Australia's awakened anxieties

Nine days on from the death of David Hookes. Nine days that have made Australia seem a shakier place, less sure of itself, not so much the happy-go-lucky land of the fair go, no longer trusting and confident in the farce of one big happy mixing pot.

The same day that Hookes was pronounced dead, assaulted brutishly and mysteriously outside a St Kilda hotel, graffiti was scrawled on the wall of a train bound for Bondi Junction: "Middle eastern people are ruining our country, raping our children and killing David Hookes." And you wonder whether the confusion and wrenching out there would be somehow different if the name of the 21-year-old security guard currently on bail and fielding death threats was not Zdravko Micevic but, say, Bruce Brown?

Nine days on and the wrenching continues. "In many ways I wish I'd been there on Sunday night and been able to step in," was Rod Marsh's initial response the morning after. Well-meaning but unhelpful, Marsh's comments summoned up the spectre of blokey, breast-beating, wounded masculinity that infects Australian pub-life, and that probably - one way or another - has something to do with the fact that Hookes is no longer with us.

With the passage of days anger and bitterness have turned to a milder, mellower sorrow. The various Hookes webpages that have sprung from nowhere are clogged with condolence messages. Former team-mates, protégés and park cricketers everywhere have donned black armbands. Darren Lehmann says the game will never have the same meaning for him again. Ian Davis, Hookes's Centenary Test team-mate, told one weekend newspaper: "There's a hole in my heart."

In the same breath he touched on the anxieties, the unspeakable wider tensions, that are inseparable from this death, in which Australia has seemingly lost much more than just an old part-time Test cricketer who averaged 34. "It's an indictment," said Davis, "of society as it is today."

On the same day that Hookes's funeral arrangements were announced, Germaine Greer flounced into print in The Australian newspaper with a ramshackle 1400-word tirade headlined: "Slack And Insufferable". In it, she railed against an Australia of "ever-expanding replications of Ramsay Street", an Australia "marooned in oceanic tracts of suburban doldrums", an Australia where "nobody has ever been heard to discuss a book or a movie, let alone an international event".

This was nothing unusual, for Greer routinely lambasts Australians for our slovenly ways, urging us to live more like world-savvy hunter-gatherers then skipping away to her hoity-toity Essex academic's existence. As always with Greer, it contained a kernel of truth and a lot of bollocks but was well worth saying. But not here, not now, not on this day of all days.

Yesterday, Australia Day, always a day for awkward introspection, brought more confusion and wrenching. An indigenous leader, Pat Dodson, reminded us that Aborigines are being subjected to "a new brand of assimilation" and remain the "most marginalised and disadvantaged people in the nation". An environmentalist, Peter Garrett, noted that Australians have "embraced consumption and real estate" but "forgone the harder journey of tackling those things we know bedevil our nation". A best-selling author, Matthew Reilly, lamented: "We hide. We quiver in fear - afraid of asylum seekers, afraid of waves of Asian migrants, or just afraid of the unknown."

Mostly this had nothing to do with David Hookes. And yet, in a muddled kind of way, it did. For Hookes liked a beer and a whine, he had a sense both of fun and injustice. He brought backyard cricket to the international stage, his purpose always to raise people's spirits not his own batting average. He was never coddled or over-managed or politically correct; he was one of us. He represented an Australia we worry has disappeared. And now he is dead.

Over on Cricket Victoria's memorial webpage a little more confusion, a lot more wrenching. "As a kid and now an adult in his mid-30s," writes Steve Hatziakoumis, "you were my only true hero." "My idol and my first crush," gushes Claudia Giarrusso. "I have never been moved by the death of somebody I don't know so deeply as this," says Phil Pearce. "When Hookesy came into bat," writes Don Wilson, "I just knew that anything was possible." From Lindsay Perry comes the ultimate tribute: "When I was growing up my brother and I would always argue over who would be David Hookes during our backyard cricket matches."

Life goes on. Each day the confusion and wrenching eases a little. Yesterday Steve Waugh - whom Hookes, granted lither footwork and longer selectorial patience, could almost have been - was named Australian of the Year, following in the steps of Allan Border and Mark Taylor and completing something of a holy cricketing trinity. Today, the day of Hookes's funeral, people will gather at the Adelaide Oval to say goodbye and weep bittersweet, recuperative tears.

Yes, life goes on - without David Hookes, though, and without the same innocence and certainty that a blond-haired youth with a fantastic eye, amazing timing and no fear can bring to a people.