An Ocean of XIs

GH with a grass roots cricket gallery

The Mumblebone Cricket Club, some time in the 1900s, look like they’re ready for anything, from bringing in the harvest to joining a bar room fight. Except look at the reverence they accord that precious scorebook, which they’d have carried around the district of Walgett like a talisman - you can’t feel that same way about a tablet, so don’t tell me you can. Anyway, this is from the State Library of NSW - one of many, many hundreds of cricket team photographs retained and preserved by our major collecting institutions, providing in their similarities and variations a sporting, social and sartorial portrait of Australia through the ages. Strangely, it is a genre going out of fashion - now it’s so easy to take a photograph, the specialness of the formal image has dwindled. But when the camera was a novelty, it called forth our preserving instinct, and provided a hedge against time’s passing.

They’re lovely things, these vernacular cricket images. While it’s rare photograph that identifies the figures, you can usually pick the types: same as today, there’s the enthusiast, the gun, the old timer, the kid etc. You can also observe the passing of certain species of cricket. Clubs abide. We still, to a lesser extent, have schools. But the days when your company or your department got together a team went the way of welfare capitalism. For most of the twentieth century, for example, the railways were Australia’s biggest employer; most of their remaining workforce is now heading out the door, taking with them the vestiges of an active and vibrant culture in which sport was key. You have to be a certain age, like me, to remember church cricket. Anyway, enjoy this rich pageant - at the very least, a stroll through decades of fashion and fad, hair and hat.