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The drive to Bowral in New South Wales takes you through some of Australia’s most English countryside. Pastoral hills roll right up to the roadside and finish in grassy verges, flecked with yellow and white wildflowers. Alliums stand sentinel around vibrant lawns. Even the eucalypts are cosplaying as beech and oaks. You might be in Hampshire, if it weren’t for the dazzling sun.
Just a few roads from the high street – storefronts full of fancy cookware and country casuals – is the Bradman Oval. This small ground, with its pre-loved outfield, has become a pilgrimage stop for the Australian cricketing faithful. Head out to the middle and you’re walking across the sacred turf where Sir Don honed his skills. Stand at the crease, look past the white picket fence, and you can see the family homes where he grew from boy to man, on Shepherd Street and Glebe Street respectively.
The village feel gives the ground a surprising charm and familiarity – especially to the England fan. We grow up with the narrative that Australian cricket has always reflected its red-rock interior: a place where hard men toil on hard wickets, Bradman being the hardest of the lot. But an Ashes trip – if you can spare some time from the gladiatorial Test grounds and Barmy Army beer joints – is an excellent check and challenge to images conjured solely from the imagination, and a landscape seen purely through the lens of a remote rivalry.
For me, travelling solo across four states, cricket has proven a constant companion, meaning this large continent has never felt lonely. Beneath the pink-granite mountains of the Gawler Ranges, a six-hour drive from Adelaide, I checked into an empty motel expecting a lonesome evening in its dining room and instead found myself immersed in the joyous family atmosphere of a Wudinna Cricket Club post-match hang.
In the parks and pubs, cricket remains the dominant summer pastime and subject of conversation. In the Grampians of western Victoria, whose peaks are better known for their world-class climbing, I constantly witnessed pick-up games in the backyards and paddocks of the cafes and restaurants, or mums and dads tossing up hit-mes to tiny toddlers holding miniature bats. There was beach cricket in the Perth suburbs, and on one Melbourne city beach I even saw a game played waist-high in the waves.
These constant public displays of affection are matched in the stands and on the airwaves. Channel 7, the terrestrial broadcaster of the Ashes, had the entire series available on demand for repeat viewing, session by session, a gesture offering significant added value for matches that ended too quickly. The Big Bash, which overlaps with the international summer, creates a festival atmosphere around the sport: rather than cannibalising attendances, it has contributed to them. Last week, a combined 105,767 spectators added up to a record crowd for the new year’s matches at the MCG and Optus stadium.
Cricket’s truly public nature in Australia is perhaps epitomised by their major Test grounds, which are owned by state-appointed trusts, government agencies or, in the case of Adelaide Oval, the people of South Australia itself. They are not run for the benefit of venture capitalists, nor for the members of private clubs, but for the very people who enjoy (or might one day enjoy) the sport they host.
It all throws England’s ruthless privatisation of cricket into sharper focus. The hiving off of a common and popular field game by the elite is, after all, one of the foundational moments in its history, thanks to the aristocrats who formed Marylebone Cricket Club and immediately copyrighted the laws of cricket. The English game’s far more recent retreat behind televisual paywalls, its disappearance from state schools and its eager adoption of “elastic” market pricing for tickets – which only ever stretches one way – has yet to be mitigated.
In the meantime, Australia becomes a land of counter-envy – a place where English cricket fans travel to experience a cricketing culture that the “old country” once believed to be a major marker of its identity, and vital bond with its colonies. There’s an inherent irony in this reversed nostalgia. Perhaps it’s how French winemakers feel about the cuttings of vines that were planted here in the 19th century, and ended up being the rare survivors of that ancient viticultural legacy when the phylloxera blight raged through Europe’s vineyards. Like cricket, they still thrive here. The wines they make are, similarly, big winners.
It’s possible, in this country, to travel four hours into the Victorian countryside to a town with a population of just over 100, and find locals so passionate about their local sporting hero, Johnny Mullagh, that they have transformed the old bank into a charmingly child-friendly museum about the 1868 Aboriginal XI tour of England. Even here, space is set aside for a quick bowl in the front yard – or you can head up the road to the ground where Mullagh played, and where a small cairn halfway up a hill across the road marks the spot to which he hit his longest six.
As for Bowral’s Bradman Museum – incorporating the hallowed Bradman Oval – it hasn’t stopped striving for excellence since it was founded nearly four decades ago. To be fair, you’d expect nothing less from somewhere that celebrates a man with a Test average of 99.94. Its most recent new addition is an impressive permanent exhibit celebrating the women’s game, and a female hall of fame. Like the Johnny Mullagh Interpretive Centre, it is majority-staffed by volunteers. And yet it remains open 364 days a year, and sees visitors arrive from far and wide on every one of those.
It may be no surprise to see Australians taking cricket seriously, but it is an education to travel through a country where the game is so readily available and publicly embraced. English perceptions of Australian cricket may often have been distorted by distance and prejudice but, up close, there’s plenty to learn.
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