History is written at the Pollies v Press cricket match

For politicians, every encounter with the media carries the risk of injury.

Usually, it’s reputational. At Canberra’s annual cricket match between politicians and the parliamentary press gallery, the danger turns physical – although egos can bruise just as easily as bodies.

The tradition continued last Sunday when the latest edition of the fixture was played at Chisholm Oval, a turf wicket about 20 kilometres south of Parliament House.

The match endures as one of Canberra’s great acts of bipartisan theatre – part fun, part contest, yet always, somehow, political.

On this occasion, the Press Gallery XI won by eight runs – a narrow margin in a long rivalry that has lately favoured the pollies.

Now 41 years since Bob Hawke came off second-best against a rising delivery, no match since has eclipsed that event. An iconic photograph captured the ball smashing into Hawke’s eye – his head twisting from the blow, his glasses exploding into the air. It remains the fixture’s defining image: the moment that turned a lighthearted contest into political folklore.

The day was Sunday, October 14, 1984. The venue, Canberra’s Kingston Oval. Just six days earlier, in a reminder of how far the performance of politics has shifted, Hawke had announced a general election not before the cameras in a press conference but in the House of Representatives – telling the chamber he had advised the then governor-general, Sir Ninian Stephen, to dissolve parliament on October 26 for a December 1 poll.

Intensely competitive and imbued with a love of sport that helped define his public image, Hawke fancied himself as a batsman – and with reason. In the 1940s, he had opened for Perth Modern School and later for the University of Western Australia Cricket Club. At Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship, he was named 12th man for the 1954 match against Cambridge at Lord’s.

With the Prime Minister’s XI batting first, Hawke had made a handy 28 before the press team captain, and then National Times correspondent, Geoff Kitney handed the ball to Gary O’Neill, a medium-pace bowler from Melbourne’s afternoon broadsheet The Herald.

“I could see he was getting more than a little frustrated at not scoring quickly,” O’Neill recalled last week. “I don’t know what went through his mind, but I had the feeling that no matter what I bowled, the next ball was going over the boundary one way or another.”

O’Neill’s instincts were right. As Perth Modern School magazine The Sphinx had noted back in 1946, Hawke’s batting was “exciting but often hampered by a lack of patience”.

“As far as Hawkey was concerned, I just bowled a pretty innocuous ball,” says O’Neill. “It was probably on a reasonable length and getting up, but certainly nowhere around his chest or that sort of area. It was around waist height, and he stepped to the side and then took an almighty swipe at the ball. He hit under it and the ball came flying off the top edge straight up into his face. His head snapped back, and glass flew everywhere. As he put his hand up to his eye, he literally slumped to the ground. It was very dramatic and I thought, Christ almighty! What’s happened here?

“He had his cricket glove on, but you could see blood coming out from underneath it, and it was very, very worrying. I ran down the pitch, and others ran in to help him – I was a bit dumbstruck – but one of the other journos took his hand away fairly gently, and there was blood all over his face and blood on his bat, but his eyes were open and there was clearly a piece of glass sticking straight out from his eyeball, and one of the other journos was able to pluck the piece of glass out of his eye.”

Out there in the sun, without talking points or advisers, politicians face the press on equal terms – and occasionally find themselves on the losing side of history.

That other journalist was Geoff Kitney, who was fielding in close and watched in horror as Hawke tried to rub his eye.

“I yelled out to him, ‘Bob, don’t rub it!’ and then I grabbed his hand and was able to remove the piece of glass,” says Kitney. “Years later, Bob told me I had almost certainly saved the sight in his eye.”

As someone who enjoyed a spot of cricket, Hawke usually wore shatterproof glasses but on this occasion had simply forgotten to swap them.

The Canberra Times photographer Peter Wells wasn’t expecting much. Convinced nothing newsworthy would happen out in the middle, he was shooting proceedings from the comfort of his car. Back at the office, developing his film, he mistook the blur of shattered glass across one frame for a flaw in the negative. Only later did he realise he’d captured one of the most enduring images in Australian political history.

The ABC had sent a television camera down as well, and while they caught the moment the ball hit Hawke’s face, they missed a shot of the bowler.

“The editor in Melbourne just took a random bowling shot, which happened to be me,” says Barrie Cassidy, who later became Hawke’s press secretary. “Now, if you go into the archives, that’s what you’ll see. That never pleased Gary O’Neill, of course, but as I said to him, ‘You ought to be satisfied that for the first time in your life you got a ball to lift beyond knee height…’ ”

Hawke was taken to Canberra Hospital but soon “returned to the match and made spirited interjections from a banana lounge, watching his colleagues through binoculars,” according to The Canberra Times’ report the next day.

“I think he was a little terse with me a bit later on,” says O’Neill. “But that was okay, we were all used to that sort of thing.” That wasn’t the end of the story, however.

On the Monday, the start of the second week of what was to be an exhaustingly long election campaign, Hawke invited the Canberra press pack to Jervis Bay on the New South Wales south coast to observe a naval exercise involving HMAS Adelaide and HMAS Perth.

“They were doing sea trials in Jervis Bay or something, and then Hawkey thought it was a great joke to have me transferred at sea on one of those bosun’s chairs between the two boats,” says O’Neill.

Cassidy, who was also on the press bus that day, says you had to see the stretch of water between the two ships – about 30 metres apart – to appreciate how frightening it must have been for “Junior Able Bodied Seaman” O’Neill, who himself ended up on the front page of The Canberra Times the next day being winched between the ships.

“The churn in the water was absolutely enormous, and there he was floating over the whole thing,” says Cassidy. “That was Hawke’s sense of humour, I guess.”

While the annual cricket match can burnish a politician’s reputation, it can just as easily expose one.

In March 2001, it was Mal Brough’s turn. He’d been tapped for promotion to employment services minister in the Howard government, but the move was stalled amid allegations that a staffer in his Queensland seat of Longman had falsified an enrolment before the 1998 election – a cloud that only heightened tensions with the media heading into the match.

A formidable batsman, Brough strode to the crease after a few early wickets and began piling on runs. So the press team’s skipper, Steve “Captain Grumpy” Lewis, turned to News Ltd stablemate, Queensland paceman Mark Ludlow, who sent down a thunderbolt that rapped Brough on the pads. Wicketkeeper Phil Coorey let out a half-hearted appeal.

“Convention held there would be no LBW unless it was clearly out,” Coorey later wrote. “He was forward of his crease, but the appeal went up and the umpire – News Ltd’s Malcolm Farr – raised his finger.

“Brough refused to walk. When he finally did, it was in fury, hurling abuse toward Farr, whose wife happened to be seated nearby, before storming off and driving away. He returned later, calmer, but the story became legend: the day a minister lost his temper in a charity cricket match. It confirmed an impression that would follow him through his career – a man who took everything, including himself, too seriously.”

Another politician to emerge from the annual match with his reputation less than intact was then Labor leader Mark Latham. On March 7, 2004, with Latham still riding high in the polls – a Newspoll published the next day showed Labor leading the Coalition 55 to 45 – he arrived for the annual fixture in a loose white T-shirt that clung in all the wrong places.

As The Australian’s Matt Price was to write, for a brief moment, the talk of federal politics wasn’t Peter Costello’s tax policy but Latham’s “man boobs”. It was, as Price observed, a perfect Canberra story: a trivial image that eclipsed the message. The photographs of Latham at the crease became shorthand for a leader who struggled to manage his own image. Latham never forgave Price.

Last Sunday’s match passed without any such incident.

What stood out instead was the ease with which politicians from both sides of the aisle were able to set aside their differences and play as a team.

Captain Tony Pasin, Liberal member for the South Australian seat of Barker, led from the front, taking four wickets before battling cramps – and the indignities of age – to topscore with an unbeaten 54. Western Australian Labor senator Varun Ghosh, surely the most elegant batsman ever to pad up for the politicians’ side, added a graceful 53 not out, batting on with a torn hamstring and a runner.

Alas, their efforts were not enough, falling just short of the Press Gallery XI’s 212.

For all its easy charm, the match remains a study in exposure. Out there in the sun, without talking points or advisers, politicians face the press on equal terms – and occasionally find themselves on the losing side of history. 

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
November 8, 2025 as “Political spin”.

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