A crucial experiment

The bright orange sun sank on the faraway horizon. The bright orange beers sank faster still. A woman in the grandstand turned to her boyfriend. "Is that Richie Benaud?" she said, and took another swill.

She was referring to the ground announcer at Darwin's Marrara Oval who, with a pinch of nasal and dollop of dulcet, was updating spectators on the state of the play. "Yeah," the boyfriend replied, quick as a flash. "Yeah, that's Richie." Had he heard it, it just might have ranked as the most rewarding conversation of local ground-announcing doyen Les Garraway's life.

If Australians truly are A Weird Mob, as the classic 1950s novel of that name suggests, then Darwinians must be the barmiest of the lot. A cricket crowd who don't know their Benauds from their backsides.

There is a chance they may remain forever in the dark. Staging midwinter Tests in Australia's tropical hubs, Darwin and Cairns, is one of the bolder experiments of the past two seasons. But this time next year the Australians will be in England on an Ashes tour. Zimbabwe's cricketers look increasingly underdone; the international timetable more and more overcooked. There is no guarantee that Test cricket will ever be glimpsed again round this neck of the woods.

The travelling baggy-green entourage seemed mildly, and rightly, disappointed with attendances of around 4500 a day for last week's first Test against Sri Lanka. In population terms, 4500 Darwinians is mathematically equivalent to 150,000 Melburnians attending every day of the Boxing Day Test. This, though, is the roughest of analogies. Melbourne hosts a gala sporting event of some kind every second week. In Darwin, bugger all else happens.

The 9.30am start, rightly again, was considered too early. The drop-in pitch, less intelligently, was thought too lively. Amid much huffing and puffing from mollycoddled individuals, Australia's absent captain Ricky Ponting provided the one voice of reason when he called modern batsmen "spoilt" and described the proliferation of identikit flat tracks as "a huge concern".

It was Ponting's most visionary statement yet. It was the first hint that, as with his predecessors Steve Waugh and Mark Taylor, Australia have unearthed a captain with a feel, an instinct, for the game's more exquisite nuances. "You'll end up having grounds that don't have any character," he warned the featherbed Nazis. "The grounds in Australia will be exactly the same."

Being too samey is something Darwinians need not worry about anytime soon. They're an odd crowd. A ground attendant received a mightier ovation for rubbing some sawdust into the bowlers' run-ups than Chaminda Vaas, ambling back to fine leg, did for rubbing out Australia's middle order. But this is an intricate game we play and watch; it takes more than two Tests to become cricket-savvy. Even MCG spectators, the canniest of them all, probably clapped at the wrong moment sometimes back in 1876-77.

A lone Bring Back Boonie placard rippled gently. Members of the Skoll With Skull club downed a plastic mug of beer every time Kerry O'Keeffe guffawed on the radio. Otherwise an eerie un-cricketlike hush enveloped the grassy slopes, blanketed by tarpaulin, like a tennis crowd during a tense point. Oh, and in a corner of Australia where a quarter of the population are Aboriginal people, there was scarcely a black face to be seen.

For 50 out of 52 weeks a year, this ground is known not as Marrara Oval but as Football Park. You enter via the Bonson and Ah Mat gates, named after legendary Aboriginal football families. The VIP area is called Kantillas, in honour of David Kantilla, a pioneering Aboriginal Aussie Rules hero of the '60s. Walking in, the first photograph you see is not of Dennis Lillee following through but of Dennis Dunn, a wizard-like Aboriginal full-forward, leaping high.

Trevor Hohns and various other Cricket Australia heavies spent plenty of time in this room last week. They must have seen these photographs - of Aboriginal footballers darting and twisting, jumping and kicking, with grace and verve and eyes ablaze. And maybe they wondered: what if some of them, a tiny handful, had played cricket instead?

There's the reason why Test cricket must come back to Darwin. Next time the game should be promoted across Aboriginal communities, north and south, coast and desert. There should be autographed bats and replica one-day costumes and free tickets. Pads and gloves and balls. DVD highlights packages, of players past and present, too. Buses should be sent out far and wide. Excitement should be the mantra. Word must spread.

It's a small start. But at least we'd be able to say, for the first time in nearly 150 years, it's a start.