Clip description

A child sits on the grass next to a miniature cricket kit with stumps, bat and ball, as the narrator explains that a love of cricket is inherent to 'every Australian’. Children play the game in Sydney’s backstreets, followed by footage of the Australian cricket team in action. The narrator describes a 'reversal’ on the cricket field as almost as serious as a 'national calamity’, and how easily a team’s fortunes can change in each match. Seven of the players from the successful 1930 Australian team walk onto a small oval. The captain, Bill Woodfull, addresses the camera to promote the game through the medium of talking pictures which, he says, can 'so lucidly demonstrate and explain most things’.

Curator’s notes

In Depression-era Australia in the 1930s, backyard cricket was played by many kids in the lanes of city slums, as seen in this clip. Most footage of inner city housing in the 1930s and 1940s focuses on the poverty, the inadequate living conditions and overcrowded areas endured by those hard hit by the Depression. The children filmed here were likely to have been inner city kids – possibly rewarded for their brief appearance on film with a meal or a couple of bob. Rather than focusing on hardship, the boys here are happy to be playing a game of cricket. Furthermore, the narration offers them hope by saying that the back lanes are just one step away from the playing field.