According to experts, for example Benedict Anderson, nations are in many ways constructed, imagined communities. Communities that are not based on a daily face-to-face interaction between their members, but on a perception of belonging to the same wider group of people, defined by common experiences and expectations, by common values, by a common land and culture and by a common language. However, on a personal level, the sense of belonging to something bigger than your neighbourhood or small town, this wider affinity and connection to others, is mental, that is, ‘imagined’. Nations are also defined or shaped to a large extent by their relations to others and to rivalries. These rivalries have always included sports.
Australian nationalism at its birth was defined in opposition to Britain. This opposition was expressed to a large extent not through Australian Rules Football (since the English did not play the game), nor through rugby and the largely unknown to Australians, soccer, but through cricket. ‘Officially’ it all started in 1882 with the test series known as ‘The Ashes’. In reality the first rivalry, namely the first test cricket match between England and Australia, was born in 1877.
The cricket supremacy of Australia against England in the crucial first half of the 1920s, or in the pre-war Depression and in the nation building post-war years, was a crucial morale booster and a nation building ‘supplement’ in a country that has always valued, almost on a daily basis, its sporting activities and its achievements.
This is why the annihilation of the current Australian cricket team in the grounds of England this European summer has given rise to so much concern, and has appeared in so many articles not only in the sports sections but also in the opinion pages of reputable newspapers. Titles such as ‘Who killed Australian cricket’, ‘Cultural change driving the decline of Australian cricket’, ‘Decline and fall of Australian cricket empire’, ‘Clarke, Watson and our great cultural malaise’, are not only addressing the fears of the cricket fans, who look for an explanation or for an excuse in the rise of soccer or in the ‘ruthless efficiency’ and the wealth of the AFL that provides better prospects, better than cricket, to young talents.
There is an underlining fear in these headlines, that was rightly pointed out in The Age by public intellectual and Australia’s new race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, when he wrote “Australia’s decline as a cricketing power may be a metaphor for the state of this fragile nation”. The asylum seekers, these cultural, religious and political strangers are ‘landing’ on our shores and dominate the media and the public agenda as well as the public’s imagination in a distorted and out of context way. The mining boom we are told is winding down sharply and the Australian economy that has provided more than 20 years of continuous growth is not prepared to make the required transition. The all-important in the country’s psyche and imagination, Australian Rules Football, is in the middle of what appears to be a doping scandal. An iconic sport always considered very popular, very ‘noble’, very ‘pure’ and very Australian is going through testing times as its image comes under threat.
The ascendancy of the culturally diverse and still somewhat ‘alien’ to wider Australia Asia continues and comes closer to our shores with the 240 million strong Indonesia overtaking us as an economic power in the near future.
All these are causes for concern and rising insecurity in this great, rich, Anglophone and empty continent of the south. All these multidimensional and complex insecurities can find and do find an indirect way of expressing themselves through the debate that is following the collapse of the Australian ‘cricket’ empire in England in the first two test matches of this year’s Ashes.