1975-76 And All That

GH looks back fifty years

Sheffield Shield cricketers earned $60 a match. A St Peters Five-star bat cost $42. A streaker jumped the stumps in the Perth Test. A Melbourne junior coach told his boys to get their hair cut because they looked like girls. It was the summer of 1975-76, and life was simpler back then. Or was it? Cricket Et Al is in the middle of moving, and when his eye was detained by these back numbers they provided a prism on that high summer of Australian might.

That summer’s Boxing Day Test finished fifty years ago today, an eight-wicket Australian victory over West Indies attended by 223,000 people. It had followed the summer’s only one-day international, the last for three years, and preluded a 5-1 series victory.

Cricketer editor Eric Beecher deemed the MCG a ‘billowing bowl of compressed concrete’, and columnist Phil Wilkins described its press box as ‘a pigeon-bespattered windy hole.’ Despite this, Cricketer reflects the print base of the era’s cricket culture. Television and radio are hardly referred to. The Chappells, Rod Marsh, Jeff Thomson, Ashley Mallett and Clive Lloyd all write signed columns for newspapers that summer; the Chappells, Marsh and Mallett all answer queries from junior cricketers in Cricketer itself. Occasionally their responses are provocative. ‘If someone can come up with a lightweight, efficient head guard,’ foreshadowed Greg, ‘I for one would consider wearing it for batting.’ Mostly they are gentle and benificent. Selected entries receive cigarette lighters.