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The auctioneer “waits for instructions” after bidding on Don Bradman’s first baggy green falls short of expectations

The bid for Sir Donald Bradman’s first green hat far exceeded expectations and is well below the record for one owned by the legendary Australian cricketer.

An online auction for the 1928 cap ended at 7:00 p.m. (ACDT) with a bid of $ 391,500 from someone with the initials SC in the Greenslopes suburb of Brisbane.

The auctioneers had hoped to raise between $ 1 million and $ 2 million on the cap that will be sold to pay the owner’s creditors, former bankrupt Adelaide accountant and convicted fraudster Peter Dunham.

Gavin Dempsey of Pickles auction house said he was waiting “for instructions” on the sale.

The record for a Bradman cap sold at auction in 2003 was $ 425,000.

Gavin Dempsey, General Manager of Pickles Auction House, holds Sir Donald Bradman's first green hat in his hand.
Gavin Dempsey of Pickles auction house holds the cap before his sale.((ABC News: Michael Clements)

The current record price for a baggy green is just over $ 1 million for Shane Warne’s test cap.

All of the bidders for Bradman’s hat came from Australia.

The upper limit is not allowed to leave the country as it falls under the Federal Act on the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage.

Bradman received his first baggy green long before the modern tradition of test cricketers who retained a single cap throughout their career was established.

He made his Test debut against England in Brisbane in 1928, scoring 18 and 1 – a return that dropped him for the only time in his career before being re-selected two games later, earning the selection a first century.

Dunham, now in jail, was given the hat when he was a young neighbor of Bradman in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs.

Bradman was friends with Dunham’s mother, who died in 1964.

The cap had been kept in the State Library of South Australia as part of the Bradman Collection.

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