Poems, paintings make for a Perfect Pitch

There are eight women, grouped together as a team of some sort, looking into the camera, wearing the gowns of the day. The top of what look like boots are glimpsed from under the hem of a very long skirt. They are wearing elaborate hats and the woman in the centre is obviously the leader among them. She is holding two bats, smiling with amusement at the photographer, who has gathered them together. Next to her is a woman of colour. Maybe Maori? Maybe not.

Everyone has hands folded on their laps, except the one at extreme left, younger, with a grim, slightly foreboding expression. In her right hand, there rests a cricket ball - she's the bowler.

Who were these women? Where did they come from? What team did they form? Nobody knows. This photograph was found in the attic of the Northern Districts Association as they went about a burst of renovating in the lead-up to the World Cup. It belongs to Hamilton and has been dated circa 1920.

It is perhaps the most beguiling exhibit in the Waikato Museum's The Perfect Pitch, an exhibition put together to celebrate the rich, unexpected and dispute-ridden history of the Northern Districts Cricket Association.

It is only right that the photograph of the women begins the exhibition, which has run from February 6 and will last until the end of the World Cup on March 29. The exhibition's curator, Salima Ghazally, is by profession a specialist in curating displays around science. She was given the cricket exhibition without any background of an interest in cricket or in its history. In putting The Perfect Pitch together, Ghazally brought to it a new way of seeing the game.

"I came to it with a blank canvas," she said, starting out originally with the thought of pursuing the science of the sport. "I was interested to see the science and physiology involved, things about health, safely, the virtual eye in broadcasting, those kinds of things."

Yet, once she fell into cricket and was soon enraptured by the story of Waikato and its neighbouring regions, the need to "tell a regional story took over". Ghazally began collecting information and artefacts about the history of cricket in the region which crossed conventionally segmented divisions of cricket history. "As the objects were coming in," she says, "I realised I must have a more emotional, sensitive and human story to tell."

So while there are bats, balls, stumps, trophies and blazers, there are also enormous surprises and delights to be found around every corner. The photograph of the women cricketers is only one of them. There is a drinks tray from the 1950s, the luggage players carried on seaward voyages to do with cricket, the wheel of the ship that was chartered to bring in spectators from around the region when the first cricket match here took place - between a team of 11 Englishmen and a "Twenty Two of Waikato" on January 31, 1882. There are poems, paintings, photographs and an interactive cricket "dice" game called "Owzthat", which was created by soldiers in the First World War, who carved long dice out of pencils as a mean of leisure in the camps.

Seddon Park, which has held three World Cup matches, was created out of swampland, and the exhibition also traces, through letters, scorecards and newspaper headlines, the long and fairly familiar story of Northern Districts' fight to get recognition from the other traditional centres of the game in New Zealand. It was the last of the New Zealand regions to attain first-class status, in 1956-57. A familiar pattern of exclusion and alienation will be recognised by cricket associations everywhere in the world struggling for relevance and acknowledgement.

In a tribute to the modern, in the middle of the exhibition, next to the blazers of the region's famous players, male and female, stands a replica knight in full armour, helmet, visor, sword et al.

The current Northern Districts team are nicknamed Northern Knights and the colour of their short-format uniform could actually be called fuchsia. Before there is sniggering, remember this: five of the 15-member New Zealand dream team that is coasting its way through the World Cup, belong to Northern Districts. That's one-third. Who's laughing now?