A True Blue Tale

History and Heritage of the Parramatta District Cricket Club

1843 to 2018

Parramatta District Cricket Club Historian, former first grade player and current administrator Tom Wood comprehensively tracks the historic voyage of the club from its birth in 1843 through to the 21st century in ‘A True Blue Tale.’

To purchase your copy of this 1,100 page Club History, complete the following Purchase Application Form.

PDCC History Purchase Application Form v2

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Parramatta District Cricket Club is NSW’s oldest living cricket club and amongst the oldest in Australia.

Parramatta played its first newspaper recorded inter district match against Liverpool on 11th September 1843. It played six times against touring English International teams in the 1880s and 1890s, and in 1867, the famous Aboriginal team that toured England in 1868 also took on Parramatta.

Many talented players represented Parramatta including the first of its nineteen Test and International players, Frank Iredale in the 1890s. Other early stars were Gerry Hazlitt, Les Pye, ‘Mudgee’ Cranney, Gar and Mick Waddy, W.P. Howell, Ron James, and Ray Rowe.

In Modern times Richie Benaud, John Benaud, Doug Walters, Greg Matthews, Sean Abbott, and Nick Bertus stepped on to the field adorned in the club’s iconic two-blue bumble-bee caps. In 2018/19 the club celebrated its 175th anniversary.

Calypso Collapse

Emerging crickets hit for six by $2.5 million collapse of tour operator.

Calypso Collapso SMH 30 May 2024

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Tom Vernon Garrett

(By Tom Wood – Club Historian)

Throughout its long history the Parramatta District Cricket Club has had a multitude of intriguing tales to tell, and the story of Tom Vernon Garrett certainly fits that classification.

Between 1904 and 1911 Tom, a busy all-rounder (right-hand middle order batsman and medium-pace bowler), took the field for the Parramatta club (then known as Central Cumberland), in both First and Second grade – some of his playing contemporaries were club legends like Les Pye, ‘Mudgee Cranney’, E.L. ‘Gar’ Waddy, and internationals W.P. Howell and G. Hazlitt.

His playing statistics were:

Batting – 1,056 runs @ 20.71 [H.S. – 86 v. Waverley (1st grade), 78* v. Redfern (2nd grade)].

Bowling – 32 wickets @ 30.84 [B.B. – 6/36 v. Redfern (2nd grade)].

During his time with Parramatta his brother John also played first and second grade with the club.

The Garrett family featured some notable members, Tom’s Vernon’s father Tom W. Garrett played 19 Test matches for Australia, including the famous first-ever Test played against England in Melbourne in 1877, and his grandson is famous Midnight Oil singer and Federal Politician Peter Garrett.

After the end of World War 1 Tom V. Garrett undertook a significant adventure, by settling in the then pioneering island of New Britain (PNG) where he purchased and managed the copra and cocoa plantation ‘Varzin’ in Kokopo southeast of Rabaul.

In 1941it was reported in the Mirror Newspaper that Tom was still turning out on the cricket field playing for the Kokopo club.

Sadly, fate turned wretchedly for Tom V after the fall of Rabaul to the Japanese, during World War II, when he was a passenger on the Japanese merchant vessel Montevideo Maru which was sunk by an American submarine USS Sturgeon on the 1st of July 1942. This was Australia’s greatest single wartime loss of life, 1,000 people perished that day. The sunken vessel was crammed with prisoners of war soldiers and civilians. Peter Garrett wrote the Midnight Oil song ‘In the Valley’ about his grandfather’s demise.