This summer, browsers will probably find these chronicles of Eddie Gilbert and Mark Waugh snuggled close together in bookshops. Both, after all, are biographies of Australian cricketers, written by journalists, and published by firms with strong sporting backlists. But their proximity will be misleading. Cricket contains few less similar careers, and has generated few more different narrative styles. Indeed, reading them consecutively is to appreciate how stealthily our understanding of ‘biography’ has been elasticised.

Eddie Gilbert should be far better known. An Aborigine, he was raised on a controlled settlement at Barambah in Queensland. Seventy years ago, his speed as a fast bowler unsettled and unseated the mighty Bradman in a celebrated over at the Gabba. Having run the racist gauntlet of the time, Gilbert was tripped up by alcoholism and womanising, and prostrated by dementia, which confined him to an institution for the last twenty years of his life. It is a story rich in narrative potential – the inspiration, in fact, behind David Forrest’s enchanting short story ‘That Barambah Mob’ (1965). What Gilbert has needed for many years has been a version of his story shorn of drama, ornament and effect, assembling the known facts and blending them with new material. This collaboration between Mike Colman and Ken Edwards fills this need admirably.