Modern tourists miss going bush

Few travelling English cricketers have skirted the continent from west to south quite so contentedly as Andrew Strauss and his men this week. Historically the tour, by now, is a shambles already, a haze of form clouds and injury strife, defeat sticky in the throat and a sun-bronzed nation’s cricket watchers holding back their laughter. Then comes the final straw: some sort of practical joke, surely? A two-day train ride, eerily straight, with smoko breaks every few hours, cross the Nullarbor Plain.

“Not a very interesting journey … Nothing but saltbush and sand,” concluded allrounder Percy Fender in 1928-29. Eighteen summers later Denis Compton was aghast. “One of the bleakest spots on which I have ever set eyes … We were not sorry when the train pulled to a halt in the main street of Port Pirie.”

Card games in the sitting room filled the cracks in conversation on that October 1946 train trip. For a few brief seconds in time, all eyes darted up. “It was on this journey,” reported Compton, “that we had our first glimpse of the Aborigines, but as Peter Smith, at this stage, held a very good hand, the rest of the ‘school’ … did not take so much notice of this event as it probably justified.”

Probably that’s a fair assumption on Compton’s part. Probably it is one more taste of Aboriginal life than this summer’s English tourists shall sample. They are here three months. They will play 19 matches. Their most exotic destination is Hobart, city of half a million people and not many of them Aboriginal.

It is odd, is it not; an opportunity lost? Cricket Australia says it is determined to spread cricket’s gospel beyond fair-skinned Michaels, Simons and Rickys. And there exists no set of circumstances or cricketers so likely to woo the uninitiated as an Ashes summer and 16 visiting Englishmen.

The 16 Englishmen are not to blame. Their task is to win the Ashes – though it might occur to a couple of the more sensitive ones, should a local history book sneak its way into their aeroplane reading, that England owes the indigenous people of Australia a favour or two.

The sincerity of Cricket Australia’s lofty determination, meanwhile, is worthy of hard scrutiny. No Sheffield Shield match this summer is to be staged further afield than western Sydney and a suburb called Blacktown; and it is called Blacktown somewhat poignantly, alas, as smallpox killed off most of the local Darug people not long after the first British boat landings. A 50-over Ryobi Cup game was played in Townsville last month, which is something, as Aboriginal people do live in and near Townsville. It is, though, a decidedly modest something. Fifty-over cricket puts to sleep even its loyalest and oldest followers. No one seriously thinks it will wake up any new ones.

Besides, Townsville is not exactly the beating heart of Aboriginal Australia. Where better to take cricket than to the country’s Top End – to the showgrounds, say, in Katherine? Strictly speaking, Katherine is a town of one main street and 10,000 people. But it is a crossways meeting place for many more: for the Jawoyn and the Wardaman, the Warlpiri and the Dagoman, for the Gurindji, Mayali and Ngaringman people.

Alice Springs, another meeting place, was once an occasional dot on the international cricket map. Mysteriously, it isn’t any longer. Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of the last time Alice Springs hosted a touring side.

As with most impossible conundrums, the Aboriginal reluctance to play and watch cricket can appear both mind-twistingly complicated and breathtakingly simple. At the core of it lies a hunch that Aboriginal people, living as they tend to in very hot country, lack the requisite silliness to put on long white trousers and stand under a stinging sun the whole day, much less for five days, all for a game where hour after hour sails by in which not much seems to happen.

And yet, hark; has a new wham-bam variant of cricket, one that’s over in three hours, not just been invented? On the calendar this summer are a couple of dozen Twenty20 matches. Not one will take place outside a capital city.

You don’t need to think hard to think why. Taking cricket to the bush means more costs, less revenue. When so much good can come, it is a piddling price to pay.

But Cricket Australia is determined. Its annual reports say so. And every so often it flies board member Matthew Hayden, whose intentions are magnificent, out to the Tiwi Islands. He was there last November, when the children wore “We Love Haydos” shirts, and again in July, when he brought Allan Border with him. Hayden’s Heroes beat Allan’s All Stars by two runs. Everyone had buffalo and turtle for lunch. It was a fabulous day.

More fabulous than that would be Australia playing England in a 20-over match under floodlights at the showgrounds in Katherine, a sea of black and white faces munching on dagwood dogs and clapping all the sixes. For there is no substitute for watching the best cricketers play hard cricket in real-life cricket matches. Nothing else sets the imaginations of boys and girls flying.