ALBION, HOME OF THE australian BAGGY GREEN

A woman sits, with her fellow workers, in a brightly lit room at the back of an ugly building whose designer was surely a box- maker not an architect. This is factoryland and the building is located right beside the main road south out of Sydney- the Princes Highway- where noisy, creaking trucks proliferate and jet planes of all shapes and sizes roar overhead. Fourteen years have passed since the woman, Myun Sim Park, left her homeland of South Korea to make a new life for herself in Australia. For 11 of those years she has been a valued employee of the very important Albion Hat & Cap company.

Myun is sewing, sitting before a Brother machine around the saddle of which she has tied a soft, black cloth which is her pincushion; scissors are by her right hand. In both hands she holds a shape of green cloth, moving it this way and that beneath the pumping needle of the machine. She is putting the finishing touches to the Baggy Green- the most revered piece of sporting equipment in Australia today, as it has been for nearly a century.

NATIONAL PRIDE

The Baggy Green had a difficult birth, which is another good reason to treat it with respect. Early Australian teams, in the 1890’s, often wore blue, in various shades, with white or red trim (that’s no excuse for England in the 1990’s!). In the 1898 Melbourne Test the Australians wore the dark blue of Victoria, because it was the custom to wear the colours of the state in which the Test was played. But for the 1899 tour to England the Australians wore green and gold and, in the 1902 MCG Test, green and gold was worn for the first time at home. On 29 May 1908, the Cricket Board ratified the team’s colours as ‘gum-tree green and gold’. The Sydney Morning Herald reported the following, ‘It was stated at the NSWCA meeting last night that gum-tree green and gold had been adopted as the Australian colours.’ This raised a general query: what is gum-tree green? And someone suggested, why not wattle gold?    

HONOUR

Why is the cloth cricketing cap of Australia such a legend? Why is it afforded so much respect than the caps of other countries?

This is what Steve Waugh has said about the Baggy Green, ‘when you're playing as a kid in the backyard… the ultimate goal is to wear the baggy green cap. That was my goal. Even now kids will say, “Hey Steve, give us your cap!” I say, “No mate, you’ve got to earn one of those.” The world champion Australian Test team, Mark Taylor’s, decided the Baggy Green should be compulsory headwear for all players for their first fielding session in a test.

UNIQUE

The Baggy Green begins it unique ‘life’ as eight panels of bottle- green woolen cloth, plus the peaks, cut to a precise pattern. The front panel is sent to the embroidery room, where the official Australian Cricket Board crest is stitched on by a long, light green, squat machine which whirrs impressively after taking its instructions from a computer disk and the press of a button. The crested panel is soon returned to the other bundled bottle- green panels and peaks, and Myun’s workmates, seven of them, under the eyes of production manager Steve Sharp, sew them together, then size, line and block each cap, and finally… tack.

The tack is the magic moment, for that is the process whereby the unique baggy look is created: four well- placed stitches pull down the crown of the cap onto the peak. Without the tack the Baggy Green would be just another cricket cap. A modern player, who shall remain nameless, once innocently cut the tack because he felt the resulting cap might offer him more shade for his eyes; the sight of his un-baggy green prompted stories that the traditional cap design had been modernized to fit in with the baseball image of cricket’s One-day era. Sacrilege! He knew what he’d done…

SPORTING ROYALTY

Albion makes 30,000 caps a year, but only one dozen of the Baggy Green; an accountant well versed in the ways of the manufacturing industry might set its value at about A$15. cheap. But today, if a very famous player- not perhaps as famous as Sir Donald Bradman, but about a rung down the ladder- were to auction one at his Testimonial, it would come as no surprise if a four-figure sum were bid.

Source: Jenkins, V 1998, The baggy green: world series to world champions, New Holland, Sydney, NSW

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