ABSTRACT
During the 1982–83 Australian summer, and cricket season, an old controversy was revived. In Australia and England, a renewed search began for the true character of a test cricket series played half a century earlier. The anniversary was partly the reason for the renewed interest; fiftieth anniversaries frequently are. In the case of the 1932–33 Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) tour of Australia, however, there was more to it than a simple number of years past. Though the facts of that cricket visit have never been at issue, what has never been successfully resolved is its real meaning: how its events went far beyond the cricket ground fences and into the collective memory of an Anglo-Australian generation for whom cricket was a major cultural bond.
