"Wait, wait...yes!"

In Sydney there a quite a few quaint and beautiful cricket grounds. Green ovals of turf wrapped in white picket fencing. Often these fields are embraced on one side by a grass hill with trees and sometimes even an old rotunda. The Camperdown Park version of this space forms the social centre of the suburb. Parties, picnics, practice and promenades. This is where the community comes to do it.


Today there was a cricket match on the field. The usual family soccer games and picnic spreads were hustled aside so the hard leather ball could be whacked around unimpeded. I watched from behind a take away coffee on the lawn outside the fence. With a sausage dog lead in one hand, and balancing a dormant e-bike against the impending, clambering 2-yr-old generated fall, I watched and wondered.


The cricket was some kind of masters match. Every player looked like they were probably good at cricket 20 years ago, and probably even better 30 years ago. The speed had changed, the bodies had changed, the skills had rusted a little bit and the all-white waist bands had a lot more work to do that back in the day. The element that stood out in stark contrast to this cascade of maturation was the sound.


The cricket game sounded exactly the same as I’d heard before. The sharp crack of the timber bat on the ball bounced off the hill. The batsman’s talk of “wait, wait, yes!” echoed down the wicket. The shared voices of 11 players appealing to the umpire filled the space. I imagined exactly as they had always done since the cricket oval was built.


I was struck by the disparity. Everything in the game looked like it had softened and slowed. But the cheer at a dismissal had not. The feelings hadn’t changed. Joy, achievement, togetherness and victory. All these lived inside the players. It came out filtered and wobbly in the length of the throws, speed of the steps and grace of the slides,  but it came out clear and pure in the voices. The sounds spoke of a reality that endured in tandem and contrast to the reality that had changed. ​