Slogging on the solstice

Long memories on the shortest day.

Just as the sun never sets on the (former) Empire, cricket’s always being played somewhere -- even on the shortest day of the year.

That sun made the most of its allotted time yesterday and so did these cricketers.

Spread the field … they’re going the tonk.

No whites, no uniforms, no gloves or pads (they appeared to be using an indoor cricket ball): what was missing underlined what was not – a profound passion for the game.

Passion and aggression. Every delivery I saw -- bar one slash-and-miss and one skied slog – was sent to or over the boundary (which was marked with cones, as was the 30m fielding restriction zone).

One mighty blow landed halfway up the cliff, right about where one of my teammates, a strapping left-hander called Stephen Pell, plonked a ball in the late 70s.

Yes, this Sunday morning stroll was a sort of homecoming, as this was where the Burnside Demonstration School cricketers learned the blessed game 50 years ago.

After the dawn rituals of Thunderbirds, Herculoids and Birdman, we were packed into Holden wagons and Leyland P76s and deposited in this park, where we’d chase the grails of compulsory-retired 30s (try to get to 29 and hit a six) and three-fors (earning a name in the paper).

Scoop shorts, Puma Sheffields, and Cottees cordial in a plastic flask. The rich kids flashing Gray-Nicolls Scoops like light sabres (some even had *swoon* Double Scoops, like Chappelli); the rest of us making do with Slazengers from the canvas ‘kit’.

Yesterday’s solstice stroll evoked more than nascent cricket too: Here, in this quarry hewn from the hills, transformed into a cricket ground in the 60s, we revelled in other pursuits as well.

We rode (under our own power) up through cul-de-sacs of two-storey, Mike Brady-designed brick houses in cream and dark brown. Wait, ‘through’ cul-de-sacs? Well every street either ended at the park, a rough track to the park, or a friend’s house with a back fence abutting the park. Thence it was to the cliff, and the tracks renting its face. This was a time before guard rails, helmets (bike and cricket) and occupational health & safety. No-one was seriously injured making this Gen X childhood.

Imaginations transformed bush slopes into battlefields: the battlefields of Combat! and The Rat Patrol. Who will be Sergeant Saunders and who will be Lieutenant Hanley? Who will be Sergeant Troy? Hitch? Tully? No-one played the part of the Germans – they were imagined. (The power of the child’s imagination is incomprehensible to the adult mind of that same child.)

Only once did we go there reluctantly. The day we were props for our parents in a protest we hardly understood. The neighbours, you see, were concerned the ground would host more than primary school cricket: they feared clubs and clubrooms and organised sport and floodlights and noise and parking problems. A solution was found, and it can be seen in this picture taken after play yesterday – a perimeter tree-planting program to make the ground smaller, thereby limiting its appeal to those wanting to expand its use. U-huh, those trees are younger than me.

The post-play debrief.

Tennis courts, playgrounds, barbecues and even a ‘sports library’ (think one of those tiny book libraries but with balls and bats instead of books) have been added, because every modern park apparently needs all these things for people to have fun. We needed only the terrain and our imaginations, but that was another time.

Still, how well it’s worked out for everyone. For the neighbours. For the winter cricketers. For the bushwalkers and tennis players and barbecuers. And especially for the birds and possums and other wildlife – the surrounding Grey Box woodland has spread into the quarry spoil of 70s memory.

When stumps are drawn at noon on this cool and short day, it’s a zig-zag walk up the fenced track to the lookout – did we really clamber straight up these sheer cliffs? – and a city view. A view unappreciated – unremembered? – at the time, as we were consumed by more pressing matters: After all, Hauptmann Dietrich and his Luger might be lurking behind the next gum tree.