The Window: Australia's deep and abiding love

There were high hopes for the town of Big Bell, a seven-hour drive north of Perth, when it was established in 1936 to serve a new gold mine. Pride of place in the main street was taken by a superb art deco pub which boasted the longest bar in Australia. There was a concrete pitch and a cricket association, too, featuring clubs with names as plain as Town, Surface and Underground. But after two decades, the mine closed, the pub was abandoned and the cricket ceased as the population dispersed. At its peak, Big Bell was the home to 1,200 souls; by 1959, five remained.

When Les Everett visited the town a year ago, it was long deserted. The pub stood out: stripped of its signature green-painted tin roof, it now resembled a giant dolls’ house. But the Fremantle school teacher was unsure where to find the old concrete slab laid for cricket – until he realised he was standing on it.  

Big Bell is one of 200 sites featuring on Les’s evocative Instagram gallery, Abandoned Cricket Pitches – the fruit of two years of weekend road trips and incurable curiosity. The landscape could really be of no other country: the rusty red dirt, the cobalt blue sky, the piercing brilliance of the light, the bristling hardiness of the foliage, with the watertower drained to its last drop standing out against a horizon so sharp it almost looks like an illusion. Meanwhile, recalling Francis Thompson’s At Lord’s, a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost.

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Les’s site, however, is strangely celebratory. Although his photographs are stark, bare of people, they testify to Australia’s deep and abiding love of their national game – that in the most unpromising locations, where human life was often marginal and ultimately temporary, people still hankered enough for cricket to domesticate the terrain accordingly, and optimistic enough about their prospects of on-going habitation to organise a complex, time-consuming pastime for themselves.

A newspaper clipping of November 1953 records the start of a season in Big Bell having to be deferred because there were no cricket balls left in town.

Most of the images that Les and other contributors have collected show pitches reverting to the nature from which they were carved. They are blistered by the sun, fissured by the heat, returning to the fields and the bush from which they were carved. But they aren’t so far gone that you can’t imagine playing.

On a pitch in a wheat field in North Bandee, population 32, on the Great Eastern Highway 230km from Perth, Les found a set of metal stumps still standing, as though the players had just popped in for tea and would be back imminently. Sixty-five years since play was abandoned in Big Bell, the deck looks better for batting than some at the Waca. Certainly it features fewer cracks.

This article was published in the April edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game