This book focuses on the development of cricket in Australia, with a focus on the commercial and professional aspects of the game. It takes a historical approach and analyses the reasons behind the ebbs and flows of commercialisation in the game. It also applies economic analysis to help provide it with some original insights into the way in which the game is structured and has developed in Australia. The book would be of interest to a range of people both in Australia and abroad, who are interested in the manner in which sport in the modern world has become a commercialised pursuit.

A great depression, worsening Anglo-Australian relations, the declining British Empire and the challenge from an Australia striving to find a national identity are the context which explain bodyline and its repercussions. Bodyline was a watershed in the history of cricket and politics were publicly seen as part of sport. This book offers a radical reappraisal of bodyline which challenges the official interpretations of the events, and places them in a unique social and political context. .

This set examines sport and leisure from a social science viewpoint. The volumes included, originally published between 1984 and 1991 take a cross-disciplinary approach to explore the social, political and cultural roles of sport in today's society. They cover issues as diverse as inequality, nationalism, gender, and commercialisation and engage with a range of academic disciplines including cultural studies, history, politics and sociology.

This fascinating book takes a different look at Australia's all-time sporting hero, Sir Donald Bradman.

In his important contribution to the growing field of sports literature, Anthony Bateman traces the relationship between literary representations of cricket and Anglo-British national identity from 1850 to the mid 1980s. Examining newspaper accounts, instructional books, fiction, poetry, and the work of editors, anthologists, and historians, Bateman elaborates the ways in which a long tradition of literary discourse produced cricket's cultural status and meaning. His critique of writing about cricket leads to the rediscovery of little-known texts and the reinterpretation of well-known works by authors as diverse as Neville Cardus, James Joyce, the Great War poets, and C.L.R. James. Beginning with mid-eighteenth century accounts of cricket that provide essential background, Bateman examines the literary evolution of cricket writing against the backdrop of key historical moments such as the Great War, the 1926 General Strike, and the rise of Communism. Several case studies show that cricket simultaneously asserted English ideals and created anxiety about imperialism, while cricket's distinctively colonial aesthetic is highlighted through Bateman's examination of the discourse surrounding colonial cricket tours and cricketers like Prince Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji of India and Sir Learie Constantine of Trinidad. Featuring an extensive bibliography, Bateman's book shows that, while the discourse surrounding cricket was key to its status as a symbol of nation and empire, the embodied practice of the sport served to destabilise its established cultural meaning in the colonial and postcolonial contexts.

The Oxford Companion to Australian Sport appears in a revised, updated and greatly expanded new edition. Produced by the Australian Society for Sports History, this is the first authoritative and encyclopedic reference work on all sports played in Australia. It provides a comprehensive overview of the history and character of the innumerable codes that constitute the Australian sporting character. All sports are covered - not just the major ones like cricket, Australian Rules, lawn tennis, and horse-racing. The Companion offers succinct and informative entries on famous sportsmen and women, and on major institutions, competitions and venues. The Companion also offers thematic essays on crucial aspects of the history, culture and professionalization of sport in Australia. For the first time readers have access to biographies of sporting champions from different codes, all of whom rub shoulders in this literary pantheon. For the second edition, the editors have commissionedfour major new thematic essays: Coaching, Disabled Sportsmen and Women, Regionalism, and the Olympic Winter Games. Seven more sports have been added (badminton, bicycle racing, curling, fives, petanque, ring bowls, and surfing), along with 38 additional clubs. The second edition boasts 240 new biographies. One of its major features is a `list of lists', which provides full details about major competitions such as the Stawell Gift, Davis Cup finals, the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, the Sheffield Shield, Brownlow Medallists - to name just a few of the lists contained in this Appendix. Greatly expanded and offering a readable cultural history of Australian sport, the Oxford Companion to Australian Sport is essential reading for sportsmen and women, administrators, journalists and sports followers.

In a readable, informed and absorbing discussion of cricket's defining controversies - bodyline, chucking, ball-tampering, sledging, walking and the use of technology, among many others - Fraser explores the ambiguities of law and social order in cricket.

The first Australian cricket tour to India possesses an inherent intrigue that, for inexplicable reasons, has fallen into obscurity. Megan Ponsford rectifies this through her investigation of the uneasy relationships between Australia, British India and Indian nationalism during the interwar period, using the 1935/36 tour as a case study. The unique liaison between the entrepreneurial tour manager Frank Tarrant and the Maharaja of Patiala, who financed the exercise, led the way. From the palaces of the Raj to the foothills of the Himalayas, the evolving racial consciousness of the ragtag team of Australia cricketers defines the tour. The cricket establishment was also challenged as the tour defied the amateur game with participation encouraged by the Maharaja’s deep pockets. Employing a unique methodology, this book interprets the material culture located in the archives of the Australian and Indian cricketers. In the absence of first-hand accounts, these artefacts enable insight into the forgotten and overlooked sportspeople who are finally given the voice and acknowledgement they deserve. It is a brilliant new contribution to the study of both cricket and history, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of History, Politics, Sports, Sociology, and Cultural Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

In The Death and Life of Australian Soccer, journalist and historian Joe Gorman explores the rise and fall of Australia's first national football competition and shows how soccer came to practice and embody multiculturalism long before it became government policy. Drawing on archival research and interviews with players, supporters and club officials, he tells the incredible and oft-unknown stories of Australian soccer. The Death and Life of Australian Soccer is a fascinating and timely account of the first Australian sport to truly galvanize every ethnic, regional, metropolitan, gender and political group across the country. It examines the myths and legends of Australian sport and offers new ways of understanding the great changes that shaped the nation. This is more than a book about soccer – it is the riveting story of Australia's national identity.

The conventional history of sport, as conveyed by television and the sports press, has thrown up a great many apparent turning points, but knowledge of these apparently defining moments is often slight. This book offers readable, in-depth studies of a series of these watersheds in sport history and of the circumstances in which they came about.