The book has one supreme quality: it is fair-minded. The authors are assiduous in avoiding judgment so that, at the end, the book amounts to a welter of information and opinions, many of them conflicting. In such a controversial case, that is a worthwhile role for a book to play.

Roebuck was a big part of Australian summers for over a decade, initially as a sports writer and later as a broadcaster. As a writer, he was punchy and poetic – he could convey a cricketer's character in a phrase. His store of insights into the game seemed limitless. He was politically fearless, one of his principal targets being Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwean regime.

I first met Roebuck when I wrote as piece on him in the 1990s in which I compared him to T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). I was more right than I knew. Both were physically brave, highly intelligent men (Roebuck had a first-class honours degree in law from Cambridge University) with oddly compartmentalised natures.

For about a decade, Roebuck and I met at least once a year. Things I remember from those times? Introducing him to a woman and, the introduction done, him being no more aware of her presence than if she had been a hat stand. Roebuck visiting a hospital to meet a mate of mine who had broken his neck in a skiing accident. He did that very well, taking an intelligent interest in my friend, being easy with his time, listening as well as speaking.

Roebuck generously wrote a cover note for my book, The Call, the story of Tom Wills who was, among other things, a great cricketer destined to commit suicide in a ghastly manner. I also remember him shocking me by saying he had not a single copy of any of the books he'd written. That's highly unusual for a writer; their books are like the pyramids they build to survive them.

As a batsman in English county cricket, Roebuck stood up to some of the greatest fast bowlers the game has seen. He seemed, through the application of an intellectual method, to be fearless. During the years I was catching up with Roebuck, I wrote from a shed in the garden in which I had permitted a spider to build a web in one corner as something for me to meditate on while I attempted to write my first novel. Roebuck saw the spider's handiwork and screamed. He had fears all right. Like all of us, I suppose, he admitted the fears he could handle and kept the rest at bay.

His recurring theme as a sports writer was character, or the lack thereof. I remember him telling me that a former West Indian great had told him the trouble with the West Indian cricket team of recent years is that young West Indian men lacked character. I thought the trouble with the West Indian cricket team is that the West Indies is an artificial construction and the game is withering in its geographical zone. After Roebuck's death, I re-read his autobiography. Again, the idea of "character" was everywhere. It was as if he were obsessed with the one quality he wasn't sure he could control.

The book strains to present Roebuck's credentials as a heterosexual and, in so doing, presents the remarkable testimony of a former lover, Julia Horne, daughter of Sydney author Donald Horne. One can only see Julia Horne's posthumous defence of Roebuck as an act of love by a brave and intellectually independent woman. That said, however, many men with homosexual orientations have heterosexual relationships at different stages in their lives.

As far as my relationship with Roebuck was concerned, there came one year when Roebuck didn't ring and it seemed like a natural conclusion to me. He was endlessly interesting on cricket but I was interested in more than cricket. I was interested in him.

The book quotes a string of people saying he never spoke about having a family. He did to me, but maybe in response to a question. He said his family relied upon him to solve their problems, that he had recently had to intervene in a sibling's marriage. I gathered he had little respect for his father. It was significant, I thought, that the young Zimbabwean men he sponsored and lived with in South Africa were required to call him Dad.

During his trial in England in 2001 on assault charges after he caned a young South African cricketer who was living with him, I rang to give my support. I seem to remember him saying he could never go through the ordeal again.

I thought he had been caught out doing something odd and that he would promptly change his ways. I was amazed to subsequently hear him defend corporal punishment on an ABC radio lifestyle program.

The thing that has to be understood about caning is that it is an intimate act between two people. This is why it intertwines so easily with sex. It cuts to a similar level but by a different path. Roebuck made the young South African, who had failed to keep up with Roebuck on a run the morning after he arrived, select the instrument with which he was to be punished and then inspected the welts he'd left on his rear.

I thought the judge in that case got it exactly right. He told Roebuck his actions were "so unusual that it must have been done to satisfy some need in you".

When asked if he had any advice for Ben Cousins during the worst of his drug problems, Gary Ablett snr, a man with well-publicised troubles of his own, replied, "Keep out of temptation's way." By setting up a house in a remote part of South Africa and taking in young men (note: not children) from Zimbabwean orphanages, Roebuck, in my judgment, put himself in danger's way.

I found the testimony of Itai Gondo – the 26-year-old Zimbabwean whose complaint of sexual assault led the police to Roebuck's hotel room on the last night of his life – to be credible. There are some who believe Roebuck was murdered, as well as some who think the Zimbabwean government, for whom he had become a problem, used Gondo to set up a "honeytrap".

Gondo said Roebuck spoke to him of a bond between men that women don't understand. I first encountered that idea in gay writers like Oscar Wilde. Julia Horne was so forthright as to state the only sexual problem in her relationship with Roebuck was what the authors delicately termed his "over-eagerness". In very different language, Gondo describes a similar experience. He then quotes Roebuck as saying, "I'm sorry. I've never done this before."

I can believe that, too. I believe Peter Roebuck was someone who carried within his complicated self a strong urge to do good in the world. Which is why his life, and particularly his death, is a tragedy. This book is like a funeral service conducted in a spirit of fairness and candour.