The first England cricket tour of Australia after Bodyline was when a female team visited in 1934-35. Soon after, an Australian team returned to England. These tours overlapped with more men’s Ashes series, but Stell argues that the women’s matches restored the good name of cricket as a game that could be played seriously but within sporting limits. The Australian and English teams, she maintains, found a line between earnest competition and remembering that cricket is just a game, even while being derided by some male observers and administrators for treating it as ″⁣only″⁣ a game.

The thesis is less compelling than the fascinating detail Stell accumulates about the players and their lives. Best-known, probably, is Betty Archdale, the England captain in 1934-35 who later moved to Sydney to be principal of Women’s College at Sydney University and Abbotsleigh girls’ private school. In interviews with Stell prior to her death in 2000, Archdale is blunt, humorous and an endless source of good information. She leaves no doubt about the seriousness of the cricket.

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″⁣[Male officials] were anxious that [lead-up] matches should be drawn so there’d be more interest in the Tests,″⁣ Archdale told Stell. ″⁣I rather coldly told them we haven’t come umpteen thousand miles, or however far we’d come, to play a lot of drawn matches. I was extremely rude.″⁣ Archdale is one of many who grew sick of a stereotyped male response to women’s cricket: ″⁣We came to scoff but stayed to praise.″⁣ You still hear it today.

The Australia star of the period was Peggy Antonio, a Port Melbourne seaman’s daughter who grew up playing street cricket with boys and managed to cross the class and gender gap through her skills as a batter and leg-spin bowler.

Antonio was not the only player whose main obstacle was raising money to enable her to tour. One of the major themes of this book is the economic one, about how hard it was for the most talented cricketers to find the funds to play for Australia. Some, including the Port Kembla steelworker’s daughter Ruby Monaghan, discovered that talent wasn’t enough.

Stell’s great bequest to cricket is the number of vivid personalities she portrays. Without the crude conflict that dramatised the men’s Test matches, she gives life to another history that deserves its own spotlight. Next step? When Australia’s current leg-spin wizard Alana King is compared not to the great Shane Warne but to the great Peggy Antonio, and when an Australia-England tussle evokes past matches played by women.

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