I got more Crickets Than Friends

Jizzy Pearl is the author of I got more Crickets than Friends ( avg rating, 4 ratings, 0 reviews, published ), Angst for the Memories ( avg r.
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After the day's play, Kamahl and the other Kensington players were in the dressing room mingling with a group of people he didn't know. One of my fellow cricketers said 'do you have any idea who you just met? Kamahl doesn't remember the next time they crossed paths at a gig in North Adelaide, but has strong memories of the third occasion in , and the anxiety he felt. I said 'yeah, I'm meeting God'. Then I told him who it was and he asked 'can you get an autograph for my sons?

Little did Kamahl know at the time, but the encounter at Bradman's home on Holden Street — a stone's throw from Kensington Oval — would mark the beginning of a beautiful friendship. He was born to Tamil Hindu parents in Malaysia and arrived in Adelaide as a schoolboy in to pursue a higher education.

As his university studies floundered, immigration authorities attempted to deport him, but singing helped save him. As a boy, Kamahl had never coveted a career on stage, but he enjoyed singing to himself and attempted to imitate Nat King Cole and Paul Robeson.


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After securing the support of some powerful benefactors, he was able to keep the immigration authorities at bay. A little later, in the late s, he met a young Rupert Murdoch, who was sufficiently impressed to arrange for Kamahl's first performance on television.

A hat-trick and a first encounter

Fortunately, the critics were very generous to me," Kamahl said. A few years later, with Kamahl's star on the rise, the Murdochs invited him to Sydney, sending him a plane ticket and organising a six-week season at one of Sydney's most upmarket hotels. Kamahl's meeting with Bradman on Melbourne Cup day in came about not as a result of their shared passion for cricket, but because of their mutual love of music. Bradman himself was a very talented piano player who wrote a song called Every Day is a Rainbow Day for Me , which was recorded in The letter elicited a reply from the Don, who said the recording would "be a cherished possession as long as I am spared".

Their correspondence stretches to about 80 letters, which contain discussions about music, but also personal details about Bradman's devastation following his wife's death from cancer. Kamahl is unsure of what will eventually become of the letters, but is contemplating selling them and donating the money to the charity Variety.

More stories from South Australia. If you have inside knowledge of a topic in the news, contact the ABC. ABC teams share the story behind the story and insights into the making of digital, TV and radio content. Read about our editorial guiding principles and the enforceable standard our journalists follow. Here's the full list of nominations. So if you're having trouble paying your bills, what can you do? The futuristic fountain and the Railway Roundabout in Hobart that generated so much civic pride in the early 60s have regained a place in the community's heart.

We asked people who worked in, or visited, aged care homes to send in pictures of what was fed to the residents. Curious Adelaide Curious Adelaide. Sir Donald Bradman and Kamahl forged a lasting friendship based on a shared love of cricket and music. Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar with Kamahl at a function. Kamahl - What is Australia to me? Curious Adelaide What have you always wondered about Adelaide? Tell us and an ABC journalist will investigate. Why is the name Brenton so popular in Adelaide?

By Eugene Boisvert Curious Adelaide: What are some of the unusual things Adelaide's famous Park Lands been used for? What's behind the rivalry between South Australia and Victoria? Elegantly written, the weightless prose outlined a staggeringly simple idea, yet hid a staggering depth of work.

And that simple idea changed the lives of thousands of scientists, creating a whole new field of research. Research into how people are connected, how disease spreads, how rumours start, how music and fashion changes, how to stop power grids from browning out, or the internet from collapsing. Which means this paper likely changed your life too. It all started with crickets. Steve Strogatz was and is fascinated by anything that synchronises.

And crickets sure do love to synchronise their chirps, the irritating insect. So he set his graduate student Duncan Watts the task of working out how a bunch of crickets in a field could synchronise together, how they listen to each other and subtly adjust the timing of their chirps to match the others. Watts ran into a problem: You could assume that every cricket had telepathic knowledge of every other cricket so that they were all linked.


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    4. But crickets are not, to our knowledge, telepaths. Actually, now he came to think about it, there were lots of ways in which crickets could listen to each other. So Watts started thinking about representing the crickets in a way he could play with. Make each cricket a node, and the link between a pair of nodes is then a pair of crickets that could hear each other. Well, presumably something where one cricket could hear many other crickets in its group and they could hear each other , yet any cricket was only a few links from any other.

    That way each group could synchronise locally, yet transmit that synchronisation to all other groups quickly.

    Curious Adelaide

    But what was that pattern of links? It was as though the pattern of links needed to be between regular and random. But what was between regular and random? This had to be a clue. People sit in their local groups of friends, yet according to legend there is just a few links of acquaintance joining widely differing people. Social networks seem neither regular nor random. So Watts asked his boss, Strogatz: Their famous model boiled down the answer to its bare essentials.

    Take a ring of nodes, and add to each the same number of links. But to get one from side of the ring to the other takes many, many jumps across many, many links. We do this by re-wiring the regular network. Randomly select a link sticking out of one node, and re-wire that link to any randomly chosen other node. Do that to every link, and the end result is a random network: Re-wire just a few and, suddenly, the average number of links between any two nodes becomes tiny.

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    Yet all nodes are still heavily linked into their local groups. Dang that looked like a network of society, a network of groups of friends linked by acquaintances. Where you might be linked to anyone else by a short chain of friends, giving you the sensation that it was a small world, after all. And lo, they called it: Every real-world network they tested turned out to be a small-world.

    The network of appearances in the same films by actors. The power grid network of the Western USA.

    A career launched by Rupert Murdoch

    The nervous system of the tiny worm C Elegans. It turned out that basically anything we can describe as a network is a small-world. The network of social interactions between dolphins in Doubtful Sound, New Zealand. The Marvel Comic universe.