Jim Maxwell: Radio commentary's tireless doyen

There are many particularly welcome occurrences at the beginning of an Australian summer and chief among them is having the radio airwaves filled with cricket talk. Cricket talk means ABC Radio. ABC Radio means our commentary doyen Jim Maxwell.

If you have never played the game at the highest level, it requires talent, the capacity for a lot of hard work and no small amount of perseverance to succeed in cricket broadcasting. Maxwell surely possesses all three and particularly needed the latter when it took him three tries to win a traineeship with the public broadcaster 41 years ago.

Back then, in 1973, Maxwell was a 23-year-old greenhorn calling the likes of Lillee and Thomson, though any Australian cricket lover under the age of 40 could scarcely conceive of a time when Maxwell wasn't a broadcasting institution. His calm, measured utterances remain one of the most recognisable and evocative sounds of an Aussie summer, like Cicadas or the sizzling of a barbecue.

When Maxwell talks into his microphone, the whole of Australia is linked by the arms in an increasingly rare communal experience. As a city dweller it is one of the rare moments in which I'm reminded of Australia's vast landscape and the remoteness of some fellow Aussies. At the end of the over some rural listeners will be departing for the country hour, Maxwell tells us. Thus, Channel Nine's reality TV show cross-promotions are thrown into even starker relief.

There are commentators whose authority comes from being champion players; there are the jokesters, the stylists and the impressionists but an increasing rarity in the broadcast landscape are veterans like Maxwell who command respect with calm, measured description and unfaltering delivery. He doesn't hammer you with facts or figures, he doesn't labour his way through comedy routines and he doesn't shriek down the line.

So many of us can be transported somewhere else when Maxwell is on the microphone, not just in the present and to far-flung cricket grounds but also to moments in time that have passed. I'm a child sitting on a chair beside my father as he works away in his laboratory to the sounds of Maxwell and co or listening through a crackly transistor radio as he pulls weeds from the garden. I'm rolling down the Western Highway past barren fields of the Victorian countryside with the windows down. I'm ducking out of a wedding under the guise of fetching something from the car but really I just want Maxwell to tell me the score.

As Richie Benaud's absence from Nine's dreadful TV coverage last summer showed, a commentary box needs a captain with a firm and steady hand, and at the ABC that is Maxwell. Radio commentary is a far different beast to its TV equivalent of course but in Maxwell, Benaud has a peer. If Nine had any sense they would be looking at him as Benaud's successor (he does have TV experience) but they won't and anyway, radio listeners would be mortally wounded if they did.

The radio job is far harder than a TV commentators' actually because you don't have vision on which to fall back on and become complacent. Instead, he must essentially describe the same thing over and over and make it interesting each and every time without exaggerating, stagnating or irritating listeners. Maxwell doesn't do catch phrases, he doesn't yell and scream and he maintains an extraordinarily high standard on a consistent basis.

''To do cricket commentary well, you have to be around it for quite a while, not get too self-indulgent, not get too carried away, not get too forgetful about what the audience needs to hear,'' Maxwell told the Sydney Morning Herald a few years back. Those qualities are easier spoken of than enacted but Maxwell succeeds.

It's worth noting that Maxwell was mentored by Alan McGilvray and so straddles generations that seem a century apart, but in style he's spread his wings a little over the years and adapted to the times without losing any of that gravitas. He is conversational and chatty but never inane, comprehensive but never condescending. Everywhere around us are cautionary tales of how difficult it is to strike that balance between informative and entertaining. Maxwell has done it for so long and so well that it appears effortless. Surely it can't be.

We are lucky to have him, really. Not every sport still boasts old-fashioned pros. At the edge of the vast sea of Australian Test cricket in the last 40 years, Jim Maxwell has always stood at the top of the lighthouse, guiding us home.