The day/night Test in Adelaide finished early on Sunday evening, depriving me of the ideal audiovisual lullaby. Roaming the other channels dubiously, I stumble upon Aunty's live broadcast of Crowded House performing on the crowded steps of the Opera House.
The chance find is bittersweetly sublime; I resent the lucky (or at least organised) Sydneysiders who snagged tickets, but then my reserve pew is eminently bearable: the Cassina armchair set at a 45-degree gradient from the interior medial of my late-model Samsung (its blacks admittedly inferior to LG's OLED, but then most people seeking darkness from a TV generally just switch it off).
And it's fitting that a belated show of batting backbone led me to the Finn brothers. Because, what two ingredients of Australia's mythical summer holiday are more pivotal to its enjoyment (cold beer perhaps excluded) than cricket and music?
I know this country is no longer a macrocosm of Cloudstreet, notwithstanding large and conspicuously avoidable tracts of Queensland; that many citizens and residents of modern Australia spend their Januarys slurping hot and sour soup, or on a mat facing Mecca, or just bleeding out in an Earlwood driveway full of some rival importer's lead. But I'm not pretending to write a culturally representative ode to Christmas break; might as well be hauled before Gillian Triggs for my choice of ice-cream flavour. Mine is, or at least has been, precious weeks when the bat and ball come out in the yard or on the sand and the stereo resounds with Aussie (or indeed Kiwi) rock classics.
There are certain traditions in cricket, as in music, that stem from the way families grow up together. Imagine old Mr Finn banging on the wall telling Neil and Tim to turn down their Fender amps. Or Mrs Waugh looking out the back window in Panania to see her twins playing World Series. And now, while one tribe is adulated at Bennelong Point, the other is shaping the future of their game: Mark is a member of the National Selection Panel, while Steve is a prime candidate to be its next chairman.
In the 'burbs, brothers form bands. Like the Finns, or the Seymours (Nick being the Finns' bass player and Mark being Hunters & Collectors frontman). Cricket legend is written the same way. These are the bonds and obsessions formed in Nowheresville, Vanillaland – like nothing built between remote Warcraft gamers – by the (increasingly less) white working class.
And it's in those families and streets that some siblings, or neighbours, are naturally gifted whereas others graft and grind with the modest – relatively speaking – talent they have. Tim Finn is a natural, I realise, as he belts out It's Only Natural.
It's easy when you don't try…
So was Mark Waugh, the most silken batsman any of us alive today has probably seen. They made it look easy all right, so easy we often wondered if indeed they were trying.
But Neil Finn (his family called him "The Ant", so ploddingly ambitious was he) and Stephen Waugh are two testament to generating prodigious returns from a more limited range, a range pared back and so somehow enhanced. Both had more enduringly successful careers than their sublimely talented brothers.
Prevailing wisdom has the musical institution of the album on its last legs, destroyed by society's exploding deficit of patience. The same goes for Test cricket, the vinyl of the game, for the diehards, the aficionados. Heavily lit, before a ringing mob, both rely on great partnerships.
My laboured juxtaposition does rely on one glaring inconvenience: the Finns aren't ours. Their summers were bracing; in the Waikato, the sands are black! But I don't care. I'm claiming them.
And as they disperse, the Black Caps arrive in town. Our boys in their canary yellow face them tomorrow at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Last year in Melbourne, we deprived them of the World Cup but who'd really have begrudged the Kiwis their first title? Whether in this sport or the other, the rivalry is fierce but rarely bitter. Hell, it's borderline affectionate. You don't need an Anzac parable or an ANZUS Treaty to know that.
As for music and cricket, Aussies and Kiwis have tremendous parallels. Like family. Other than the Crowes (one, may he rest in peace, a prince among men, his cousin actor a boofhead), the members of famed New Zealand houses live like normal people.
Who is more awesome than Neil Finn? Paul Kelly needed heroin to be that awesome. Neil's been married for 30 years – to the same person! In August, I found myself in a queue with Finn at US Customs in Los Angeles. Talk about unpretentious (him, not me) – he could just as well've been a ski instructor from Arrowtown or a restaurateur from Hamilton (I bet Hamilton could do with a decent diner).
Yep, I'm claiming him. And the rest of them. I love New Zealand. I'd live there if it wasn't so boring, and they could play cricket.
joe.aston@afr.com.au @mrjoeaston
