Cricket (example entry)

Cricket was soon played in most centres following Perth’s first recorded match in 1835. But isolation and poor pitches meant that when eastern Australia and England inaugurated Test cricket in the 1870s and 1880s roundarm and underarm bowling were still common in the West and matting-on-concrete pitches the only true batting surfaces. WA was the only colony not invited to the meeting in 1892 that saw New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia inaugurate the Sheffield Shield competition. The outstanding local team had been an Aboriginal one from New Norcia but it was from among its regularly defeated opponents that members of the colonial elite emerged to form the Western Australian Cricket Association (WACA) in 1885. Four years later, supported by Commissioner of Crown Lands John Forrest, it extracted a 999-year lease of fourteen waterlogged acres from Governor Broome. With much reclamation work ahead before the WACA Ground could stage cricket, the first inter-colonial contests came on a tour to South Australia and Victoria in 1893, during which WACA honorary secretary F.D. North proved himself the colony’s leading batsman. No less important to cricket’s future was North’s ten-year career from 1891 as secretary to Premier Forrest, who granted an extra five acres to the WACA in 1897.

The Forrest government’s greatest assistance, however, came indirectly through the development of Fremantle harbour. Even in 1897 George Giffen’s Australian XI had to disembark at Albany for the first major tour of the colony, playing local teams of eighteen and twenty-two. Thereafter increased accessibility through Fremantle raised standards through interstate matches at the WACA Ground and Fremantle Oval against South Australia (1899, 1906 and 1909) the Melbourne Cricket Club (1903), New South Wales (1907), Victoria (1910), the Australian XI en route to England (1912) and England’s MCC (1907 and 1908). In 1912 Western Australia also played two matches in each of Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. Although it lost five and drew nine matches from 1899 to 1912, four victories included one against each of the three Sheffield Shield states. While recent arrivals Ernie Jones, South Australia’s Test fast bowler, and former Victorian all-rounder, Arthur Christian, were prominent, even more outstanding were local bowler Bobby Selk and batsman Ernie Parker, the first West Australian picked for a representative match, playing for the Rest against Australia in 1909. But the promise of these years before the First World War gave way to stagnation afterwards.

The WACA survived crises in 1907 and 1912 only by hosting other sports, especially football and, most lucratively, harness-racing, a tenant from 1913 until 1929 when the WA Trotting Association opened its own track on land bought from the WACA. This transaction saved the organisation when cricket alone could not. Ernie Bromley had to move to Victoria to become the first WA-born Test player, confirming the limitations of a state that would eventually suffer twenty-three first class defeats in the inter-war years, manage nineteen draws and not a single victory. Crowds above ten thousand watching Don Bradman in 1932 and 1940 showed that this record was more important than the Depression in explaining low attendances. So did the first ever match between English and WA women's teams in 1934, which attracted larger numbers than the WA men playing an Australian XI a year later.

Against that background only the influential Bradman could ensure inclusion in the post-war Sheffield Shield competition. In doing so he devised a much-resented plan that admitted the state on a half-time basis in 1947 but required it to subsidise the travel costs of interstate opponents. It became a full-time participant in 1956, with the subsidy phased out over the next decade. After winning the Shield in its inaugural season the state team waited until 1967–8 for a second success. But eleven more Shields and eight one-day national trophies established WA ascendancy in the next three decades.

It was 1956 before the first locally based West Australian played Test cricket, but over the next forty years thirty-six others followed John Rutherford, among the most famous fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Graham McKenzie, batsman Kim Hughes and wicket-keeper Rodney Marsh. Just as important to the state team’s success was strong leadership from captains Barry Shepherd and Englishman Tony Lock in the 1950s and 1960s, John Inverarity in the 1970s and Graeme Wood in the 1980s. While the team was less dominant in the later 1990s and early 2000s notable international representatives included locally raised Tom Moody, Justin Langer and Damien Martyn and wicket-keeper/batsman Adam Gilchrist, originally from New South Wales.

The WACA Ground staged its first Test Match in 1970 against England and, after others in 1974 and 1975, became an annual venue from 1977–8. It was, however, the arrival of AFL football in 1987 and its departure in 2000 that prompted two major ground redevelopments. Despite a strong grassroots district competition, West Australian cricket was heavily dependent in the early 2000s on commercial sponsorship and grants from its national parent, Cricket Australia. A recent trend at that time was belated recognition of women’s cricket. The large crowd for the women’s match in 1934 had not started a trend. Mocking references to players who looked like women, ‘with no black beards among them, no preposterous big feet’, suggested patronising newspaper attitudes that largely ignored women players for decades. Even though WA’s Zoe Goss was the country’s most famous woman player, it was late in the 1990s before Western Fury state team was playing at the WACA Ground. But this was a prelude to WACA and government financial support in 2003 of a state coordinator to promote all levels of the women’s game. Anthony J. Barker

Anthony J. Barker, The WACA: An Australian Cricket Success Story (1998); Jack Pollard, Australian Cricket: 192 Years of Australian Cricket Statistics (n.d.)

See also: Aboriginal people in sport, Hall of Champions, Sport history, WAIS