Lord Sheffield’s 1891–1892 Tour and the Revitalisation of Australian Cricket

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the decade before Federation. It shows how the tour of Lord Sheffield’s team (featuring a now-aging W.G. Grace) played a key role in the revitalisation of Australian cricket in the 1890s. Not only did this tour help make Australian cricket popular and successful in the colony, it also helped enact some noteworthy structural reforms, including the organisation of a formal, regular intercolonial competition and the establishment of a federated governing body in the Australasian Cricket Council. Thus this tour also demonstrated the continuing importance of the British World scaffold for the development of Australian cricket. However, this renaissance in Australian cricket also witnessed the local Australian particularity within the mediated identity becoming increasingly assertive.