ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the latter, charting the changing notions of class, national identity and masculinity that have characterised it since the Second World War. Since before the First World War, an abiding issue in the Australian national team was the perceived meanness of the Australian Cricket Board. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Ashes continued to be a theatre for the rehearsal of class myths prevailing in the cricket cultures of the respective countries, but with some important new inflections. Keith Miller – a hero to succeeding generations of ‘larrikin’ Australian cricketers — always ‘walked’, never waiting to be given out. Moreover, aside from seeing themselves as keepers of the amateur flame, Australia’s cricketers were open in their admiration of the British monarchy. Border, a close friend, identified ‘a considerable streak of larrikinism’ in Ian Botham’s makeup and thus tagged him as ‘a genuine sort of bloke, a real straight shooter’.
