Friday, April 22, 2016

Foreword - or "Driving on the Up Through Cover"

A question that has been posed to me – and by me - for a number of years is “how would you go about writing a history of the Kiama Cricket Club?” It’s not an easy question to answer or an easy task to ponder. Let’s face it; this is the Kiama Cricket Club. A Club whose members are as fiercely loyal as they are keen for a beer or ten after the game is won or done. A Club whose members are better sledgers of their own teammates than any opposing team could ever hope to be. A Club whom itself coined the wonderful phrase “Kiama Kollapse” to explain away the consistent failings of its batting line-up.
As of August 1st 2012, there have been just a few under 900 people who have made an appearance on the field for the Club in one of its four Grades since the formation of the South Coast District Cricket Association in 1946. In the 90 years previous to that, in the many forms the Kiama Cricket Club has taken since the 1850’s, there were countless others who have had their name placed on the scoresheet as having participated in a match for the Club. Even if this anthology became a fifty volume history, it would be an incredible task to try and mention all of those players. Given that this is the case, the readership of a history of the Club is going to be necessarily limited, but word of mouth can also be a powerful thing.

So how does one go about it?
There is of course the traditional method, which would be to trace events in chronological order, focusing on the scores and familiar successes and failures of teams and players. If done well, this is certainly not a bad way to do it. It does require an enormous amount of time and a great deal of research of material that in most cases no longer exists. It also relies on the interest of the reader on events that happened 40 or 60 or 100 years ago. Most of the readers of a ‘history’ of a Club will show more interest on the history of the era in which they played themselves, which would restrict the majority of readership to the most recent thirty years. This is all and good, but you don’t want to ignore one era and be proliferating from another.

In the long run, to do a history properly, it has to be informative. It has to be interesting to people from a multitude of eras. It has to be inspiring. It will hopefully be sprinkled with humour and humorous events. Finally, it has to be relevant. It has to not only be all of these things to people within and around the Kiama Cricket Club, but hopefully it has to be the same to cricket lovers everywhere. The stories and events should be able to be enjoyed by those who have never had an association with the Club, to be presented in a way that it can hold its own whether the people involved are known by the reader or not.

So this is my attempt to bring to life the history of the Kiama Cricket Club. You could call it an irreverent history, one that may not seem to have any rhyme or reason to it, until you start to become intrigued by it.
Some of the events described herein I have witnessed firsthand. Some of the events I have heard second hand. Some of the stories are described through my eyes, others will come to you through the voices of others. Many of these stories and moments I have researched thoroughly, through scorebooks and written accounts and newspaper articles, as well as interviews or just chats over a beer or five. Some of these stories I have just enough information so that I can paint a picture that may not be completely as events unfolded, but it is how I imagine that it could have happened. Some of what you will read in the following articles is as I have imagined it, that I have dreamed I was there to see it. In these cases I have not tried to create a fiction of an account, but merely have attempted to bring to life the atmosphere of the moment, and try to recapture what may have occurred at that time.

What I have tried to do is bring together a mix of characters and events. It will cover the great moments of the Club’s history. It will profile some of the very best players. It will highlight some people and events that have been lost in time. It will hopefully bring together moments and incidents that few people knew at the time they happened, but can now take their rightful place within the history of our Club.

It’s not just a history of the Club. I guess in a way it’s my story of the Kiama Cricket Club as well, and that will likely become obvious through the pages to come. It’s not an attempt at a dry historic record. It is a selection of tales – both mine and others – put together in an entertaining format that is hopefully also informative and interesting. It is my hope that those who read it will find enough here to enjoy, and that you can envelope yourself in the joy that is the game of cricket.

Bill Peters
August 20, 2012.

No comments:

Post a Comment