The Australian Cricketing Team, 1888

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Type: Photographs
Date: 1888
Place: London, England
Materials: Paper, Photographic emulsion
Collection: Sporting Memorabilia collection
Accession number: 2003.0060.0003

Description

Cabinet card black and white photographic group portrait. It is titled "THE AUSTRALIAN CRICKETING TEAM, 1888" along the proper right side, and it depicts the players, who are wearing cricketing 'whites', and the team manager C. W. Beal (centre] who is wearing a black suit and a top hat. The photograph appears to have been doctored before its production to include S. P. Jones and J. J. Lyons.

About the collection

The Sport and General Memorabilia collection (The Charles Leski Auction -A219) consists of one black and white photograph of the 1888 Australian cricket team, one programme booklet for a "complimentary smoke night" held in Melbourne in 1938 prior to an Australia-England test match series and one colour poster advertising the official film of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Cricket represented a field of endeavour where a sense of "Australianness" preceded the formal federation of the colonies. Cricket has operated a cultural institution that has both unified the Empire and Commonwealth, as well as at times contributing to Anglo-Australian tensions, particularly at a popular level (most notably during the "Bodyline" tour of 1932-3). The 1956 Melbourne Olympics were the first Olympic games held in Australia. The games are commonly associated with the introduction of television into Australian society, but most people would still have had to have seen official footage at the cinema. It is the film of the Olympics that this poster advertises.

Read live from the Museum's Collection API (12/11/2026, 5:25:00 am). Record last updated by the Museum 2026-09-30. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.