Lively story of early women cricketers in Australia

Rafaelle Nicholson
Department of Sport & Event Management, Bournemouth University, UK

I recently calculated that in the past 100 years, less than 20 books have been published about women’s cricket (compared with countless tomes on the male version of the sport). It is into this small but expanding field that author Louise Zedda-Sampson has stepped, with her short history of the “first” women cricketers in Australia.^[1]

I have deliberately placed “first” in inverted commas. The starting point for this book is a women’s cricket match which took place at Bendigo in 1874 – a match Zedda-Sampson labels as “[t]he first organised, revenue-raising, spectator match of Australian women’s cricket” (p.7). Despite the fact that 30 years ago historians Richard Cashman and Amanda Weaver found reference to a women’s match in Australia occurring as early as 1855,[2] this book is predicated on the idea that it is the 1874 women who should capture our attention. This type of “firsting” in women’s sport was recently critiqued in a fascinating conference paper by Dr Lydia Furse; Furse questioned whether it is helpful for our focus to be so obsessively focused in this way, especially given that popular myths around “firsts” are often inaccurate.[3] It strikes me that Zedda-Sampson’s work is a good example of the commercial imperative which generally lies behind these claims: it’s easier to sell a book about the first women cricketers than “possibly some of the first but we aren’t quite sure”. The market doesn’t like nuance.

Anyway, onto the book. There is much to like here. Zedda-Sampson tells the story of the 1874 match, and its fall-out, in a zippy, lively way; it’s a story she stumbled across when working as a student volunteer at the Youlden Parkville Cricket Club in Victoria, relayed through a media lens. We learn about the build-up to the match, whereby adverts appeared in the Bendigo Advertiser seeking “ladies who are desirous of playing”, and the Bendigo United Cricket Club granted the women permission to use their ground and equipment to practice (p.9). There is a detailed account of the match itself, plus a full scorecard – the Blues winning with 83 runs to the Reds 62. Then there is the dreaded fall-out, which Zedda-Sampson labels as “vicious and vindictive” (p.26). The reporter for the Maryborough and Dunolly Advertiser is particularly damning, describing the women players as partaking in an “unfeminine trial of masculine skill” and an “unwomanly exhibition”, and labelling the whole exercise as “disobedience to the law of GOD” (p.32).

We learn about the build-up to the match, whereby adverts appeared in the Bendigo Advertiser seeking “ladies who are desirous of playing”, and the Bendigo United Cricket Club granted the women permission to use their ground and equipment to practice.

The book is beautifully presented, and it’s great that the author has included reproductions of some of the print columns and newspaper illustrations of the time. At just 98 pages, with a smattering of endnotes, it’s highly accessible. Having said that, even a casual reader might well be left with a number of pretty big questions, in particular: why exactly was women’s participation in sport so controversial? Those of us who work in the field of sports history won’t be remotely surprised or shocked to find sportswomen being described as “immoral” or “unfeminine”, but you’d be hard-pressed without any background knowledge to understand from this book why some societal reactions to the 1874 match were so negative, or to gain any sense of the reasons why cricket might have been perceived to be more controversial than other female sporting pastimes.[4]

From a methodological perspective, I wonder, too, if Zedda-Sampson’s singular approach to studying these matches – i.e. using newspaper articles – is in fact a helpful one. Would any of us take what we read in The Herald Sun about women’s sport at face value nowadays? Presumably we recognise that the need to sell newspapers affects the way in which particular issues are presented, and that opinion articles by male journalists do not necessarily reflect broader Australian society. Should late nineteenth-century newspaper articles not be afforded the same privilege? Therefore, was women’s cricket really as “controversial” as Zedda-Sampson suggests? This is a critique which can perhaps be applied to studies of women’s sporting history more generally, which so often relies on newspaper coverage to make broader sweeping assertions about societal attitudes in the absence of other source material. The onus is on us as historians to try to provide a more nuanced perspective.

I hope this book sells well – it’s certainly a wonderful means to encourage the public to engage more thoroughly with the history of women’s cricket. It would make a delightful gift for any female cricketer (or coach, umpire or supporter) who wants to know more about the origins of their sport. But they might also need a helping hand, once they put it down, to understand some of the broader historical issues surrounding women’s participation in sport which the book only briefly alludes to.

Copyright © Rafaelle Nicholson 2021

Footnotes

[1] Other recent work on women’s cricket includes Fiona Bollen with Matt Bonser, Clearing Boundaries: The Rise of Australian Women’s Cricket (Churchill Press, 2020), Adrienne Simpson and Trevor Auger, The Warm Sun on my Face(Upstart Press, 2020), and Rafaelle Nicholson, Ladies and Lords: A History of Women’s Cricket in Britain (Peter Lang, 2019).

[2] Richard Cashman and Amanda Weaver, Wicket Women: Cricket and Women in Australia (New South Wales University Press, 1991).

[3] Lydia Furse, ‘Founding Figure(s): Constructing and Deconstructing Sporting Myths around the “First” Female Rugby Player(s).’ Paper presented at British Society of Sports History conference, St Mary’s University, Twickenham, 26 August 2021.

[4] For a discussion of this issue, see Nicholson, Ladies and Lords, pp.32-43.