Reception in honour of the Australian Twenty20 cricket team
26 September 2012
Speech by Australian High Commissioner, Robyn Mudie
Captain of the Australian 20/20 team, George Bailey, Tournament Director of the ICC World 20/20 Sri Lanka series, Stan Nell, Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, guests and friends.
Welcome to the Australian High Commission residence.
I am delighted and honoured to be able to welcome this evening members of the Australian 20/20 cricket team.
This tournament has been eagerly awaited here in Sri Lanka and the games are the talk of every café, school yard, bus stop, office, factory and every other location you can name across the country.
So your presence tonight is a great honour and privilege for all of us and we thank you for giving up some of your non-match time to be here, meet some keen cricketing fans from the community and, we hope, have a relaxing break.
I will keep this short as it’s an informal occasion but I wanted to make a few points which go beyond the current razzamatazz of the 20/20.
Sporting contacts and exchanges are one of the most effective ways of strengthening people-to-people ties between our two countries.
Australia and Sri Lanka have a longstanding friendship which goes back to the establishment of diplomatic relations over 65 years ago, but also beyond that to the days when ships taking Australians to and from Europe and other destinations used to stop in Colombo.
We have a significant community of Sri Lankans in Australia – over 100 000 – and there are strong and growing family, business, cultural and sporting connections.
I think it’s fair to say that we know and understand each other well.
And of course Australia and Sri Lanka both share a great love of cricket.
We have a longstanding tradition of playing cricket together and this goes back well over a century.
According to a fascinating article on the history of Australia-Sri Lanka cricketing links, by cricket writer, Ben Roberts, the first recorded cricket match in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, was in 1832.
In 1890, the Australian team en route to England for the Ashes played in Colombo against a local team.
The Australians continued this tradition of stopping off in Ceylon and playing games against local teams in 1893, 1896, 1912, 1926 and 1934.
In 1935 a tour by the New South Wales team and a tour by an Australian XI to India and Ceylon brought the Australian-Ceylonese games to first class status.
But Sri Lanka and Australia first played each other on the international stage in 1975, when Sri Lanka made its debut into international World Cup cricket.
Australia first visited Sri Lanka for test matches in 1982-83. It won the series but there was a growing appreciation at the time for the style of cricket played by the Sri Lankan side.
Although Australian spinners such as Tom Hogan and Bruce Yardley performed exceptionally on the slow wicket, the writing was on the wall that Sri Lanka would become a force to be reckoned with across the game as the careers of luminaries such as Arjuna Ranatunga, Aravinda de Silva and Mutthaya Muralitharan went on to show.
I won’t continue the history lesson, but all of this shows that our cricketing ties go back a long way, and that the team visiting for this series continues a long and enduring cricketing relationship between our countries.
The many hundreds if not thousands of players who have faced each other in Australia and Sri Lanka over the years have played a significant role in strengthening the friendship and understanding between our two countries – even while they have been rivals on the pitch.
Although I am not a cricketer myself, it’s clear that there’s a particular knowledge you gain from facing someone on a cricket field which you don’t get elsewhere.
That knowledge and the shared love of the game can be, and often is, the basis of friendships and shared understanding which last a lifetime.
So there’s a lot more to the presence of the Australian team here in Sri Lanka than just games of cricket.
But of course the games of cricket are what it’s all about in these heady few weeks of the 20/20 and I’m sure that much of the discussion here this evening will be about the highs and lows of the series so far and what’s yet to come.
On that note, I’d like to again welcome the Australian team here this evening, congratulate them on their success so far and wish them well for the rest of the series. But I’d also like to acknowledge the strong competition they will be facing from Sri Lanka- among others - and wish our hosts the best of luck as well.
Whatever the outcome, we’ll all be enjoying the games and some fine sport in the coming couple of weeks.
Thank you again for joining us and I wish you a relaxing and pleasant evening.