And now to a bunch of cricket players who refuse to keep politics out of sport, in fact they revel in it. This is the story of a suburban sports club with a difference. In August 1979, the Royal Park Reds Cricket Club was established in Melbourne by a group of left-wing activists who wanted to express their politics through playing sport. So much so that they proclaimed their recruiting zone for players to be "not so much geographic, as philosophical". Well last Friday night, current and former members of the Reds got together f or an anniversary dinner to celebrate their 20 year history.
ATMOS.
MC: Good evening and welcome Ladies and Gentlemen. On this momentous occasion the 20th anniversary of -
Amanda Smith: One of the founding members, who's still playing with the Reds Cricket Club is Alec Kahn. Alec says that the club was formed to challenge the idea of sport being no n-political.
Alec Kahn: I think there's always been an element on the left, or in left-wing thinking, that likes to be a bit outrageous, a bit in-your-face. And sport is such an apolitical ar ena that I think there was something a bit exciting and daring about being overtly political in that arena. I think most of the individuals involved had had experience with crick et clubs and they regarded them as hot-beds of either sexism, or racist comments, reactionary comments. And so I think they liked the idea of getting together in a cricket club t hat was a bit the other way.
Amanda Smith: Now I notice in the commemorative booklet, Alec, that you've put out for this 20th anniversary occasion, a photograph of the 1982/83 Premiership team, and they're s tanding in front of a roughly painted banner which says 'Bringing the class struggle to the cricket pitch.' Now did you really believe that you were, or was that a bit of a joke?
Alec Kahn: It was a bit of a joke. I think we actually thought that it might be a way for the left to attract people, I suppose on a semi-social basis, into its circles. But no, I don't think we ever expected to actually fight the class struggle on the cricket pitch!
Amanda Smith: The meeting in August 1979 that established the Royal Park Reds was held in the inner suburban house of Tony Roberts. Tony's now retired from playing, but acts as t heir unofficial historian.
Tony Roberts: Personally, I'd played with a club which was pretty ockerish the year before. It was the first time I'd played since I was at school, and I found playing enjoyable but the social atmosphere was a bit off-putting. We had some social matches between the International Socialists, a political group that I was in, and the Communist Party, over a couple of years up to 1979. And after the second or third one of those in early 1979, we started talking to the people from the Communist Party about the possibility of joining together and forming a team.
Amanda Smith: Yes, well I'm interested to know why you did choose cricket. What about its English, imperialist connotations, didn't that concern you?
Tony Roberts: Never. Cricket was part of my life from the age of eight. And I think I wrote in the article about the history of Royal Park Reds that Kim Philby always wanted to g et the cricket scores from England when he was in exile in Russia; it never bothered him! All the alternative sports were either a lot worse in those respects, you could think of things like rugby union or tennis or golf or sailing. Or frankly, a little bit too violent and off-putting, like Australian rules or rugby league. For us, soccer was out of boun ds. Back then, things like baseball and basketball just were off the horizon. Basketball I suppose is the ultimate Disneyland sport as far as we're concerned, and we'd never want to go in for that. Besides, most of us would be about six inches too short for basketball.
Amanda Smith: But there was also no sort of left-wing uneasiness with sport, or with competition?
Tony Roberts: I think people, women who we were involved with, might have had that attitude, and there were probably a lot of men who were in the left-wing groups like I.S. who m ight have had an anti-competitive attitude to sport. But there were certainly enough of us to form a cricket team who didn't have qualms about competition.
Amanda Smith: But the Royal Park Reds had only been playing in their suburban competition a few years when they met with their greatest crisis. And ironically, the crisis came ab out as a result of one of the reasons they'd chosen to play cricket, rather than any other sport, in the first place. This, according to founding member Alec Kahn, is the amount of time during the course of a game that cricket allows for talking and discussion.
Alec Kahn: That's true. I think yes, it does have the sort of culture of off-the-field natter and there's plenty of time to do it. And I think left-wingers have always been keen on chewing the fat over political issues, social issues.
Amanda Smith: Yes well there was mention in one of the speeches tonight about rigorous debates regarding the merits of meritocracy.
Alec Kahn: Ah yes, well that was actually an oblique reference to our first split. Because like all good left-wing organisations, we had a split. And it tended to be between I su ppose what I would call the more Leninist types, who wanted to see a committee elected, and have the right to then choose the best teams for the club, and choose on form, and wha t I'd call the more Anarchist wing of the club who thought that that was all a bit too structured, people should be able to associate with who they wanted to, play in whatever te am they liked. Maybe I'm putting too much of a political slant on it, maybe it was just two different cliques in the club. But I think there always was a bit of a political under tone to it.
Amanda Smith: And that led to the split in 1985 when you broke into two different Reds clubs?
Alec Kahn: That's right. We'd tried to coexist with these two factions for a while, but it didn't work out.
Amanda Smith: Well as a politically and ideologically based club Alec, who have been your greatest adversaries in the competition that you've played in?
Alec Kahn: Well it's strange. I guess in the early competition we played in, the North Suburban Cricket Association, that was a very working class competition, and we used to com e up against some pretty redneck sort of sides. The faction that I went with, that went into the turf Mercantile Competition, we've come up against quite a few sides that are bas ed around business houses. So I guess we'd feel a lot more ideologically sound playing against them. Places like Coles Myer, Yarra Park, which is based on Price Waterhouse I thin k. One of our great early victories in that competition was against the Stock Exchange.
Amanda Smith: And one of your famous lines of sledging I understand was yelling out "All Ordinaries, All Ordinaries!"
Alec Kahn: Yes, "they're All Ordinaries", and it drove them crazy. The captain turned to the umpire and said, "Can't you shut these imbeciles up?"
Amanda Smith: Well now Alec, the Berlin Wall's been down a good ten years now. What's happened to the politics and political leanings of the club in its more recent history?
Alec Kahn: Well I guess like the left generally, the politics have been in retreat. I think it's much more a bohemian club now. It tends to attract a lot of artists, poets, perfo rmers, a few film makers and so on. So it's still got that slightly off-centre feel to it, but I think it's certainly lost that political edge that it had in the early days.
Amanda Smith: Does that sadden you as a founding member?
Alec Kahn: No, I think originally some of us had a fantasy that this would be a cosy little left-wing enclave, but I guess opportunism takes over. Someone brings along a friend w ho's not all that political but a terrific cricketer, and suddenly you bend your principles a bit, because it's much more fun than being flogged all over the park because you're being ideologically pure.
Amanda Smith: And it's a mark of the extent to which things have changed for the cricket club that one of its newer members, the stand-up comedian Hung Le, pointed out in his spe ech at the 20th anniversary dinner that he'd left Vietnam as a refugee, fleeing from Communism, only to come to Australia and find himself playing for the Reds!
But in trying to put their politics into practice, both on the cricket pitch and in the organisation of the club, the Reds have tried various experiments over the years. Now that many of them have children, the players themselves run a child-minding creche at their games. Although attempts at gender equity took an even more radical, if somewhat unsuccess ful, step in the early days, as Tony Roberts explains.
Tony Roberts: There was a lot of talk in the early years of women who were associated with the club wanting to play. But they never actually got to the point of turning up to pra ctice, and pressing for selection. So we never had to really put that to the test. I do remember when I was the umpire's secretary for our association, that I took the bold step of getting the first woman umpire in our local North Suburban Association, to umpire one of our matches. But it's been written up as an absolute disaster, as she apparently was t rying to strike a blow for women and hadn't done much about reading the rules of cricket.
Amanda Smith: Nevertheless though, the club as I understand it, has never had a women's auxiliary to make the tea and sandwiches for the players?
Tony Roberts: No-one would have ever dared consider that.
Amanda Smith: Now as a social experiment I suppose, has the Reds cricket club worked in the way that most sports clubs would say is the only thing that really counts, and that's winning competitions?
Tony Roberts: Oh we've done a fair bit of that too, I would have thought. It's a bit hard to know where to strike a balance. There was one year where one of the teams tried to ap point every one of its players as captain for one week throughout the whole ten or eleven weeks of the season.
Amanda Smith: Along socialist principles?
Tony Roberts: Yes. (I think in Monty Python they wanted everything to be elected by a democratic vote in a collective - in Monty Python and the Holy Grail as I recall.) Well that flopped, they were hopeless. They got themselves together under one captain and won the Premiership the next year. So we can adapt ourselves to reality in that respect. Most of our socialist experiments have been tempered by the need to get the thrill of winning when we're playing against the opposition.
Amanda Smith: So what do you reckon has kept you together as a club these 20 years, despite a loosening of the political ties that did bring you together in the first place?
Tony Roberts: Partly I suppose the fact that there are quite a lot of people who want to keep marking the occasion of the fact that we did form ourselves in the first place. I th ink that probably helps to create a sense of continuity. But the way the club's grown in the last ten years, even in a sort of apolitical sort of way, would indicate to me that t here's still a lot of people who want to react against the '80s and '90s way of doing things. And as long as there are a lot of people who are put off by commercialism and gung-h oism and Wall Street and all that kind of thing, I think there's going to be plenty of people who want to go and play for the Reds. And say, "We play for a club that actually sta nds for something a bit different to you."
MC: ... perhaps we should give the clubs, three cheers at this point. Hip, hip!
ALL: Hooray!
MC: Hip, hip!
ALL: Hooray!
MC: Hip, hip!
ALL: Hooray!
APPLAUSE, CHEERS
Amanda Smith: The Royal Park Reds and Mercantile Reds Cricket Clubs, both factions at their 20th anniversary dinner in Melbourne last Friday night, to celebrate their founding ba ck in August 1979.
And I must say, I've never come across such a bunch of sportsmen, not only committed to their sport and their club, but who also treat it all with a disarming kind of self-deprec ating humour. Which that's pretty well summed up in their motto: 'Win nervously, lose tragically'.
And that's The Sports Factor for this week. I'm Amanda Smith and I'll be back next Friday; hope you'll join me.