How up to date are you with the concept of the Tree of Wisdom? No, it’s not quite as philosophical as you might think.

For the uninitiated, the Tree of Wisdom is a relatively new addition to the cast of The Wiggles who has gone viral for his outrageous and full-bodied dance routines.

The Tree pops up in a variety of different songs and situations, but always with the same absurd intensity.

There are some songs where you know he’s coming and you can brace yourself for the Tree, but then on others he just appears from nowhere in a hypnotising flurry of limbs and leaves.

No matter what is happening around the Tree, he’s always at 11. All you can really do is marvel at it and appreciate it for what it is.

“Why are we talking about The Wiggles and something called the Tree of Wisdom here?”, you may justifiably ask. Because Travis Head is the Tree of Wisdom.

Travis Head has no plan B. He has no gears to move through. He has one speed and it is beyond frenetic.

He cares little for situation or context and only for the plundering of runs. A lot of the time it doesn’t really make sense, and nobody else in his vicinity seems to ever operate at the same velocity, but when it works it is completely captivating.

On day two in Adelaide, Head took a game that was in a state of flux and made it conclusively Australia’s with a hundred at near enough to a run a ball.

The stats might say otherwise, but it felt like Head tried to hit every single ball he faced for four. Anything wide of his off stump was whomped through the covers, behind point or wherever else he pleased. He played pull shots with purpose and was utterly ruthless once the spin of Ravichandran Ashwin presented itself.

And of course he rode his luck at times, because that’s all part of the Travis Head experience. He played and missed plenty, was dropped once and slashed another between the keeper and first slip.

But a three-way contract has been signed between he, the Australian cricket team and the devil himself that grants him full license to bat with total freedom in the knowledge that some days it will work and some days it will not.

That sort of arrangement is not new in Test cricket, but in years gone by it was signed by the number seven or eight batters, often the wicketkeepers. Nowadays that role has been pushed up the order and often not restricted to just one batter.

India has Rishabh Pant, England has Harry Brook and Australia has Head, their pinch hitter who counters crisis with chaos to maximum effect. In some ways it is now the most important assignment in the game, and one that leaves the batter open to criticism when it doesn’t come off.

But when it works, oh boy. That this innings came in front of Head’s adoring home crowd at a packed Adelaide Oval just added to the festival of it all, granting him batting invincibility if only for an hour or so.

Even when he was finally dismissed Head couldn’t turn the intensity down. Mohammed Siraj, who seems to operate in a perpetual state of outrage, tried to give the local hero a send off and was met with three words in response — two that can’t be repeated, the other being “you”.

Head rather stormed off the field while still taking in the adulation of the faithful. There is just no turning him down.

On the whole, Australia could hardly have plotted day two out any better. It got a half-century out of Marnus Labuschagne, and a pretty encouraging one too, before Head stormed out and commenced dancing.

Then the tail wrapped the innings up right on the stroke of tea, giving the semi-rested quicks a brand new pink ball and a floodlit pitch to work with.

They promptly went to work, each taking their turn to rock the Indian top order while simultaneously challenging each other to up the ante.

Pat Cummins’s first wicket of KL Rahul came from a wicked bouncer, bettered only by Scott Boland’s first-ball peach to catch the edge of Yashasvi Jaiswal’s bat.

Boland followed up with another cracker to nick Virat Kohli off, but they both paled in comparison to the Mitchell Starc ball — perhaps the ultimate Mitchell Starc ball — which honed in on Shubman Gill’s middle stump like a ballistic missile.

Trust Cummins to try to upstage them all though. He produced one more millimetre-perfect delivery for good measure, sneaking past Rohit Sharma’s defence and taking just enough of the top off stump.

It was a frankly astounding night of fast bowling from the Australian trio, capping off a raucous day for those in the Adelaide Oval outer.

It wasn’t so long ago that Australian cricket was in crisis, and it would be disingenuous to say that all the problems Perth highlighted have been eradicated by two good days in Adelaide. Almost of them remain, but who needs to fret about the future when the present can be so exhilarating?

Nobody summed that up better than Head. The next time he tries a knock like this it probably work, but you better believe he will front up anyway — full of energy and ready to swing those limbs, come what may.