Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

Australia won 29 of the 61 inter-state men’s championships, including eight titles in the nine-year period from 1962 to 1970. Perth’s most successful hockey club was Cricketers, founded in the 1930s as a means of keeping players in the summer game fit in the off-season. True to its name and history a number of first-class cricketers, Ric included, played for the club in the 1960s and 1970s. It may well be that success in hockey enabled dual sportsmen, such as Ric, to escape the self-doubt many commentators attributed to the state cricket team until the late 1960s, and to a local football community regularly surrendering its star players to the Victorian Football League. But whether rooted in complexes inferior or superior, there is no doubt that a sense of separation from the rest of the nation infused the sporting ethos of the only state to have voted to secede from the Australian Federation. Long after that attempt in 1933 had been summarily squashed by a British decision that secession was constitutionally impossible, West Australians alternately lamented and celebrated Perth’s isolation. Even though improvements in transportation and technology had long since overcome some of the disadvantages of the 1930s, Ric grew up in a period when there was still no sealed road for over 200 of the 1,672 miles to Adelaide and it usually took longer to fly to the nation’s capital, Canberra, than to Singapore. The ‘world’s most isolated capital city’ had a population of a mere 600,000 in a state with barely a million inhabitants spread over a million square miles, one third of the continent. One factor that shaped Ric’s formative years was the physical environment. The majority of the population lived within easy reach of the coast or the broad expanses of the Swan River, or both. A predictable climate of hot, dry summers made for a lifestyle truer to Australia’s self-promotion as an open-air leisure paradise than was possible in the fickle climates and urban sprawls of Sydney or Melbourne. Another major influence was an education system that, in this superficially egalitarian society, produced a series of informal networks – forged at a handful of schools and the state’s only university – that dominated local business, politics, law and the arts, as well as sport. Ric was unusual in the spread of his activities and achievements in the 1970s and 1980s, and unique in the eminence he achieved later as a coach in several sports and more than one country. But he was very much a product of that older, smaller Perth environment before it changed 8 Prologue