The truth about women’s cricket and its pivotal role in history

CRICKET
The Bodyline Fix:How women saved cricket
Marion Stell
University of Queensland Press,$34.99

It’s no secret that cricket is a spectacle with multiple layers of appeal. Beneath the surface is history,and behind today’s players are the memories,stories and ghosts we hold inside. For the devout follower a cricket match is enriched by knowing what happened in this place before,and where current deeds stand in the context of the past. It’s a nerdy pleasure,but cricket has always had a gift for respecting nerds and for bringing history into the centre of the action.

As professional cricket played by women continues its steep trajectory into prominence,and the popularity gap closes between it and the game played by men,a gap between those underlying layers remains conspicuous. Cricket history has mostly been staked out by men. This means that those deep pleasures linger in the male domain.

Betty Archdale left no doubt about the seriousness of the cricket the women played.

Betty Archdale left no doubt about the seriousness of the cricket the women played.Steven Siewert

Meg Lanning,Australia’s champion batter of recent years,is widely compared to Ricky Ponting and Greg Chappell,less so to Belinda Clark or Betty Wilson. Australia’s female team plays most of its matches on suburban grounds,and when they do play on Victor Trumper’s Sydney Cricket Ground or Don Bradman’s Adelaide Oval,they are considered privileged to walk in esteemed male footprints. There is a freedom for today’s female cricketers in making their own history,but it is also a statement about how men’s memories maintain their hold over the cricket imagination.

Marion Stell is one of the historians rectifying this,and her bookThe Bodyline Fix:How Women Saved Cricket is one step in the long project of returning women’s cricketing history to women’s hands,and giving all involved,male and female,a deeper appreciation of the foundations of today’s feats.

The Australian team relaxing on board the ship Jervis Bay en route to England in 1937. Peggy Antonio is second from the left in the front row.

The Australian team relaxing on board the ship Jervis Bay en route to England in 1937. Peggy Antonio is second from the left in the front row.National Museum of Australia

The story is about how,after the Bodyline series of 1932-33 generated such ill-will between England and Australia as to put broader national relations on a tense edge,women cricketers rebuilt the friendship.

England’s men had come to Australia in 1932 with a plan to counter Bradman’s dominance,bowling fast short-pitched balls at the unprotected body and head while stacking the fielders behind the batsmen’s back,so that when he was trying to protect himself he was likely to lose his wicket. It succeeded on the field,with England winning the Ashes comfortably,but so soured relations that even 15 years and a war later,when Bradman finally had express-pace bowlers at his disposal,he deployed Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller as tools of vengeance for Bodyline.

The first England cricket tour of Australia after Bodyline was when a female team visited in 1934-35. Soon after,an Australian team returned to England. These tours overlapped with more men’s Ashes series,but Stell argues that the women’s matches restored the good name of cricket as a game that could be played seriously but within sporting limits. The Australian and English teams,she maintains,found a line between earnest competition and remembering that cricket is just a game,even while being derided by some male observers and administrators for treating it as ″⁣only″⁣ a game.

The thesis is less compelling than the fascinating detail Stell accumulates about the players and their lives. Best-known,probably,is Betty Archdale,the England captain in 1934-35 who later moved to Sydney to be principal of Women’s College at Sydney University and Abbotsleigh girls’ private school. In interviews with Stell prior to her death in 2000,Archdale is blunt,humorous and an endless source of good information. She leaves no doubt about the seriousness of the cricket.

″⁣[Male officials] were anxious that[lead-up] matches should be drawn so there’d be more interest in the Tests,″⁣ Archdale told Stell. ″⁣I rather coldly told them we haven’t come umpteen thousand miles,or however far we’d come,to play a lot of drawn matches. I was extremely rude.″⁣ Archdale is one of many who grew sick of a stereotyped male response to women’s cricket:″⁣We came to scoff but stayed to praise.″⁣ You still hear it today.

The Australia star of the period was Peggy Antonio,a Port Melbourne seaman’s daughter who grew up playing street cricket with boys and managed to cross the class and gender gap through her skills as a batter and leg-spin bowler.

Antonio was not the only player whose main obstacle was raising money to enable her to tour. One of the major themes of this book is the economic one,about how hard it was for the most talented cricketers to find the funds to play for Australia. Some,including the Port Kembla steelworker’s daughter Ruby Monaghan,discovered that talent wasn’t enough.

Stell’s great bequest to cricket is the number of vivid personalities she portrays. Without the crude conflict that dramatised the men’s Test matches,she gives life to another history that deserves its own spotlight. Next step? When Australia’s current leg-spin wizard Alana King is compared not to the great Shane Warne but to the great Peggy Antonio,and when an Australia-England tussle evokes past matches played by women.

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Malcolm Knox is a journalist,author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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