The Bradman Museum's: World of Cricket by Mike Coward

Author:Mike Coward [Coward, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Without understating the colossal contribution of fast bowlers to Australian cricket, ‘Bring on the Leg Spinner’ has long been a familiar refrain of spectators throughout the country. Australia has been wonderfully served by the masters of the arcane art and this homespun sign was hoisted to demand the appearance of charismatic and controversial Shane Warne. Warne proudly served his distinguished predecessors, Arthur Mailey, Clarrie Grimmett, Bill O’Reilly, Richie Benaud and company, to become the nation’s highest wicket-taker in Test matches.

In a matter of months the often staid, colourless game of Empire had time-travelled. Nothing seemed the same. The philosophy of cricket changed both on and off the field of play. So did its complexion. So did its standards and values. So did its language. Flannels were discarded for what some said were coloured pyjamas. The game was played at night with a white ball to unfamiliar laws and there were markings on the ground. Television and radio appreciation of the game was different, its reportage too.

With a numbing swiftness, the game belonged not to parochial administrators but to publicists, promoters and marketers, as sports lovers responded in impressive numbers to catchy jingles and patriotic anthems. The newness was intoxicating. The game and its finest exponents were absorbed into popular culture as never before. Cricketers who had been branded ‘Ugly Australians’ in 1974 and roundly condemned for introducing sledging to a genteel pastime became heroes, role models, to often unruly and exhibitionist crowds. Colour TV, introduced in 1975, underscored and amplified the game’s transformation. It was to such a kaleidoscopic backdrop that Viv Jenkins took a telephone call in November 1977 from one of Packer’s most trusted lieutenants, Lynton Taylor, offering him the position of official photographer to World Series Cricket.

A successful newspaper and magazine photographer, Jenkins had to make the transition from multiple fields of endeavour to a single subject: cricket. It demanded lightning reflexes, the patience of Job, and a preparedness to hump 25 kilograms of equipment to his workplace, which shifted on a daily basis. He had the priceless opportunity to intimately document the most remarkable period in Australian cricket history, and he did so with a freshness, daring and modernity that perfectly complemented his subject matter. The most affable of men, he immediately gained the trust and respect of his subjects—a fact reaffirmed years later when Richie Benaud and Ian Chappell provided laudatory forewords to his books Fields of Glory and The Baggy Green: World Series to World Champions.

Benaud and Bradman did not speak to each other during the two-year schism. Throughout cricket, there was deep bitterness and lasting resentments, much like the summer of 1932–33 when an England captain in a harlequin cap, Douglas Jardine, calculatedly went outside the spirit of the game to bring down Bradman.

Come 1979 the warring parties found common ground, and a conspicuously humbler Australian Cricket Board welcomed back to the fold the country’s finest cricketers. Packer’s Nine Network won the broadcast rights. Jenkins was appointed the board’s official photographer. He faithfully recorded the triumphs and travails of Australian cricket until 1996–97.

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