The abundance of fine and temperate weather makes outdoor life preferable to indoor during eight months of the year.  Perhaps this is a reason why the colonists live in such poor houses and care so little how they are furnished.  Town-life is a recent invention in Australia; and town-life as it is known at home, in the sense that numbers of people live in a town all their lives and only go into the country for an airing, is quite unknown.  The majority of the population still lives, more or less, in the bush.  Our ideals are country ideals and not town ideals.  For all these reasons the principal amusements of the Australians are outdoor sports of one kind or another; and if the interest taken in them proportionate to the population be the criterion, this may fairly claim to be the most sporting country in the world.  In Australia alone, of all countries, can any sport be called national in the sense that the whole nation, from the oldest greybeard to the youngest child, takes an interest in it.

Cricket must, I suppose, take the first place amongst Australian sports, because all ages and all classes are interested in it; and not to be interested in it amounts almost to a social crime.  The quality of Australian cricket has already spoken for itself in England.  Of its quantity it is difficult to give any idea.  Cricket clubs are perhaps numerable, though yearly increasing; but of the game itself there is no end.  There is no class too poor to play, as at home.  Every little Australian that is ‘born alive’ is a little cricketer, a bat, or bowler, or field.  Cricket is the colonial carriere ouverte aux talents.  As Napoleon’s soldiers remembered that they carried a marshal’s baton in their knapsacks, so the young Australians all remember that they have a chance of becoming successors of that illustrious band of heroes who have recently conquered the mother-country and looted her into the bargain, though the idea of gain certainly never enters into their heads in connection with cricket.  It may be, and it is most probable, that English cricket will soon recover the laurels which the Australians carried away in 1882; but I venture to prophesy that from 1890 onwards, the cricket championship will, except through occasional bad-luck, become permanently resident in Australia.  The success of the first Australian Eleven bred cricketers by the thousand.  If that eleven was picked out of, say, 10,000 men and boys playing cricket, the present has been chosen from 20,000, and by 1890 the eleven will be chosen from 100,000.  Certainly, very few of these can afford to devote themselves solely to cricket; but most of them will play from five to seven o’clock through six months of the year, and on holidays, half-holidays, and odd moments through nine months.  Some measure of the interest which attaches to cricket can be gathered from the space devoted to it in every paper, and the fact that during the tour of the Australian Elevens the full scores of every match they played, together with details of the more important matches, were cabled from London every day, and this at 10s. 6d. a word.  At the intercolonial and international cricket matches in Melbourne, as many as 23,000 persons have, on one day, paid their shilling to gain admittance into the cricket ground, and 10,000 is about an average attendance.