Ashes to Ashes

At times it can be a bit intimidating being British in Australia. Mostly when there’s an important sports match between the two nations coming up.

The Ashes definitely falls into this category. The Daily Telegraph, Sydney’s tabloid newspaper, started a “pommie sledging” blog on its website for its readers to submit their favourite terms of abuse for Brits. The current TV adverts for Weet-bix, the Australian equivalent of Weetabix, are accompanied by a song whose lyrics are all about “smashing the poms”. At least two of the papers used the headline ‘FIRST BLOOD’ when Australia’s cricketers beat England in India in the ICC Champions Trophy last week. And the sports pages here probably have more about England’s injury woes than the British ones do. I didn’t have to think twice when I was asked if I wanted to join the work cricket team – as well as being congenitally incapable of batting, bowling or catching the ball (in itself something of a disadvantage), I figured that the second the opposing team heard my accent, the bowling would turn nasty.

It’s nothing personal, mind. The Aussies just like getting behind their team, and they’re rarely sore losers (although admittedly this doesn’t get tested very often).

So I was surprised that there were relatively few people at the Museum of Sydney to see the Ashes urn when I visited on Monday. The urn has been loaned to Australia by the Marylebone Cricket Club in the run-up to the Ashes. Starting in Sydney, it will tour the country in the coming weeks before being returned to the MCC for safe keeping. The accompanying exhibition went through all the well-known legends about the origins of the Ashes series. It reproduced the tongue-in-cheek notice published in the Sporting Times after Australia won at the Oval in 1882 announcing the death of English cricket and saying the body would be cremated and taken to Australia.

But there was also a lot that was new to me. I didn’t know the Sporting Times obituary reflected a contemporary debate in England about the merits of cremation over burial. Or that the tiny, battered terracotta Ashes urn started life as a joke by a group of upper-class Australian women. When England came to Australia in 1882-3 for a return series, the women presented captain Ivo Bligh with the urn, in which they placed some ashes, probably from the burning of one of the wickets used in a just finished game. The story doesn’t end there: Bligh fell in love with one of the women, a music teacher called Florence Morphy, and brought her – and the urn – back to England with him. The urn became a treasured family possession as a reminder of their courtship. When Florence bequeathed the urn to the MCC after Bligh’s death in 1927, almost nobody in English cricket knew about its existence.

Most interesting, though, was a display on the first Australian cricket team to tour England, in 1868. Astonishingly, they were Aborigines. The players’ story is in some ways very sad: just decades before the team was formed, their homelands in modern-day Victoria were ravaged by the coming of European settlers, and they were given pretty racist-sounding English names like Jim Crow, Dick-a-Dick and Tarpot. But it sounds like the tour of England was a big success, financially, culturally and sportingly. They played 47 matches, winning 14, losing 14 and drawing 19. The three star players took a total of 607 wickets and scored more than 1,000 runs each. Another of the players, Twopenny, achieved the impressive average of 9-9 off ten overs in East Hampshire. Perhaps inevitably, the team did not attract crowds for their sporting prowess alone – they performed tribal dances and spear and boomerang throwing displays during breaks in play, and in the official pictures more of them are holding boomerangs than cricket bats.