Over and out: stumps called on abandoned outback cricket pitches

Australia’s lost cricket pitches are a fascinating link with our past.

Abandoned cricket pitch at North Baandee, WA. Picture: Les Everett

The photography of Les Everett is at the intersection of sport, history, geography, archaeology and art. And while this may be a small intersection, it runs deep – a reminder not just of our abiding love of cricket but also our ­tenuous hold on the land and the inexorable march of nature.

“Abandoned cricket pitches” is what it says on the lid: an Instagram archive of more than 200 cricket pitches, mainly in Western Australia, where stumps has been called permanently. A handful are surprisingly spruce, as though the players have just adjourned, and a bit of weeding would allow play to resume; most are in decay; a few are all but reclaimed by the landscape.

Abandoned cricket pitch at Big Bell, a ghost town in WA’s Murchison region. Picture: Les Everett

The palettes are sometimes that intensely ­Australian mix of red dirt and blue sky, with maybe a water tank or a windmill in silent ­attendance; other times you can almost feel the blast of the sun blistering the concrete and sense the ­vegetation’s unstoppable creep. Cricket is a proverbially long game but here it is pitted, hopelessly, against the most relentless opponents of all.

Old pitch at Bobalong, in the Great Southern region of WA. Picture: Les Everett

A schoolteacher, Les now works part-time at North Lake Senior Campus near Fremantle. He played cricket for 30 years until his opening bowler’s bad back packed up, although he’d just as soon talk about his only half-century – 58 not out at number 10 (“batted pretty well that day”).

Almost 20 years ago, he and his wife Titian were taking regular drives to and from his old hometown of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. During their miniature schnauzer’s ablution breaks along the route, Les started photographing football scoreboards, which became the basis of a website he set up with ubiquitous Melbourne-based journalist Vin Maskell (scoreboardpressure.com) dedicated to the aesthetics of community football.

Les grew interested in the impermanent towards the end of 2017 when he signed up to participate in a national facilities audit initiated by Cricket Australia to gauge the condition of the country’s grassroots infrastructure. Among those facilities he audited were the ground where he played his first game aged 10, Boulder Oval (“I made a duck”), and where he played his last game, Cottlesloe Oval (“One for 14 off seven overs. A solid finish”). The pitches, he found, were gone, subsumed by Australian rules, as though they had never been there.

Abandoned cricket pitch at Sandstone, in WA’s Mid West. Picture: Les Everett

It aroused his curiosity. Visiting the Wheatbelt town of Corrigin, where in his youth he played four summers, Les thought he’d try to locate some of the grounds on which he had played in nearby towns such as Ardath and Shackleton. He found them abandoned and desolate, albeit still bearing cricket’s traces, which he photographed – and thus was formed a habit that has proved impossible to break.

Congelin, in WA’s Wheatbelt. Picture: Les Everett

For the past two years, Les has been crisscrossing Western Australia as far north as Meekatharra looking for pitches, clocking up 30,000km on 75 separate journeys. Not all of them are as noticeable as in Doodenanning, where the sign “Cricket Pitch” exudes a certain misplaced confidence; most have required local advice, solicited in person and on Facebook, and lots of scrolling through digitised news­papers on the National Library’s Trove. All that survives of cricket in North Baandee might be a sunbaked concrete strip and rusty metal stumps, but back numbers of the Avon ArgusandCunderdin-Meckering-Tammin Mail allow one to revisit Baandee’s consecutive premierships in the mid-1920s when the East Avon Cricket Association drew large crowds. When his wife’s enthusiasm waned for taking 14-hour drives on the off-chance of finding a pitch, Les picked up a similarly obsessed partner: travelling ­pharmacist Gordon Smith, who has made some impressive finds.

Neglect, Les notes, was not the only factor in obsolescence. Greater prosperity and improved transportation obviated the need to have pitches everywhere; the same factors are now, in effect, also an aid to their rediscovery. Nor are they merely forlorn. They attest the desire to build a way of life rather than merely a mode of work in these remote locations. They are the efforts of people who came to stay even while knowing that they, like all of us, would move on.