It Came Round About But It Came

This morning the newspapers are full of a new British heroine. Her name is Anna Hingley and she has become the first woman to cross Australia by horse.

There is no doubting that this is a significant achievement. It is however important to keep it in context. Australia has many horses. Sooner or later a woman was going to saddle one and cross the country with it. Furthermore men have been doing it for years. Although certainly deserving of praise the achievement pales into insignificance beside the valiant attempts to cross Australia by things which do not exist there. History bears many examples of the brave and ultimately futile attempts to accomplish one particularly astounding feat.

The first attempt to cross Australia by Slow Left Arm Bowler took place as long ago as 1867. A team sponsored by the notorious rake and adventurer Lord Philip Schofield hired a Yorkshire village cricketer called Davis to bowl his way across the country with the intrepid travellers pitching tents in his wake. The fact that no one remembers the forename of Mr. Davis demonstrates that he was declared professional on joining the expedition and consequently had no future in village cricket should he return. The party decamped in Sydney and sought to bowl its way to Perth. Unfortunately then as now Australia proved a poor hunting ground for the slow left armer. This type of cricketer does not exist there because the pitches are not receptive to the technique. The party which arrived with great fanfare was followed by a large crowd of settlers armed with every sort of bat imaginable. The crowd easily whacked Davis back over his head into the harbour time and time again and most of the first week was spent retrieving an increasingly sodden ball from the dingo-infested waters. Finally most of the party left to gamble their way to enough winnings for the passage home while Davis continued alone. With no one to umpire him he increasingly strayed into no balls and wides and with no wicketkeeper byes were inevitable every ball. Eventually he gave up about ten miles outside the city with horrendously expensive figures and settled in the outback where he lived by selling a book about his experiences which he translated into Kangaroo and Wombat.

The second attempt in 1884 learned some of the lessons of the first. A team of eleven set out from England captained by an actual cricketer in the Hon. Tennyson Morley Morley Morley of Winchester College. Each member of the team had a specific fielding position and three of them were slow left arm bowlers who worked in relays. Furthermore they avoided local batsmen by bowling at night. Progressing from the Queensland Coast they came to a small town inside the New South Wales Border. Here the expedition began to founder. The weary party arrived as dawn was breaking and yet another local shindig was beginning. The team could not resist joining in the festivities and got thoroughly drunk before asking what the name of the town was. When told it was Wee Waa hysterical laughter broke out among the reserved English gentlemen. Two of the bowlers were sent home with split sides and a third was still laughing when visited in confinement seven years later. The rest were in no fit state to continue due to a combination of dehydration through shedding tears of mirth and being assaulted by the insulted locals. The British government telegraphed the colonial administration and demanded that the name of this town be changed. When it refused Britain declared an expedition embargo on Australia which almost brought the country to its knees but paved the way for further immigration from other parts of the world whose own adventurers rediscovered cowpats and other Australian delicacies.

With no more British expeditions the Australians themselves made several attempts. Hiring British bowlers from as far afield as Devon and Dundee a number of famous parties set out with the hopes of a nation resting on them. They have been immortalised in the bush ballads of Harry Cackbottom and Sludgie McGurkwash amongst others. The tale of Ron the Con and Flatbellied Don who attempted the crossing double handed is sung by every Australian. But all the Australian expeditions foundered through a lack of balance. Sometimes a member of the party would keel over and die because they did not say the word 'mate' at the end of a sentence. Then they would collapse into arguments and disarray because everyone was addressed as 'mate' by everyone else and no one could distinguish who was who. It would be several years before 'Bruce' became the first and last Australian name. After the seventh such expedition the natives had had enough. There would be no more attempts to cross Australia by Slow Left Arm Bowler and this final frontier would remain unbreached by man.

This was not quite the end of the story. A joint English-Australian-West Indian team set out in 1965 in the hope of raising interest in future cricket series' involving these countries. It was a disaster. West Indians only joined in to show they had slow left armers in their islands and did not appreciate being asked to do other duties. The English supplied the main bowlers but discovered Australians could not field to them. The Australians were hounded by their own press who felt they were betraying the country by helping Pommie bowlers cross it. The expedition ended two weeks after it had begun in the middle of the Australian desert. But one good thing came out of it. Scientists had used the expedition to measure variations in flight and action amongst the bowlers to calculate exactly how a future expedition should bowl and what its route should be. Their calculations were controversial because they concluded that they should start in New Zealand and finish in Canada. But at least the groundwork had been laid if at some future date there was someone with a bottomless pit of money to resource an expedition and enough bowlers capable of fulfilling the requirements. This has not happened yet. But who is to say that in this day and age the raw material cannot rise to make the theory a reality?

Today the minds of the world return to this final great adventure. Those scientists never calculated how women or horses could cross Australia by Slow Left Arm Bowler. Maybe they are the missing element. Since when did women have enough sense of humour to injure themselves laughing at Wee Waa? Since when did horses have names as simple as humans? It only takes a few training sessions to get them up to the standard. Maybe the real achievement of Anna Hingley is entirely different to the one being rightly celebrated in so many stables and knitting circles today.