Multicultural cricket? National identity and the Australian Cricket Board's annual report

Abstract

From the early 1980s much political and cultural discourse in Australia concerned immigration, multiculturalism and the interpretation of Australian history. In the 1970s and 1980s historians had asserted a place for test cricket in the development of the Australian nation, an assertion which was adopted by the Australian Cricket Board (ACB) as a major promotional strategy between 1998 and 2009. This paper examines the representation of cricket by the ACB in its annual reports since 1983–1984, and the “Australia” that it chose to represent. It will show that the Board in the pre-Howard government years quietly represented itself as a powerful part of the Australian mainstream, “coming out” between 1998 and 2009 to clearly promote a view of Australian culture which aligned with John Howard's view of Australian identity, and after 2009 dropped any allusion to its place in Australian cultural development. It discusses how the Board's representation of its role in Australian culture dealt with the apparently competing objectives of promoting cricket as a significant part of an Anglo-Australian culture, while at the same time embracing a growing migrant population.