ABSTRACT
Between 1970 and 1975 I was preoccupied with India while playing cricket for University of Western Australia (UWA) teams (during a period when Australian player John Inverarity led the club; and one of my opening bat partners was Geoff Gallop who went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and later became Premier of Western Australia) and, later, with Nedlands. Games with those clubs told me more about social attitudes expressed via sport. University teams were considered elitist because access to university then was still a social elite privilege, especially so at UWA, while Nedlands and Dalkeith were and remain Perth establishment bastion suburbs. One memorable match involved a UWA team playing in a far-off suburb where ethnic communities predominated and the contest was fierce – our exit from the ground was blocked and a physical encounter seemed inevitable with our opponents thinking us privileged snobs who should be taught a lesson. This was sharper than my New Zealand experience. The ‘West’ also had a love-hate relationship with the rest of Australia (referred to as ‘the Eastern States’) expressed powerfully through cricket and Australian football – before the transformation of the Victorian Football League into the Australian Football League, Western Australia resented the recruitment of Perth footballers by Melbourne clubs.
