The WACA by Tony Barker
The Western Australian Cricket Association presides over the most successful team in modern Australia. To cricket-lovers the world over, 'the WACA' is also the Association Ground - legendary for wickets of unequalled pace and bounce. Yet success on and off the field was hard won. Although the WACA is unique among its state counterparts in owning its Ground, financial necessity has demanded it be a multi-sports stadium. Even so, development brought two life-threatening crises in the early 1900s and internal tensions in the free-spending 1980s. The WACA was saved in adversity and sustained in growth by state governments conscious of cricket's power to put a remote community on the map. The same isolation shaped both the traumas and triumphs of more than a century of cricketing endeavour. Although some exceptional individuals emerged before the First World War, limited interstate competition delayed team success for another 60 years. Even after regular air transport diminished the desert barrier between Perth and Eastern Australia, inclusion in the Sheffield Shield in 1947 was on a provisional half-time basis, eventually replaced by a decade of enforced WACA subsidy of visiting state
Tony Barker is an Associate Professor of History in the University of Western Australia. Born in Yorkshire in 1938, he studied history at Sheffield University and management at Manchester University, then worked in industry in London and, after emigrating in 1963, in Sydney and Melbourne. Changing careers in the late 1960s, he taught and gained his MA at Sydney University and his PhD at London University before moving to Perth in 1973. The commission to write the history of the WACA has allowed him for the first time to apply his professional training and experience as an academic historian to a lifelong love of cricket.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781864486759 |
| ISBN 10 | 1864486759 |
| Title | The WACA |
| Author | Tony Barker |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Allen & Unwin |
| Year published | 1998-01-01 |
| Number of pages | 386 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |