Black Swan Summer by Max Bonnell

Author:Max Bonnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

As soon as the game against Victoria finished, head groundsman Jim Claughton led his staff on to the centre of the WACA ground and began to dig up the pitch. He had instructions to build a new wicket square, with a faster pitch. There are reports that suggest he used Merri Creek soil from Victoria, though Basil Rigg is certain that the soil came from ‘my grandfather’s old potato farm at Wokalup’.

Almost two months would pass before Western Australia played their next match, against New South Wales in Sydney. Seven other Shield matches would be played in that time, and there was nothing the westerners could do but look on and hope that the results fell in their favour.

* * *

Western Australia selected a team of five women to represent the state in the annual national track and field championships in Sydney. Ordinarily, this wasn’t an event that attracted much attention, but the Olympic Games were due to resume in London in July 1948, so the national championships would also serve as the Olympic trials. Western Australia’s hopes rested on a sprinter, Shirley Strickland, whose form in local meetings had been exceptional. Around Perth, she was often referred to as Dave Strickland’s daughter, and Dave was mildly famous for having won the Stawell Gift handicap sprint in 1900.

He might have gone to Paris for the 1900 Olympics, but the athletes were then expected to pay their own way, and the cost was beyond him. On that front, not very much had changed: one Perth newspaper reported that the Western Australian women’s team was hosting ‘a barbecue at the Strickland property to raise a bit more toward their respective expenses’.

At university, Strickland had made something of a reputation as a hockey player, but her opportunities to compete on the track were limited. ‘During the war there was no sport,’ she recalled, ‘The normal sport that we look at today didn’t exist. The university used to have a sporting day … and none of us had shoes, because shoes were in short supply. So, the first organised sport apart from the university faculty stuff was in 1947 when they had the men’s championships in Western Australia. That’s the very beginning of what was post-war organised sport. And they had some events for women, and I went in those and won. I was an adult by then, I was well organised, clearly focused and I suspect that was why I was so successful.’

In the small pond of Perth women’s athletics, Shirley Strickland was unbeatable. Throughout the Western Australian track season, she was unbeaten over the 90 yards hurdles, 100 yards sprint, 220 yards sprint – and even the high jump. How this raw beginner would fare against tougher competition was a question that remained to be tested.

* * *

The Federal Parliament had a serious issue to debate: beer. Rowland James, a Labor member from the Hunter Valley, asked the Prime Minister whether ‘Australia is assured of adequate supplies of beer to tide industry

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