Richard Cashman

CACKYHANDER

Writing About Cricket, Sports History and the Olympic Games

Richard Cashman

196 pages • Preface • 80 illustrations (colour and black and white) • Notes • Bibliography • Index
Publication date: 1 June 2022
Paperback edition
ISBN: 978-1-876718-37-4

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EBook (PDF) $30

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OVERVIEW

Even though sport was not highly regarded in my household, I became captivated by the majesty of cricket on the radio and watching the game at nearby Waitara Oval from the age of 11. None of my siblings were similarly attracted to sport.

With the expansion of higher education, I gained scholarships to Sydney and Monash universities and Duke University in North Carolina. The six-week voyage by cargo ship to the USA via the Panama Canal was memorable.

The 1960s were a turbulent time with anti-Vietnam protests, the counterculture, and black activism as well as race riots and assassinations. I taught history at the University of Rochester, in upstate New York in a dramatic time when American society was fracturing. I had a ‘hippie’ wedding ceremony in a forest in 1970.

After joining UNSW in 1972, I organised the first sports history conference with Michael McKernan in Australia in 1977. We believed that the interrogation of sport, was an important exercise. I was one of the first Australian academics to become a fully-fledged sports historian.

I produced a number of pioneering cricket studies on cricket crowds, the first histories written on Indian cricket and on Australian women’s cricket and biographies of Fred Spofforth, Billy Murdoch and Yabba

The staging of the Sydney Games provided me with unparalleled opportunities as the director of the UNSW Centre for Olympic Studies. A highlight was when I was selected as a community torchbearer and ran around Enmore Park the day before the Games opened. Afterwards, I completed four books on the legacy of the Games.

Richard Cashman carrying the Olympic torch at Enmore Park on 14 September 2000.

CONTENTS

Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

1. Growing up in Waitara
2. Discovery of cricket
3. Bound for Duke University
4. Turbulent years at the University of Rochester
5. Return to Australia
6. Playing and writing about cricket
7.A full-time sports historian
8. My Olympic journey
9. University of Technology Sydney years
10.Return to cricket

Notes
Bibliography
Index

With some stalwarts of the Marrickville-Pagewood Ducks in the 1980s. (From the left) Tas James, Marino Guarino, Richard Cashman.

A self-portrait of Nicholas Felix, a famous English cricketer of the mid–19th century. My great-great grandfather played first-class cricket for the Marylebone Cricket Club in the 1830s. He married the sister of Nicholas Felix.

Richard Cashman watching cricket at the SCG on 7 January 1983, after he had been hit on the forehead by an empty can.

I wrote regular features in the 1980s for the Cricketer, produced by Ken Piesse.

AUTHOR NOTES:

Richard Cashman is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology Sydney. He has had an involvement in 12 cricket publications, winning the ACS Literary Award three times. He has been a pioneer in establishing sports history in Australia. Since 1996, he has had an involvement in Australian Olympic Studies and has published four books on the legacy of the Sydney Olympic and Paralympic Games.