The Spin | How Sandhill Ashes cricket match helped to rebuild a community ravaged by bushfire
It’s bushfire season once again in Australia.A record-breaking heatwave, plus intense winds, have resulted in a tinder-box landscape and hard-to-control blazes in large areas of the south east.“To be frank,” said Jason Heffernan, chief officer of Victoria’s Country Fire Authority on Tuesday, “the state is very, very dry.Any fire that takes hold will be a challenge for the community.”The fires are the worst since 2019-20, that black summer of ash horizons and filthy air, when 19 million hectares of land were burned, 33 people died and 3 billion animals were impacted.
Cricket, like everything, was affected,Big Bash and school matches were cancelled and a Sheffield Shield game played in heavy smoke was likened by the New South Wales spinner Steve O’Keefe to “smoking 80 cigarettes,”In the small communities of Sarsfield and Clifton Creek in rural Victoria, the 2019-20 fires were devastating,Many had to start again from nothing,John Kinniburgh and his wife Carol were one of 80 families to lose their homes in Sarsfield.
“We had a cedar house,” Kinniburgh says, “with decks all around, and once it got started it just exploded.It was certainly a shock.There was lots of devastation and drama.The community went through the emergency stage of just surviving, then you begin to craft out your recovery.I was involved in the Sarsfield recovery group and we thought about how we wanted to look in five years, ten years.
The whole process was very positive, some new people moved in, some people rebuilt, it all felt more connected,”The idea to hold a cricket match to bring together the two fire-damaged communities came from the local fire brigade,Phil Schneider, a volunteer, salvaged some tea tree wood from a peat paddock fire that had burned for weeks and took it down to a wood turner in Lake Tyers,Together they worked on it until the Sandhill Ashes urn was born – named after a hill between the two communities,The first Ashes match took place in January 2021 and provoked much excitement.
The two sides got sponsored shirts and shorts, and both communities practised hard,It also attracted the Australian Cricket Foundation, including Merv Hughes and Greg Matthews, who ran a clinic alongside the match,Kinniburgh remembers the day very fondly,“There was something like 20 people a side – a few were really athletic, some could barely hit the ball, a couple of super catches were taken, and most of the runs were hit through square leg,There were lots of laughs and a big crowd of spectators drinking and eating from the food trucks.
” Sarsfield won by just one run,The game also managed to reach some who had turned their back on community programmes after the fire,“Mostly men who just stuck to themselves, doing it tough,” says Kinniburgh,“But some of them got involved in the cricket and the benefit was significant,One man told me that he’d had a fantastic time, and the match had made a real difference to how he was feeling about himself.
”Though subsequent events were smaller, the Ashes have been fought for twice more.Clifton Creek are the current holders, with the next battle due for 2027.And from its inspiration, Sarsfield Cricket Club, which had folded in 1999, was reborn.The club now play at the Sarsfield Oval, where one of the locals volunteers mows the grass.They are currently second in the Bairnsdale C Grade competition, having won it last year, with a Sarsfield player, Craig O’Brien, named player of the season for his 339 runs and eight wickets.
For now, Sarsfield and Clifton Creek are on high alert once more.Victoria is sweltering, with temperatures rising to 48.9C in Waleup on Tuesday, and Adelaide wilting after its hottest ever night.Kinniburgh, with Carol, Luna the cat and Millie the border collie, watch and wait in the new house, the nearest blaze currently 50km away.“I’m a bit nonplussed as to why conservative people think climate change is a con,” he says.
“It seems so obvious from here.It’s not just fire, it’s temperature, it’s number of days of heat, it’s floods, it’s more hot north winds, more extreme events.Anecdotally you feel it, but also statistically.It’s got a bit to do with fossil fuels and the political agenda, but when you have things like this, people often default to a blame culture.Some people are blaming our volunteer fire brigade, some people blaming the greenies who push to restore native forests and protect possums.
”On a recent trip to Melbourne, the fire app on Kinniburgh’s phone was pinging all night.When they got back, the garden was covered in burnt leaves and there was smoke on the horizon, the smell still lingering.“I’ve been splashing areas where I’m allowed to splash, I’ve got water sprinklers going.We rebuilt our house of less flammable materials, we’ve planted lots of deciduous trees, but if the fire comes we can’t stop it.”It’s a phlegmatic attitude which he even brings to previously precious cricket memorabilia.
“When we lost the house, I lost lots of things that I wouldn’t have seen for ten years,In a bag on top of a cupboard, I had a lot of cricket caps that I collected and treasured, but you don’t miss them as such, you have the memory of them,” The cricket trophies went too, housed in a special shed which burnt to ground,He grins: “though over time the number of trophies I lost may have got inflated,”This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin.
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