Bodyline - “We may well win the Ashes, but we may very well lose a Dominion.”

There are few sports which elevate the importance of the so-called “spirit of the game” quite as much as cricket, but in the Antipodean summer of 1932-33 relations were decidedly frosty between the national teams of Australia and England.

This episode of ‘The Way We See Sport’, The Way We See Life sees Nathan and Chris launch series 2 with a deep-dive into the infamous Bodyline Ashes Series. As tempers flared between the Australians and an England team desperate for revenge after defeat in 1929, it looked for a time as if a Test cricket match in Adelaide might erupt into a fully-blown diplomatic crisis. 

A tale which encapsulates sporting genius in the form of the Australian batting great, Don Bradman, and tactical ruthlessness from the England captain, Douglas Jardine, also provides a perfect window into the complex concept of national consciousness. In 1914, Australia had answered Britain’s call to arms for the First World War, and lost many soldiers on the battlefields of Belgium and Gallipoli. By 1942, Australians would be fighting. not just in Europe, but in defence of their own continent, as they sought to delay the Japanese advance down the Kokoda Track. Both events would inevitably prompt reflection on the nature of Australia’s relationship with Britain, as well as its broader place in the world.

The Bodyline Tour of the 1930s captured a moment in which the notion of what it meant to be an Australian was shifting, and signposted something of a cultural shift away from the Mother Country.