Bradman's Big Bat and Stumps

The scale is defensible in a way most Big Things are not. Bradman's Test batting average of 99.94 remains the most extreme statistical outlier in serious sport – not the best figure in cricket but the best figure in almost any measured human activity, standing roughly two-thirds above the next tier of great batsmen. A monument that is merely large would understate it.

When he died in 2001 the country mourned him as a national figure rather than a sportsman, and visiting the bat and stumps became a small pilgrimage for travellers passing through the Riverina.

They have not always been well kept – the installation was visibly run down and in need of paint for some years, a common fate for 1970s fibreglass and steel. Cootamundra-Gundagai Regional Council records a refurbishment in 2022, which has addressed it.

Bradman Oval is a working ground, and playing cricket in front of the stumps is very much the intended use.

There is a small tension in the memorial worth noting. Bradman's cricketing life belongs overwhelmingly to Bowral, in the Southern Highlands, where he grew up and where the Bradman Museum and the better-known Bradman Oval are. Cootamundra has the birth certificate and not much else.

A town in that position can either concede the point or build an eight-metre bat, and Cootamundra built the bat. There is something admirable in that: a claim staked emphatically on the one fact nobody else can take, in a district that would otherwise be passed through without a second thought on the way down the Olympic Highway.