Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent, black-and-white clip shows the Australian Test cricket team en route by sea to England in 1930. The footage opens with a shot of the team walking onto the field in a match in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The next port-of-call shown is Port Said in Egypt, where team members are seen sightseeing. The final scenes are of Naples, where the liner is berthed and the team is shown being photographed by the press contingent. The clip concludes with several team members doffing their hats for the camera. The clip includes intertitles.

Educational value points

• This clip shows rare footage of the renowned 1930 Australian cricket team as it travelled to England to play for (and win) the Ashes Series. Although newsreel footage and posed team photographs exist, this is probably the only informal footage of the team on tour now available. WL Kelly, who was on his first trip as manager, brought along his home movie equipment to make a personal record of the experience.

• Compared to today’s touring teams, the team was small, numbering 15 players, a manager, a scorer and an official. Cricket tours today involve many more personnel than in 1930. Although the number of players selected remains the same at 15, other members of the team may now include a head coach, an equipment manager, a manager, an assistant manager, a doctor, a physiotherapist, a masseur, a media representative and a sports psychologist.

• The team sailed on the Orient Line ship RMS Orford, a 19,941-tonne liner built in 1928, shown in the clip at Naples. In 1930 the Orient Line operated a regular service between Australia and England, carrying the mail and passengers in one-class tourist accommodation and using a fleet of at least eight liners. The Orford’s April 1930 voyage from Australia took between four and five weeks with stops for refuelling at Colombo, Aden, Port Said, Naples, Toulon and Gibraltar.

• An extended sea voyage was the only way for the team to get to England. Although flights to and from Australia had been made by 1930, there was no regular air service until 1934 and none capable of carrying more than eight or nine passengers until 1938. Overland travel through Asia and Europe was out of the question, as it would have taken months.

• Many of the team shown in the clip were young and inexperienced at Test level. Of the 15 players, six were in their early to mid 20s and had played 10 Tests between them. Don Bradman, for example, was the most experienced of the young players. He was 21 and had played in four Tests. These six plus four of the older players had not taken part in an Ashes tour to England before and so had no experience of English wickets.

• The team’s age and inexperience had caused a sensation when its selection was announced. As Bradman recalled in a newspaper article written in 1930, 'the experts gasped with astonishment … we were lambs going to the slaughter … youth and enthusiasm were fine qualities, no doubt, and that was about all that could be said for us’ (www.bradman.org.au). The team went on to win the five test Ashes series, two matches to one, with two matches drawn.

• In order to try to maintain its match fitness during the long voyage, the Australian team took part in a match against an All-Ceylon team while in port in Colombo on 2 or 3 April. Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) had been colonised by the British in 1815 and the first cricket club formed in Ceylon was the Colombo Cricket Club in 1832. Cricket was well established in Ceylon by the 1860s, largely through the efforts of British tea planters, and remains highly popular to this day.

• Of all the ports-of-call on the Orford’s voyage from Australia to England in April 1930, only Naples in Italy and Toulon in France were outside the British Empire. Australia itself was then a British dominion. Ceylon, the first stop outside Australia, was a British colony. Aden, the next stop, was ruled from British India. Port Said was part of the British protectorate of Suez and Egypt as a whole was under British control. Gibraltar, the last stop before London, was a British possession.

• The Australian cricketers are wearing solar topees bought in Colombo on the day of their arrival and also of the match. A solar topee or pith helmet was a lightweight hat worn in the 19th and early 20th centuries in tropical countries by Europeans for protection from the Sun. The Australian team found it strange and awkward playing in topees but they were regarded at the time as indispensable headgear for a white-skinned person out in the tropical Sun.

• The Port Said sequence reveals something of the sightseeing undertaken by the Australian team when in port. During long voyages, it is quite usual for passengers to leave the ship at one port and rejoin at a later port. Most of the Australian team had done so, leaving Aden on 12 April, travelling by train to Cairo, doing a quick tour of the pyramids, museums, mosques and bazaars, then travelling by train to Port Said to rejoin the ship on 13 April, when these scenes were shot.