Not Quite Right features discussions that are unfiltered and uncensored,
and may include themes that are inappropriate for younger listeners.
Also, I swear a lot.
Something doesn't seem quite right.
Welcome to not quite right.
My name is Ed, and this is the 11th of a series of
interviews that Amanda and I recorded at the Words and the Waves Writers Festival
this year.
This time we're speaking with Gideon Haig.
Gideon is a journalist, podcaster and above all,
a massive cricket fan.
He's the author of more than 50 books, including, most recently,
the memoir My Brother Jazz.
We spoke with Gideon about the experience of writing a memoir as well as his deep
love of the game of cricket.
O Please enjoy our conversation with Gideon Haig.
So we're here at Words on the Waves and we're here with Gideon Hague.
Nice to be here.
So you're about to go on a panel discussion called Bloodlines.
Tell us about that panel discussion.
I think I love with Legg Lane and Dominic Knight is the is the interlocutor.
I think it's about my wire.
I think both like and I have written stories about our family and about how
families dealt with trauma and, and and dislocation.
Can't be many families that don't have some sort of traumatic incident in them,
but they all tend to deal with them in isolation.
I all tend to to solve them according to their own lives.
And in my own family's case, it's to do with the death of my brother
37 years ago when she was a subject that had not really been discussed in my
family.
It was one of those sort of taboos, those silent sensitive areas and and I
decided at last to to write a book about it.
Sure at all.
Just a not even book really a sort of an essay.
And it's turned into a little hamlet called My Brother Jazz.
So no, a book I ever sort of foresaw writing,
but but one that I feel glad to have written.
I think that's a hugely shared experience with many people that these traumatic
incidents are the things that nobody talks about,
despite the fact that they are completely formative and and in some ways, you know,
can be the source of much breakdown.
Yes.
And yet we can't talk about the elephant in the room kind of situation.
Well, I was very resistant to thinking you
would talk about it too.
I mean, my family is very, very small and very stoic.
It's always been about soldiering on in the in the face of unpleasant experiences.
So even though the the writing of the book only took me about 72 hours.
Wow.
It was 37 years of not writing about it.
It was that I did most of the work in.
And with a book like that, I imagine much of the work is just coming
to an understanding about what has happened as opposed to necessarily the
words on the page.
It's about, well, what, what does it all mean?
Processing your emotions.
Yeah.
I mean, but I don't think you actually do process
your emotions, not completely until you actually about
trying to create some sort of kind of artefact.
I I'd spent 37 years and basically very, very circular thoughts that never really
had an outlet, that never really had an endpoint.
So in a sense, the right here was about trying to short
circuit that process to create it, to put in some sort of permanent form
whereby I could move it to one side.
Did it work?
I think so, yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
I was sceptical of of that and I've always had a bit of a thing about memoirs.
It's not a genre that I feel particularly comfortable with.
I don't like the idea of it doesn't come naturally to me, feels self indulgent.
It feels a little bit.
Look at me.
Yeah.
It's not something that came naturally to, which is not at all, from the sound of it,
the, you know, vibe of what you're trying to create
there.
It's not about you at all really is that.
It's about this shared experience.
I mean, it is, I mean, you know, wasn't as though I had anyone else's
experience in mind when I was writing.
I don't think it was, it was a supremely selfish gesture of me
to, to sit down and, and do this.
But it has had a very strong response.
When someone does write about something like this,
I think a lot of people interpret it as permission to share their own experiences
or licence to unburden themselves.
And I've heard a lot of very, very personal stories since from,
from from other people, things I would never have suspected.
Things seem infinitely worse than the experience that that I underwent,
which it reminded me of just how much people can reconcile themselves to,
to carry in this life.
You said it's selfish, but it's also, I think, a necessary part of, I guess,
working through these kinds of things that people want to,
people who've undergone trauma want to hear about other people's experience as
well, and that helps them work through their
own trauma.
So you mentioned a lot of people are now speaking with you,
and we've had this similar conversations with other authors as well.
Like, I remember speaking to Rosie Betty about
that, actually, and how this kind of event can be quite
overwhelming because people just feel the need to come and share the story with you.
Yeah, that shared experience.
But, I mean, some might call it trauma dumping,
I suppose, but it invites people, as you say,
to to share their own experience.
So is that something you would encounter here?
Writers Festival, for example, people sharing the book came out I think
about a year ago.
And yes, a lot of people have filled my email
inbox with with their own stories.
People have come up to me at at festivals like this.
It's fair to say that when I wrote it, I did not have that fate in mind.
And I, and in fact, some part of me is a little bit reluctant
to embrace this idea that I'm the grief guy because I don't think I have a
particular insight into it.
I don't think I have a particularly fresh take on it.
I don't think I have any particular skills in the map.
I don't think I can provide solace for for people that that's something that
only you can only do for yourself.
But certainly a lot of people have said that the book has helped them and that
they felt cathartic.
It's a very short book, so it's very intense.
It's very concentrated.
It's quite demanding.
I think it's something that you can read in, you know, 30 to 45 minutes.
I think.
It's certainly not a book that I've any desire to expand on or to build on.
Now, this will be the one memoir, right?
There won't be any more that sounds like famous last words.
But no, I don't actually find myself all that
interesting.
Now.
I'm a journalist.
I've been a journalist for 42 years.
Other people's stories have always dropped news infinitely more interesting
than than mine.
But this was this was one story that I really felt as though I had to get to the
bottom of because it's it is formative.
It does contribute significantly to A to a person's make up when they lose a
sibling.
I think we underestimate it slightly, the importance of the loss of a sibling.
We tend to think of the we tend to think first of all as grief arising from the
loss of partners or from the loss of children.
Siblings are special, so they're they're not replaceable.
They're unique in the sense that they share our DNA exactly.
They often share a huge proportion of our formative experiences.
All the friends in the world won't make up for the loss.
Obviously, I've been very, very fortunate in my friends in this life,
but I have felt a deep loss from the lack of that kind of that that emotional and
like in spiritual counterweights.
Yeah.
So you mentioned your journalistic career and before we started recording you
mentioned that you've written 52 books.
Yeah.
So tell us about some of these other stories that have been interesting you.
Well, I read a lot about cricket.
Alright.
That's that's probably the means by which most people know me.
I love cricket.
I still play cricket.
I think probably 30 odd of my books have been concerned with with cricket in in
all those different dimensions.
I tend to think of my career, such as it is,
it's pretty chaotic as being kind of knowing a lot about a little and a little
about a lot.
I know a lot about cricket too much really for any one person.
But I've written about lots of other things and I have, as a result,
a concentration of knowledge about some fairly wide, widely spaced topics.
He dispersed with huge vistas of ignorance.
So what's fascinated you about cricket?
Has it been the characters, the people who play the game?
Well, mostly, you know, it's, it's one of those sports that has a huge
number of layers and, and it can be consumed and related to in,
in myriad different ways.
You know, I started off 'cause I'm a player,
I love playing and I still play.
But the IT also, it's integral I think to Australian life.
It's, it's still our number one national game.
It's our longest lived national team.
It predated Australia as a, as an idea.
You know, we had an Australian cricket team before
we had an Australian nation.
I think it says quite a lot about nationhood and a lot about national self
image and a lot about our relationship to our imperial overlords.
I think it says a lot about community at the same time, because, you know,
it's a lot of cricket is nurtured at the, at the grassroots level by, by volunteers,
by, you know, one of the first things he did when you,
when you established a town or a new community, was he formed a cricket team.
You've built the cricket ground.
It's a, it's a complex sport.
It requires a lot of preparation, a lot of organisation that calls forth
skills of that are valuable as citizens, as participants in a, in a democracy.
I've always thought it was very interesting that I think that the
majority of the men involved in federation had relationship to cricket at
that sound community or, or, or colonial level.
You know, our first Prime Minister Edmund Barton
was a, was a cricket umpire, was a vice president of the News Cricket
Association.
So there's, there's an economic and a commercial
aspect to to cricket this that's very important.
Now, in a sense, we're in the process of privatising
cricket.
We're turning it from something that we thought we owned into something that
we're being sold, which I, which I think is the development that
people are inclined to, to overlook.
What do you, what do you mean by that?
Well, the advent of private ownership in, in cricket, I think is, is coming, yeah,
whether we're ready for it or not.
It's already come in a huge way to, to India,
which has mobilised enormous billions of, of capital and it always, you know,
billions of, of, of eyeballs.
But it'll come to Australia in the next few years.
Well, commercialization has that ability to
destroy the soul of.
Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
More and more people looking at model cricket as something that they can make
money from rather than making money in order to to afford cricket.
It's an arena of profit as as well as surplus.
But you're talking about all the political implications in the history of
cricket.
But as a a huge cricket fan, you must also just be a stats nerd, right?
I love stats, I love stamps and I love techniques
because I still play.
I'm fascinated by the techniques of the game,
the evolution of techniques of the game over the last 150 years.
Cricket is a game that is constantly changing and mutating and taking on
different forms and but also tapping into a traditional repertoire of of skills at
the same time.
So it's a fascinating game to to watch.
The cricketers have turned from players of sport to athletes in their own right.
But at a certain level too, it's one of those games where you meet
someone who's enthusiastic about cricket, no matter from what walk of life they are,
from what ethnic or religious or intellectual background,
and you already have an enormous amount in common with them.
It's a kind of an Esperanto and it means that Australians,
whether they like it or not, have a huge amount of call with Indians,
certainly not a country that they that they would automatically feel as though
they had a a sympathy or a relationship to.
But you walk into India as a as an Australian and first thing they want to
know about you is what you think about cricket.
I actually personally believe that we have a lot more in common with India than
most people realise.
Yeah, yeah, Yep.
Culturally, just as a sensibility, more so than maybe the detail of the food,
for example, but more on that level of, I mean the clothing.
I was going to say the chance for in your past history,
but I think just probably as a people, as an cultural attitude to yourselves and
that sort of thing as well.
I felt very at home in India when I first visited.
It was, it was almost like, you know, I'm not, these are my people.
You can have conversations about cricket in India that you would feel self
conscious about having in Australia.
It would be too serious.
Even through Australians, Indians have a earnestness where where
cricket's concerned.
It's quite delightful.
Yeah.
And so the thing that we share with you is the fact that you've also got a
podcast and it happens to be.
Tell us a little bit about the podcast.
OK, well, I, you know, I'm a bit of journalist for a long time.
And but in 2021, I think I started, I was at the Australian at that time and
I started off doing a cricket podcast with my colleague Peter Lawler called
Cricket, etcetera.
We then left the Australian and we reunited as a podcast called Cricket ET
al, which you'll find on YouTube, Spotify and an Apple.
And we also have a sub stack called Cricket ET al where we write more or less
every day on some cricket and non cricket related subject too.
Because we've got we're both kind of, you know,
we've spent a long time working together and we have similarly eclectic cultural
interests.
So right about all sorts of things.
So you're incredibly prolific.
Clearly, you just can't stop.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So when I found you in the room just now in the green room here,
you were writing rough hewing a first draught of my next books.
The moment.
Tell us about your next book.
Bit superstitious.
Oh, OK to myself.
Fair enough.
Is it about cricket?
No, no, no, long way, long way removed from from cricket
Facebook.
True crime is one of my old fascinations because I think that interesting crimes
are a useful aperture through which to view the society in which they're
committed.
And I've written 3 or 4 true crime books and they're also they're, they're,
they're actually histories with the crime in them rather than being sort of grown
in old or sort of macabre.
I'll find them fascinating.
They're deeply fascinating.
I mean, we, we've been having this discussion because
I'm fascinated by true crime.
I mean, I'm a middle aged woman.
I think that comes to the territory maybe, but it just doesn't connect with it on
that same level.
But I share your view that it's deeply interesting.
It's about it's a human story.
Yes.
And there's a lot more to it.
It's not really even about the crime necessarily.
It's about how we got there and what happened next.
Yeah.
Well, it certainly doesn't need to be about
that.
The crime doesn't need to actually be central.
Crime is kind of like this lightning bolt that illuminates everything around.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Interesting to hear you describe it like that.
I think.
Yeah, that that's how I feel.
I guess I've found it hard to articulate because people who aren't interested in
true crime might see it as this kind of sick interest in.
And I'm not saying that's how you feel, Ed, but it's not that it's, it's a human,
it's like an empathy thing, all those.
Well, I think the best of it is, yeah.
I mean, you certainly, you know, there's there's,
there's sort of prurient and and voyeuristic true crime,
and that's kind of cynical and exploitative.
But it doesn't have to be like that.
In the same way as, you know, crime fiction can attain the the levels
of the best sort of fiction.
So true crime can resonate with the best in history.
I agree.
So your book My Brother Jazz is available for sale now?
Yes.
Published by Melbourne University Publishing.
It's very beautiful actually.
They did a lovely job of producing it.
And, you know, my brother only lived for 17 years.
He died in 1997.
It sort of devastated our family, it and left a huge gap in it.
But as my mother said recently, it is nice to have something of my
brother after all these years.
It's something more tangible than, you know,
a seat or a scholarship or there's something of him in in that book.
In some respects, we've been reunited by the experience of
of writing.
And I imagine there's something of him in each of you as well.
Yeah.
I'm, I've still got artefacts of his that I
that I regard as very precious.
And you know, there is a huge community of loss out
there as well that is often waiting just for you to scratch the surface.
Well, I'm so glad that you did and I'm so glad
that you felt able to Share your story with the world and with us today.
So thank you for joining us today.
My pleasure and best of luck on your panel.
Thank you.
This has been a special presentation of the Not Quite Right podcast in
collaboration with Words on the Ways Writers Festival.
Check the show notes For more information about Words on the Waves and the books
mentioned in this episode.
If you're new to the podcast, please join us again for our regular
episodes where we talk about media, culture, and the art of writing.
Something doesn't seem quite right.