Cricket in the clouds

In February, the Latrobe Valley Express posted a story about an almost-unique game of cricket. The Walhalla Cricket Club took on the Melbourne Cricket Club. As I understand it, the Walhalla Club does not field teams in the regular competitions but is affiliated with the Traralgon District Cricket Association.

Why did I call it “cricket in the clouds”? I did so because the very small cricket ground is on the top of a mountain, or where the top of the mountain once stood. I don’t know how high the mountain once was, but I do know the playing surface is six hundred feet above the level of the street. That is a whisker short of 183 metres and though the track has been improved and ‘signed’ it is still a significant climb.

Entertainments of all kinds were held in Walhalla, including some very prominent performers from ‘outside’. One of the entertainments was cricket, just one of a multitude of sports, even tossing the caber. There was a ‘social’ team set up in Walhalla in 1868 or 1869, and it had a few wins against other sides – but it did not have a home ground.

Raymond Paull refers briefly to a cricket club called Excelsior being formed in March 188 (and one report says it was this team that arranged the levelling of the mountain-top) as the first cricket team in Walhalla and that fits the 150th anniversary being held in 2023, so I assume that the Excelsior Cricket Club later became the Walhalla Cricket Club.

In January of 1870 it was felt that Walhalla should form an ‘official’ cricket club. It was then called the Walhalla Eleven. William Gairdner, a mine manager, was the first president, and he successfully led the appeals to the government to reserve the ground for a cricket oval. Then he had to lead the fundraising efforts needed to take the top off a mountain, for that is what they did.

It is said that the workers from the Long Tunnel Extended mine did the digging and levelling but it seems far more likely that men from many walks of life helped. It was a Sunday job for the most part. With picks, shovels and sheer determination they took nearly 10 metres off the top of the hill to “carve a football and cricket ground 140 yards long and about ninety yards wide.”

It was 1885 before they decided they had dug away enough of the mountain. They put a concrete pitch in, on an oval that was rock and gravel, with no topsoil for grass to grow,

There is a story that Warwick Armstrong, a cricketer of note and later Captain of the Australian test team, bet in 1907 that he could hit a ball from the Walhalla pitch to the roof of the Star Hotel, down in the valley. One of the plaques along the climb up to the ground says that this is a myth but another story is that he was caught by a fielder on the treeline. The plaques support this, naming the fielder as Harvey Merrington, from Aberfeldy.

Raymond Paull’s Old Walhalla says this of Merrington and it is well worth repeating. “Merrington, a keen cricketer, walked from Aberfeldy each week-end during the season, a return journey of fifty-six miles. He had a small hostelry but also worked a reef nearby. On his absence on the reef or at Walhalla, the door remained open and notices in the bar indicated to passing customers where the whisky, brandy and rum were to be found, the price of each, and where they would find the change.” That is very hard to imagine today, is it not?

For what it is worth, too, Warwick Windridge Armstrong (1879-1947) was a national hero but he was something less than sporting. He was a dour batsman and an uninteresting slow bowler, but he did manage a thousand runs and a hundred wickets in England in three series. Beat the Poms and you’ll be a national hero whatever else you might be.

He captained Australia for ten test matches in 1920-21, and enjoyed one of the very few ‘whitewash’ results against England. His career was cut short by recurrent malaria picked up in Malaysia. He was elected to the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame in 2000, 80 years after his retirement.

Despite the limited size the ‘oval’ was used for many sports events including athletics and, as this is Victoria, for Australian Rules football.

Walhalla had its own football league because it was still a very remote place. At first there were two teams, North United and Commonwealth, who played their first games in 1888. They were joined by YMC, and the fixture was such that two tams would play each week, in rotation, while the third team ha a bye. It sounds a little odd, but it worked and the people of Walhalla were passionate in their support for each team.

In 1913, when the mines were closing down and Walhalla was shrinking rapidly, the Walhalla Football Association players had to give it away. Games were still played but the Association seems to have folded.

If I may I’ll repeat a story told by Jim Usher for “Sporting Life” in 1970. On July 21, 1924 a Walhalla team played a Baw Baw team. In the first quarter the football actually burst, and a horseman was sent galloping down the track to get another one. While he was away the players had a drink or two.

In the second quarter the ball went out of bounds, landing at the feet of and startling a tethered horse which reared up – and came down with a hoof on the ball. The stitching split. The rider was sent off for a third ball and the players relaxed over a few jars.

When he came back the local saddler had to inflate and lace the ball. He slipped with his needle and the bladder burst, Unbelievably, the rider went back for a fourth ball. Highly diverted by all this the players on the mountaintop had a few drinks and waited. They had to wait a while because the rider was also diverted and spent an hour or so tending to his thirst down in the township.

The game was eventually finished in the darkness, with the only light being a fire built up at each end of the ground. It is said that Walhalla won, but there was, and is, some dispute about this.

It might well be a true story, or it might not, I hope it is.