writer—a very, very good one—he was an educator, and, had Doc Evatt had his way, he would have been a fine representative of the Australian Labor Party.

Each year since 2005, as close as possible to the 20 December, admirers have gathered at the Sydney Cricket Ground to celebrate the Tiger's birthday, reminisce about past glories and watch the annual Tiger Cup fixture between the SCG XI and the St George District Cricket Club. This year will be no exception.

The legendary Somerset bowler and writer, Ray Robertson-Glasgow, once said of O'Reilly:

He looked as if, under the necessary circumstances, he might have founded or sacked a city. It was a face and form as you might have seen in a picture of explorers or pioneers. At cricket he would have bowled till his boots burst and after. If only one cricket ball was left in the world, and that came to pieces in his hand, he would whiz down a leg-break with the largest fragment. He had the inspired joy of battle.

That was Tiger O'Reilly: fierce, fearsome and fearless.

Another Sydney Morning Herald columnist, the late Peter Roebuck, wrote:

O'Reilly was a great man and a wonderful writer. A fierce patriarch from the deepest bush, he had red hair, Irish blood, a fondness for beer, a penetrating mind, unwavering contempt for one-day cricket and absolute faith that sooner or later leg spin would return.

Leg spin did return in the form of SK Warne, who debuted for Australia in January 1992 beneath the O'Reilly Stand at the Sydney Cricket Ground, just months before Tiger's death.

I am one who admires Bill O'Reilly. I am also one who again looks forward to joining many others, from many walks of life, at the SCG to celebrate Tiger's birth at White Cliffs, New South Wales, on 20 December 1905.

Senate adjourned at 22:26