Editor Christian Ryan describes Australia: Story of a Cricket Country as a fat book, but its quality lies not only in its width and breadth but also its depth. It is multidimensional. In 400 large-format pages, it packs 230 action and informal photographs, many of which generously run over double-page spreads, as well as essays by thirty-three writers across five organising themes: Dreaming, Playing, Shining, Watching, and Living.

Ryan was the penultimate editor of the short-lived Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack Australia and the inaugural editor of The Monthly, as well as the author of Golden Boy (2009), the highly acclaimed biography of former Australian Test captain Kim Hughes. He thus has both a cricket and literary background, which serves him well in assembling an impressive list of contributors.

Historian Inga Clendinnen opens up Dreaming with a lovely memoir of cricket in 1940s Geelong, ‘a small town laced together by sporting clubs’, in which ‘decorum ruled and umpires were a tribe apart’, where for a teenage girl cricketing creams were ‘as elegant a masculine display rig’ as she’d ever seen, and for whom former local hero Lindsay Hassett represented ‘the ultimate in reliability and moral poise’. Gideon Haigh, a fellow alumnus of Hassett’s old school, Geelong College, takes second strike with a counterfactual history of the Ashes, while Coetzee slips in at first drop with an aptly named piece ‘Catch-52’ on South Africa’s low-profile 1952–53 touring side, whose exceptional fielding enabled them to draw a five-Test series with Hassett’s Australians.

The book roams far and wide. In the next article, rock musician (and Monthly essayist) Robert Forster recalls Doug Walters’s début Test century at Brisbane in 1965. This is followed by Mark Mordue on the ghost of Victor Trumper and the tale of the second-storey window of Hunter’s Boot Factory, which remained broken for fifty years after a shot by the immortal Trumper pierced the glass during a classic innings on the Redfern Oval.

John Harms covers much territory in ‘Favelland’, which starts with a road trip from Melbourne to Adelaide for the Ashes Test of 2010. Citing David Malouf’s idea of six Australian nations, he writes that at Bordertown ‘they talk differently’, and at Keith, fifty kilometres up the road, South Australian accents, vowels, and words kick in. ‘Farmers don’t harvest, they reap. Very biblical.’ Some cricket followers think it is essential to watch every ball of a Test match. Harms is not one of them. Intently observing play during an occasional session gives him time to absorb and convey the rich and varied culture beyond the pickets at Adelaide Oval, whether from under the Moreton Bay fig trees on the northern mound or behind the members’ enclosure. 

As an editor, Ryan has a marvellous feel for both the placement of stories and the juxtaposition of imagery. Immediately after Harms is Ray Webster’s essay ‘Never Miss a Ball’, subtitled ‘The Passion of Scorekeepers’. This piece includes a full-page photograph of a small composed college boy armed with pen and scorebook at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1954. Webster is cool and clear in his historical appreciation of the scorer’s role, but scoring is a dispassionate activity. Scorers cannot be excited by the action or they will lose their place.

The centrepiece of the book – Shining – is the most controversial section: 121 past Australian Test players select the five greatest Australian cricketers according to criteria such as ability, character, personality, leadership, and public appeal. Not surprisingly Don Bradman (116) and Shane Warne (109) gain the top two spots, although the fall away in voting to Dennis Lillee, Adam Gilchrist, and Keith Miller in the next three places is rapid. Although forty-two cricketers are chosen, there is both an inevitable tyranny of the present and notable omissions. Clarrie Grimmett recorded a paltry single vote, and early cricketing giants such as George Giffen, Clem Hill, and Monty Noble missed out entirely, which suggests that Australia’s Test players need a history lesson.

This is a small complaint, because the glory and glue of the book is the photography. Flick open anywhere and there is a stunning image. Victor Trumper jumping out to drive, Don Bradman walking out to bat at Headingley in 1938, the Patrick Eagar side-on shot of Jeff Thomson at full stretch in the mid-1970s, John Dyson’s freakish catch at long-on against the West Indies in 1982, and Keith Miller cutting, are among the most familiar, but there are scores of others that have rarely been sighted or are long forgotten.

A picture of the Sydney Cricket Ground cleaner tackling a mountain of beer cans in 1969 testifies to the days when the limit on spectators taking alcohol into the grounds was twenty-eight full-strength cans per person, and Rennie Ellis’s 1983 photo of the bare-torsoed males in front of the SCG scoreboard reminds us of our past, or at least the way the Hill was. Other imagery is quieter. A solitary back view of a bare-topped male spectator reclining high up in the old Olympic Stand at the MCG in 1960 almost out-Dupains Max Dupain, and the children’s bush cricket scene taken by Bruce Postle at Bungaree in 1985 and Bill Lawry leaving the ground after his last grade game for Northcote in 1975 pinpoint cricket’s wider connections.

My personal favourite, however, is that of Albert Trott leaping down the wicket. The first impression is of the latent power and vigour of the man who in 1899 became the only person to hit a ball over the Lord’s Pavilion roof, but a second look reveals something more poignant. Trott is captured some years after his physical prime, his leap is exaggerated, his feet could become tangled, the magical physical blow had become his nemesis, his future as well as his past is writ large; in 1914 he died by his own hand.

To summarise Australia: Story of a Cricket Country in one word would be to say ‘magnificent’. In two words, ‘simply grand’: grandly designed and grandly executed. Publishers Hardie Grant have produced a book of great intelligence.