I drove through Toowoomba last week. And “Toowoomba”, as you know, is an old indigenous expression meaning, “The Place of Painful Memories”.
All right, I made that up. The meaning of the word “Toowoomba” isn’t entirely clear, and it’s the subject of heated debate between people who care about such things, but I’ve got my version, and I’m sticking to it.
It was 1979. I was in a bunch of schoolboys from Sydney on a tour of Queensland, and we were playing a game at Toowoomba. We bowled first, and we felt we were on top – we had the home side seven down for not much more than a hundred. But then, in came the Queensland Schoolboys opening bowler, a strapping farm boy called Ron Buchholz.
