By way of illustration, Australia ranks 53rd in the world in terms of population, the AFL is the fourth-best attended sporting league, behind America’s NFL, Germany’s Bundesliga and the English Premier League.

Amit Sood, the director of Arts and Culture at Google, says the move makes certainly sense although he admits to occasionally getting some surprise from testers.

You want to break down this weird conception of what is culture.

Google's Amit Sood

"People just asked ‘so, I'm going come to your platform where there's going to be a beautiful painting from Modigliani, and you'll have the Taj Mahal and Machu Picchu, and then suddenly, I'll see something about AFL?’," he says.

But, in a way, that’s exactly why he thought it was important to include these other kinds of cultural artefacts.

"You want to break down this weird conception of what is culture," he said.

The collection includes more than 100 curated digital exhibitions, over 11,000 visual artefacts and more than 20 museum views which can be enjoyed both as street-view style content, as well as in augmented reality. All that content covers almost everything, including the first Australian cricket team, photos from the 2009 Grand Final that even Nick Riewoldt hadn’t seen, the story of how blind cricket came to be and tours of stadiums and parks.

Sood’s favourite exhibit, though, is the Bradman bats. Google’s fine art one-gigapixel camera has previously only been used for the world’s finest paintings like Starry Night and the Mona Lisa. For cricket fans, Bradman’s bats sit comfortably in that company.

What was most exciting for Rina Horne, executive director of the Bradman Museum is that when the images came back from the camera, which can see things in greater detail than the human eye, it uncovered writing on Bradman’s first bat that no one had ever noticed before.

To make all of this possible, the not-for-profit Arts and Culture arm of Google partnered with 30 museums and archives from around Australia.

While Google didn’t pay any of these institutions for use of their artefacts, what they did provide was training, technology, or extra staff when needed to digitise vast collections that the curators might not have been able to otherwise preserve.

Great Sporting Land is available now to be viewed in the Google Arts and Culture app or on the website https://artsandculture.google.com/project/australian-sports