How Cricket forged the idea of Australia and gave it a national identity | Cricket News

Relentless rain forced an early abandonment of the opening day’s play of the two-day pink-ball game between the Indians and the Prime Miner’s XI at Manuka Oval in Canberra. India had a photo-op with the Australian PM, Anthony Albanese, gave him a floppy sun-hat with their autographs, and soon left the arena. The setting – the game and the capital city – though allows us to dwell on the importance of cricket to Australians. Canberra is a city of compromise. A city that was birthed, constructed, designed as a balm to developing wounds in the Australian political society. More than hundred years ago, in 1913, due to political rivalries between New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, and Victoria, the fight was one to where to have the capital and to locate the parliament house.
Once it was deemed that the capital had to be at least 100 miles (160 kms) away from Sydney, the Canberra region, inhabited the Ngunnawal people for thousands of years, was finally chosen. A worldwide designing contest too was undertaken, and the American architect couple Marion Mahony Griffin and her husband Walter Burley won, and dreamed up the capital in their imagination.
The Manuka Oval celebrated its 100th year anniversary this July, turning from a park to a fenced cricket oval, and later to this picturesque arena with open-stands with flood-lights.
It’s not a surprise that the idea to host a Prime Miner’s XI fixture at this ground stuck to the then prime miner Robert Menzies in 1953; it’s a surprise that it didn’t strike earlier as cricket and politics in not only entwined in Australia, it can be even said that very idea of Australia was forged cricket. Such was the importance of the summer game to this country.
Cricket gave Australia a sense of national identity. A lovely little story captures the pre-nationalism era in Australia. A ship carrying a motley lot of Australian cricketers to England hit a storm in the seas in 1877. When Alec Bannerman was asked Fred Spofforth, Australia’s premier fast bowler nicknamed the ‘Demon’, who would he save if the ship sank, the reply came swiftly, “First my brother Charles and then you”. Spofforth queried, “What about the Victorians?” and Alec went, “I would let them drown!” It was a period of parochialism in Australian cricket and society but things were to change soon. Cricket played a huge role in it.
That period also reflected Australia’s affinity with England. It was the days when Britannia ruled Australian culture. In his retirement speech, Spofforth said it would be a privilege if England gave him a chance to play. Billy Murdoch, who captained Australia in the match where the Ashes legend originated, later represented England against South Africa and on his death, was buried in England. Albert Trott too played for England. Australia hadn’t yet cut the umbilical cord with England.
It was around the end of 1880’s that cricket helped shape the idea of Australia. The colonies which never did anything together were beginning to assemble under the umbrella of cricket. In 1878, in their cricketing tour of England, they had a Tasmanian, and then in the follow-up tours they had three South Australians and six New South Welshmen and five Victorians.
Would Australian nationalism have suffered if they had lost in those early games?
Gideon Haigh, a cricket horian and a writer, thinks so. “Every country tends to value those things they are successful at. If we hadn’t been a not so successful cricket country, if we had lost the Oval Test of 1882, if we had lost the Ashes series of 1897, perhaps we wouldn’t have regarded cricket as fundamentally important as we do,” Haigh had told this newspaper.
“It’s amazing and significant how early victories can be when you are searching for a sense of nation, of national identity. The Australians were able to accomplish as a single entity what the squabbling colonies were unable to attain politically was a significant step.”
The 1897 series against England was a very important landmark in cricket and society. It coincided with a series of pre-federation conferences in which the individual colonies of Australia were trying to reach an agreement at some sort of a federation. In that 1897 tour, Harry Trott’s side of Australians thrashed England 4-1 and that convincing margin of victory was toasted back in Australia.
The Bulletin, a very old Australian magazine which finally shut down in 2008, hailed that victory as “as being more to enhance the cause of Australian nationality than could be achieved miles of erudite essays and impassioned appeal”.
When the Australians toured England in 1899, they adopted for the first time ever, a motley of sage green and gold and even flew it in a flag over their headquarters at the inns of Court Hotel. Australianism now had an emotional visual construct as well.
It’s also important to keep in mind that Australia didn’t have many social and cultural narratives. It’s a modern nation. Or as Gideon says, “It’s a geographical construct. We didn’t have any political identity until 1901. Like what CLR James wrote of cricket in the Caribbean, here cricket provided us access to a readymade culture and helped us assert our superiority in certain controlled and limited respects.”
In 1901, through the process of Federation, six separate British self-governing colonies of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia formed one nation. Many of the Federation fathers actually learnt how to run the country through their experience of running cricket. The first prime miner of Australia, Edmund Barton, was an umpire and a former vice-president of New South Wales cricket Association. As an umpire he was famous for stopping a riot against a visiting English side in a game against New South Wales in 1879.
“Post-Federation cricket has a particular cache, because it represents values held dear, it’s national in a new-born nation, it’s traditional in a land with few traditions. It’s imperial in a country where the links of Empire mattered, and it’s also white in a region of the world where immediately beyond Australia’s shores was not. And I think Australian cricket success allowed the country to parade both its purity and the necessity of maintaining that freedom from racial contaminants,” Haigh says.
The Bulletin was a magazine which was fiercely behind the white Australia policy and sought to use cricket to promote its ideas. Its strap line at one point of time was “Australia for the white man and China for the Chow.”
Things are changing these days of course. Cricket now is at the next step of fusing Australia. With the inclusion of the likes of Usman Khawaja, it’s taking the integrated idea of Australia to the next level, trying outreach programmes with the South Asian population interested in cricket. As always, with Australia, cricket is at the forefront of silent revolutions.