The Southern Stars owe a huge debt to the Tasmanian schoolteacher who became Australia’s first female cricket star

THE Southern Stars women’s cricket team owe a debt of gratitude to a violin and piano-playing schoolteacher from Tasmania.

History. Must credit State Library of NSW. Bega women's cricket team captained by Mrs Evershed. Date unknown (about 1900).

THE Southern Stars have fought their way to their fourth consecutive World Twenty20 final. Now at the top of their game our women’s cricket teams have come a long way since the first organised women’s club games were played in the late 19th century.

Much of the success of women’s teams today can be traced to the determination of pioneering cricketers like Lily Poulett-Harris, who formed one of the first women’s teams in Australia and was responsible for inspiring many other women to take up the sport.

Poulett-Harris was born Harriet Lily Poulett-Harris in Tasmania on September 2, 1873, the twin daughter of a Church of England priest and head of the Hobart Boys’ High School Richard Deodatus Poulett-Harris.

Taught by her father, Lily came second in an 1884 exam set to decide who would be awarded the Newcastle Scholarship at her father’s school. She sat it as a “trial of strength” on the understanding that she was not actually eligible for the scholarship.

The pioneering Australian female cricketer, Harriet Lily Poulett-Harris.

She was a bright, inquisitive, adventurous and active child who once had the presence of mind to wrap her wet swimsuit around her mother when the mother accidentally caught fire on a visit to the beach near the family home in Peppermint Bay in 1885.

Lily was accomplished in other fields as well. She could also play piano and violin with a high degree of skill and at times played in public but one of her major passions was cricket.

There was cricket in the blood. Her father was a trustee of the Southern Tasmanian Cricket Association and her older brother Herbert Vere Poulett-Harris was an accomplished runner, footballer and cricketer. Herbert toured New Zealand with a Tasmanian cricket team in the 1880s. Lily probably took part in social matches or even family cricket games before becoming a driving force in the formation of the Oyster Cove Ladies’ Cricket Club in 1894. The women played in summer dresses, which were lighter than more formal attire but were still cumbersome and restrictive compared to modern cricket garb.

Fernleas Women's Cricket Team who played the Siroccos in Sydney's first official women’s club game in 1886.

Although a newspaper reported that Oyster Cove was the first women’s organised cricket team in the colonies at the time, there had been others. In 1886 the Fernleas Women’s Cricket Team played their first game against the Siroccos on March 8 of that year at the Association Ground, now known as the Sydney Cricket Ground. With Nellie Gregory as captain of Fernleas and her sister Lily captaining the Siroccos, the match had been organised to raise money for the Bulli Relief Fund. The game doesn’t seem to have spawned regular women’s matches but it gained them precedence over the first English women’s team the White Heather Club, which would only be formed in 1887 (sometimes mistakenly called the world’s first women’s cricket club).

A Charters Towers women's cricket team from the early 1900s.

While the Fernleas club may have been formed eight years before Poulett-Harris’s team, it seems to have been a one-off for a benefit match. Women’s cricket didn’t take off in Sydney the way it did in Tasmania, partly thanks to the skill and determination of players like Lily. But other teams would be formed around NSW over the ensuing years, inspired by news of the success of women’s cricket in Tasmania.

While playing cricket Poulett-Harris was also making a career as a schoolteacher at the Ladies’ Grammar School and Kindergarten in Hobart. She juggled cricket, concerts and teaching up until she died after a period of “painful illness”, most likely a form of tuberculosis, in 1897.

The Charters Towers women’s cricket team circa 1949.

The Oyster Cove team does not seem to have long outlasted Poulett-Harris’s captaincy but women’s cricket would survive elsewhere around Tasmania and in mainland Australia.

While there would be periods where interest waned, the sport surged in popularity in the ’30s, helped partly by the formation of the Australian Women’s Cricket Council (AWCC) in 1931 and the first Australian women’s cricket side, which took on an English team when they toured here in 1934-35. Australia sent a team to England in 1937 and the game has grown since.

Our team the Southern Stars has won more World Cups and more
World Twenty20 tournaments than any other.

Originally published as The Southern Stars owe a huge debt to the Tasmanian schoolteacher who became Australia’s first female cricket star