Triumph at Wattle Flat

Martin Chandler | 7:53am BST 14 July 2024

Published: 2012
Pages: 92
Author: Mack, Richard
Publisher: Deniliquin Newspapers Pty Ltd
Rating: 3 stars

For three months in 1861/62 twelve English professional cricketers, led by Surrey man Heathfield Stephenson, travelled around Australia and played fifteen matches. A few were eleven a side, but only when the tourists split in two and played with local players making up the elevens, and one of those matches, styled as being between ‘The World’ and a Surrey XI, even has First Class status.

The real ‘tour’ matches however were all against odds, in all bar one 22 locals against eleven tourists. Only in the first match of all, against Victoria, were the odds different. On that occasion 18 Victorians lost by an innings and 96 runs. Only once were Stephenson’s men defeated, and this little book by Richard Mack, an Australian living in Castlemaine, concentrates on that single match when a side representing that small city 75 miles north of Melbourne secured a three wicket victory.

Mack begins his account by giving some historical context as to how the tour came about, and how it proceeded up until those two days at Wattle Flat. In doing so he acknowledges that, coming to the end of an arduous trip, the tourists might not have been at their best. All twelve are introduced, not a difficult task given that all were well known professional cricketer and indeed one of their number, William Caffyn, would later produce one of the very earliest cricketing autobiographies.

Before moving on to his description of the match itself and the build up to it, well covered by local newspapers at the time, Mack sets himself the far from straightforward task of producing brief biographical details of the 22 local men who opposed Stephenson’s XI. That he managed to identify twenty of them with certainty, and produce a couple of educated guesses for the other two, is of itself an impressive achievement.

How did the tourists take their defeat? In the manner of many an Anglo-Australians contest since the answer to that is not as well as they might. All the usual post match courtesies were observed, but although the phrase ‘whinging pom’ was not then, I believe, in common usage perhaps the Englishmen’s mutterings about the quality of the Wattle Flat pitch are where it comes from?

The end of the match is not quite the end of Mack’s story, as he goes on to briefly look at the subsequent occasions on which the men of Castlemaine took on touring sides from England, without further success. Overall I have to concede that the subject matter of this, as far as I am aware Richard Mack’s only contribution to cricket literature, is rather specialised. But that does not alter the fact that it is an interesting read and, although at the point of writing this review I cannot find a single copy available on line anywhere, I cannot imagine that an enquiry of Ken Piesse or Roger Page would do anything other than elicit a copy at reasonable cost.