Rowing

I arrived here, I netted strongly the morning before the game.

The day before, I went to lunch and Rod Maher said to me, what are you doing this afternoon, Scull? I said, I'm going to my room and visualising getting wickets tomorrow.

He said, well, you're coming to the Western Brewery to visualise drinking eight hours of piss with us.

LAUGHTER

So it was a, it just became, you know, an obvious organic metaphor for life, you know, for the flow of life.

So, yeah, there is that strange scene where the two boys are, Rowing back from Fremantle, which is based on an actual story from my father's childhood where his dad had the bright idea of buying a cheap boat down off East Fremantle and they realised after they'd bought it they couldn't fit it on the truck and the two boys ended up rowing it.

rowing it back to Crawley and that was always an epic story in my father's childhood as a you know a prepubescent child rowing a huge dory back to the city but in my mind it was it was like the river kind of did things to them allowed things to happen and transported them out of their ordinary existence into a into a kind of a spiritual realm of imagination and opportunity you know and the sad thing is that you know the people in cloud street don't always understand what's right in front of them you know um and also who's right in front of them and that's some of the tragic element of cloud street is that you know I mean, I was keen to write about these white working class people and to honour their lives and their hardships and their aspirations.

But I couldn't make them any more enlightened than they were in their time of their class and of their education.