Geelong Cricket Club has long had the idea of having its history written and they entrusted the task to two members of Deakin University’s Centre for Contemporary History, Tony Joel and Mathew Turner. The club expected that the authors would tell the story of the club’s successful efforts to join the Victorian Premier League competition, so they were pleasantly surprised when they recently received a 738–page blockbuster covering the history of cricket in Geelong since the 1840s. Indeed the book encompasses not only cricket but a social history of Geelong that in many respects effectively updates Walter Randolph Brownhill and Ian Wynd’s History of Geelong and Corio Bay that has been the standard work on that broader subject since its publication in 1955 (with a postscript in 1990).
It is important also to indicate what the book is not. It is not a compendium of statistics of batting and bowling averages and a blow-by-blow account of each season. It is a true social history in which the cricketers’ contribution to the game and the life of Geelong and Corio Bay is teased out and assessed. The sometimes harmonious and sometimes testy relationship with the Geelong Football Club from the 1860s is a thread that runs through the book as well. At an individual level the stories of many key players and officials of the club and their broader social roles are sketched in, as well as their playing or administrative careers within the club.
Highlights include matches against touring English cricket teams starting in 1860 and the local exploits of the first team that went in the reverse direction in 1868, the Aboriginal pioneers from the Lake Wallace area. Star players from Tom Wills and George Reynolds Rippon in the 1860s to Clinton Peake and his son Oliver, including Ian Redpath and Lindsay Hassett in more recent times are highlighted, but the strength of the book includes vignettes of many players whose names resonated in their generation, but will be unknown to most people today.
The publication was masterminded by Geoff Slattery and draws on Bob Gartland’s inexhaustible collection of photographs of players and teams and those from the Geelong Advertiser and other club members. But there is no index, though there are 30 pages of endnotes and there are four pages of batting and bowling averages!
Tony Joel and Mathew Turner, Line and Length: A History of the Geelong Cricket Club,
Slattery Media Group, Melbourne, 2024. ISBN: 9780648621201 $60.00.
Available from the club and good booksellers.
More from Roy Hay HERE
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Looks a good book..Thanks for alerting me to it.