Time stands still on a steamy hot evening at a country cricket oval, a pale green circle in a vast sweep of brown stretching to the west horizon, a high plain almost outside the suburbs of Melbourne. A pavilion of corrugated iron and timber sash windows, 1950s, leans tired like an old man pausing on a walking frame, and a brick farm shed on the other side of the oval is shrinking into the advancing wild shrubbery. Behind a long fence, off-white shapes are stealthy: sheep in the front paddock of an adjoining farm. The scene is as timelessly bucolic as a nineteenth-century George Cole oil painting - if you ignore the unending traffic murmur to the oval's north, an arrow-straight freeway to the new gunmetal-housed suburbs beyond.
The oval had been in full sun at five o'clock, but as the game wears on a dark line hatted by the corrugated pavilion's shadow creeps across the green as the under-16 away team, batting second, slowly racks up runs, chasing 117. The eleven-year-old, bored with watching her brother in the field, leaves her foldup chair and becomes a tiny sun-gilded slip moving around the far boundary, still for a moment to stare at the sheep.
At ten past eight, and in the last over, one of the players hits a four, taking the score to 119. Game over. I fold up the chairs in fading light as the coach gesticulates his post-game address to the players in the middle of the ground. Then they break and drift away, and we drive out of the dust that serves as a car park behind the pavilion and up and over the lip of that flat plain, and down the gently descending hills, distant blue smudges of CBD buildings appearing like science fiction megaliths on the southern horizon.
Along the way, forests of takeaway neons jostle each other, singing their siren song, and we pull in.
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