On 27 February 2001, Australia's greatest cricketer, Sir Donald Bradman, died in Adelaide aged ninety-two. Tributes flooded in from around Australia and the world, including one from the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, who lamented the passing of ‘the quintessential Australian hero’. Howard considered Bradman an Australian ‘battler’ who had risen above his humble origins by hard work and exceptional talent to inspire the nation by his cricketing deeds. Howard often compared Bradman's inspirational qualities to those of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) during the Great War. Like them, Bradman's batting feats during the Depression ‘reinforced the national spirit … and helped to display the independence and self-reliance of a young nation barely decades old’. His record-breaking efforts proved ‘that Australians were capable of being a talented and resourceful people’. In muddling his ANZAC and sporting myths, Howard neglected to mention that Bradman's own military service during the Second World War was brief and plagued by ill-health. But Howard deliberately politicised Bradman's life, elevating him to the status of national hero. Curiously, little is known of Bradman's private life, and whether he was worthy of such elevation. Perhaps he was just a boy from Bowral who was blessed with rare cricketing ability and little else.