Peter McFarline, the Australian journalist who broke the news of the Kerry Packer breakaway in 1977, died in Melbourne on April 7, aged 57, after a long struggle with a degenerative disease. Gideon Haigh pays tribute One day in Sydney on England's 1978-79 Ashes tour, there was a knock on Peter McFarline's hotel-room door. Outside stood Derek Randall, pen and paper in hand, evidently at a loss to complete a letter home. "'Ere," said Randall. "You're a bluddy writer. You write 'ome for me and tell the wife what's bin 'appenin'."

As well as adding to the stock of whimsicalities regarding Randall, the story reveals something about the affection and esteem with which McFarline at his peak was regarded. The Age, Melbourne's broadsheet morning daily, has been blessed with fine cricket writers for a century, from HW Hedley, Frank Mauger and Percy Beames to Mike Coward, Greg Baum and Mark Ray in more recent years. McFarline, although he began his working life at the Brisbane Courier-Mail and in the mid-1980s worked as Washington correspondent for Melbourne's Herald, stands comparison with any of them.

McFarline's boyhood hero in Queensland was Ken Mackay: his reverence, he recalled, extended to mimicking Mackay's bent-kneed gait and the "bovine dedication" with which he masticated his chewing gum. In one of his warmest pieces, McFarline described Mackay as "facing up to the world's best bowlers in a manner rather reminiscent of WC Fields wielding a croquet mallet".

The adoption of Mackay as a favourite was a patriotic choice to be sure, but perhaps as much to do with a precocious sense of the role of personality in sport. McFarline always seemed most at home in his writing with characters, larrikins, rough diamonds - and less happy when the ranks of characters began to thin with the onset of professionalism. He revelled in sport's salty humanity, and lamented its steady leeching by money, media and managers.

In the case of cricket's professional revolution, of course, McFarline could claim to have been present at the creation: his best-remembered coup will always be revealing Kerry Packer's inchoate plans to form a breakaway cricket circuit in May 1977. This story reverberated round the world, and became part of Age legend - not least because the sports editor of the day bone-headedly consigned McFarline's first Packer despatch to an inside back page.

At the time, McFarline was in his pomp, a tough, knockabout figure who socialised easily with a tough, knockabout Australian team under the captaincy of consecutive Chappells - indeed, McFarline had ghostwritten Ian's 1976 autobiography Chappelli. But the factionalised and poisonous atmosphere of the 1977 tour of England disillusioned McFarline at least a little. In Australia's Cricketer, he contrasted the trip with happier ones of yore: "Little snippets, like a piece of criticism relayed from back home, in days gone by would have brought the rejoinder `Have a drink, you bastard, what's this rubbish you've been writing about me?' Oh no, not in 1977. Then it meant snarls, insults, a heated two-hour verbal or, at the worst, no words at all. No drinks either."

McFarline sided strongly with the Australian Cricket Board throughout the schism, although he was too sane a journalist to become an establishment mouthpiece, as his book A Game Divided shows: it is lean, spare and punchy in the best traditions of Australian sporting reportage. But because he held no brief for anyone, he never hesitated to chide any athlete whom he saw as uppity, selfish or greedy; his judgments could be crushing.

McFarline's last 20 years were blighted by degenerative disease after an operation to remove a growth in his spine in 1982. The condition wrought a devastating toll on his health and appearance - he was wheelchair-bound for 15 years and evolved a technique of first dictating then silently mouthing his articles to his unfailingly resilient wife Dell. Indeed, he was still appearing in The Age two weeks ago.

McFarline's determination was such that he persisted for years on a biography that he had promised to write of the Aussie Rules football guru Ron Barassi, when there seemed at times little likelihood that he would live to complete it. It eventually appeared in 1995, dedicated to Dell "without whom there would be no book and no biographer".

Biographies of Australian sportsmen tend to be of either the cut-and-paste or tongue-in-bum variety. Barassi: The Life Behind the Legend, by contrast, is painstakingly researched and scrupulously even-handed. McFarline had known Barassi for 25 years, hunted down scores of Barassi's friends and colleagues, and interviewed his subject for more than a hundred hours: the book as a result is remarkably candid and personal.

It was not just McFarline's most arduous task but his best work, and of a calibre that few Australian sportswriters today could approach, because it is based on a sort of sympatico between author and athlete that no longer seems feasible. No, they don't make writers like Peter McFarline these days, any more than they make cricketers like Derek Randall.

Gideon Haigh is a former editor of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack Australia and the author of several books including The Summer Game. His latest, The Big Ship, is a biography of Warwick Armstrong.

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