Under the Southern Cross: Australian Cricket's Rituals

Australian cricket rituals are, with a handful of exceptions, unwritten. The team song has no sheet music and no official recording. The role of song custodian appears in no Cricket Australia document and is handed from one player to another in a dressing room with the door shut. The convention that the whole Australian side wears the baggy green through the first session of a Test is not a regulation. What holds all of it together is that a group of players decided it mattered and told the next group, and the next group believed them.

The centre of it is a four-line chant called Under the Southern Cross I Stand, adapted by wicketkeeper Rod Marsh from Henry Lawson's 1887 poem Flag of the Southern Cross and first delivered in the Gabba dressing room in 1974 after Australia beat England. It is sung after a win, arms linked, at a volume that carries through a closed door, and the last line contains a word that television has to cut. Nine players have held custody of it since Marsh, ending for now with wicketkeeper Alex Carey, who took it over from Nathan Lyon during the 2023 Ashes.

Around that sit the rest: the national anthem and the one word that changed in it, the Welcome to Country and the barefoot circle that now open a home Test, the baggy green in the first session, the pink third day at Sydney, the crowd rituals in Bay 13 and the beige-jacketed Richies. This page sets out where each of them came from, who controls them, which ones are actually written down, and which have quietly stopped happening.

The song, in plain terms

Under the Southern Cross I Stand is four lines long and takes about eight seconds to deliver. The words describe standing under the Southern Cross with a sprig of wattle in hand as a native of a native land, and finish with a shouted line of praise for Australia containing a swear word.

It is not sung in the ordinary sense. It is chanted, on a single note, at a pace set by whoever is leading it, with the players standing in a tight ring with arms across each other's shoulders. There is no melody to get wrong and no verse to forget, which is part of why it has survived fifty years of squad turnover without being written down.

Broadcasters have a standing problem with the last line. Footage of the song is routinely cut short, muted or captioned around, and Cricket Australia's own channels have historically stopped the audio before the end. That the country's most famous sporting ritual cannot be broadcast in full is a small running joke inside the game.

Where the words came from

The chain of transmission is documented and unusually specific. Henry Lawson published Flag of the Southern Cross in 1887. Raymond Hogan, an Australian playing county cricket for Northamptonshire, knew it and passed it to Ian Chappell in England in 1963. Chappell passed it to Rod Marsh.

What Marsh then produced was his own set of words rather than Lawson's. The Southern Cross survives, and so does the tone, but the lines are Marsh's. That matters for anyone trying to trace the song to a printed source, because no edition of Lawson contains it. The correct description is that the song was inspired by Lawson, not taken from him.

The wattle in the second line is worth a moment. Golden wattle is Australia's floral emblem, formally proclaimed in 1988 but in popular use as a national symbol for a century before that. A sprig of wattle in the hand is the same gesture as the sprig on a coffin at an Australian funeral or in a buttonhole on Wattle Day, and it puts the song in a much older tradition of Australian verse than a cricket dressing room would suggest.

Rod Marsh and the Gabba, 1974

The first performance is placed in the Australian dressing room at the Brisbane Cricket Ground in 1974, after Australia had beaten England, during the summer in which Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson took an English side apart. Greg Chappell's account has Marsh climbing onto the dressing room table to deliver it.

The timing is significant for a reason that gets overlooked. The tradition is not ancient. It began in 1974, which means it postdates Bradman's entire career, the Invincibles tour, the tied Test of 1960-61 and every Australian side up to that point. It began in the middle of the most aggressive and self-consciously separate period Australian cricket had known, immediately before World Series Cricket split the game in two. The idea that this is what Australian teams have always done is roughly fifty years old.

• 1974Year first sung in an Australian dressing room
• 4Lines in the song
• 9Custodians since Rod Marsh
• 52Years the tradition has run, about

Counts of documented facts about the tradition rather than measurements. The custodian figure counts the nine players who have held the role since 1974 in the order commonly published. The four-line figure describes the song as sung, not any published version of Lawson's poem.

The custodians and how the role passes

The role has no title in any rulebook. Players usually call it being the custodian or simply having the song. It passes by hand, on the outgoing player's retirement or departure, generally in the dressing room in front of the squad and sometimes with a short speech.

Custodian	Primary role	How it ended
Rod Marsh	Wicketkeeper	Handed on at retirement in 1984
Allan Border	Batter and captain	Handed on at retirement in 1994
David Boon	Batter	Handed on at retirement in 1996
Ian Healy	Wicketkeeper	Handed on at the end of his career in 1999
Ricky Ponting	Batter and captain	Handed on during his captaincy
Justin Langer	Opening batter	Handed on at retirement in 2007
Michael Hussey	Batter	Handed on to Nathan Lyon in January 2013
Nathan Lyon	Off-spinner	Handed on in 2023 after leaving the Ashes tour injured
Alex Carey	Wicketkeeper	Current holder

Two of the handovers are well documented because they happened in front of cameras. Michael Hussey passed the song to Nathan Lyon after his final Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground in January 2013, an unusual choice at the time because Lyon was a bowler with a modest Test record and no obvious seniority. Lyon then held it for a decade. When he tore a calf muscle during the second Ashes Test at Lord's in 2023 and left the tour, custody moved to wicketkeeper Alex Carey.

Wicketkeepers are heavily over-represented, which is not an accident. The keeper stands behind the stumps for every ball, talks more than anyone else on the field, and is traditionally the loudest voice in an Australian dressing room. Marsh, Healy and Carey all fit that description exactly.

• Batters55.6%
• Wicketkeepers33.3%
• Bowlers11.1%

A count of the nine documented custodians grouped by their main role in the side. Ricky Ponting and Allan Border were also captains, and are counted here as batters. The split is a structural count of a nine-person list, not a statement about who is eligible.

Show the numbers

Song custodians by playing role

Item	Value
Batters	5
Wicketkeepers	3
Bowlers	1

When the song gets sung, and when it does not

The rule, such as it is, is that it follows a win. A drawn Test does not produce it. Neither does a good day. In a Test series the song comes after the result, and after a series is won it is often repeated on the outfield once most of the crowd has gone, which is the only way the public reliably sees it.

In limited overs cricket it follows any victory, which means it can happen several times in a fortnight during a World Cup. That has led to periodic grumbling inside the game that the ritual gets devalued by repetition, and to a counter-argument that the players who do it are the only ones entitled to an opinion.

There is a firm convention against using it as a taunt. Australian sides have been criticised on the rare occasions the song was audible to a losing opposition, and the general practice is to wait until the other dressing room has emptied. The dressing rooms at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and the SCG both open onto the playing surface, so this is harder to manage in Australia than almost anywhere else.

The women's team and the same song

Australia's women's international side sings Under the Southern Cross I Stand with the same custom, the same linked arms and the same internal custodian arrangement. Given the sustained success of that team through the second half of the 2010s and into the 2020s across World Cups in both white-ball formats, multi-format Ashes series and long unbeaten runs in bilateral cricket, they have had far more occasions to sing it in recent seasons than the men.

The women's game has also built rituals the men's game does not have, most visibly around the Women's Big Bash League, whose season structure and family-oriented match day presentation produced its own customs from a standing start in 2015.

The national anthem before play

Advance Australia Fair is played before the first day of a Test match in Australia, with both sides lined up on the field for their respective anthems, and before the start of limited overs internationals. It is not played before days two to five of a Test.

The anthem itself was written by Scottish-born Australian Peter Dodds McCormick and first performed in Sydney in 1878, but it was not the national anthem until 1984. God Save the Queen was used for most of the twentieth century, which is why footage of Australian teams from the 1960s and 1970s sounds wrong to modern ears. The protocol for when and how the anthem is played is published by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and applies to sporting events as it does to any other public occasion.

Only the first verse is sung at cricket. The second verse exists, is rarely performed, and most Australians could not produce a line of it.

The word that changed in 2021

From 1 January 2021 the second line of the anthem changed from for we are young and free to for we are one and free. The alteration was announced by the Governor-General on government advice and was intended to acknowledge that human occupation of the continent long predates 1788.

For cricket it produced a small and very audible transition period. Players who had sung the old line since school kept singing it for a season, and broadcast microphones on the boundary picked up both versions in the same line-up during the 2020-21 summer. By the 2021-22 Ashes it had largely settled.

Cricket Australia's use of the anthem in the Big Bash League has been less consistent than in international cricket, varying by season, by venue and by whether a match falls on a date of national significance. That inconsistency has generated news coverage more than once, usually around the January period.

Welcome to Country and the barefoot circle

Two newer rituals now open a home international summer. A Welcome to Country, delivered by a traditional owner of the land the ground sits on, is performed before the first day of a Test. At the SCG these have occasionally become memorable in their own right, with Uncle Allen Madden's delivery during the 2021-22 Ashes drawing an unusually warm response from a full house.

The barefoot circle is the other. Players from both teams take off their shoes and stand in a ring on the ground before play, in direct contact with the surface, for a short reflection acknowledging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It entered Australian international cricket around the 2020-21 summer, and unlike most of what is on this page it is organised rather than spontaneous, appearing in Cricket Australia's match day planning.

Below international level, Reconciliation Round in community cricket and Indigenous designed playing kit in the Big Bash have become part of the annual calendar. Whether these count as rituals or as programming is a fair question, and the honest answer is that they are somewhere in between and getting more established each season.

The baggy green in the first session

The single most visible unwritten rule in Australian cricket is that the whole fielding side wears the baggy green cap through the first session of a Test match. Not a helmet at short leg, not a wide-brimmed hat in the deep, not a sponsor's cap. After the first interval players wear whatever they like.

Like the presentation ceremony that goes with a Test debut, this dates from the 1990s and is generally credited to the Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh captaincies, which set out deliberately to make the cap mean more than it had in the previous two decades. It is not in any playing condition. Nobody is fined for breaking it. It has held for thirty years because breaking it would be noticed instantly by every Australian watching.

36%64%

• Governed by a published rule or plan4
• Custom with nothing written down7

A structural count of the rituals described on this page, sorted by whether a published rule, protocol or match day plan governs them or whether they survive only as habit passed between players. The classification is the author's grouping of the items listed here and is not an official categorisation.

Show the numbers

Written protocol against unwritten custom

Item	Value
Governed by a published rule or plan	4
Custom with nothing written down	7

The Boxing Day Test as a calendar ritual

The largest ritual in Australian cricket is not performed by players at all. It is a date. The Boxing Day Test at the MCG has been an unbroken annual fixture since 1980, and its shape is fixed to the point of liturgy: the queues on Jolimont Street from early morning, the first ball a little after half past ten, the day one crowd that has repeatedly cleared eighty thousand and once passed ninety thousand.

The rituals inside it are family scale rather than national. People sit in the same bay every year. Members arrive early for a specific seat in the Members Reserve. Groups that formed at a Boxing Day Test in the 1990s still meet at one. That accumulation is the ritual, and it is why the MCG fixture survives even in years when the touring side is not competitive.

The New Year Test and Jane McGrath Day

Sydney's Test in early January carries the most successful charity ritual in Australian sport. Day three is Jane McGrath Day, named for the wife of fast bowler Glenn McGrath, who died of breast cancer in 2008. The SCG first turned pink in 2009.

The visual conversion is thorough. Pink stumps, pink bails, pink umpire shirts, pink shirt numbers, pink in the members enclosure and the outer, and a stand renamed for the day. Money raised funds McGrath Foundation breast care nurses, and the day has been running long enough that it now generates its own smaller customs, including families who attend that specific day every year and nowhere else in the summer.

Crowd rituals

Australian crowds have built their own set. The Richies — hundreds of spectators in the Sydney and Melbourne outer wearing beige jackets, cream trousers, grey wigs and microphones in tribute to Richie Benaud — began in 2010 and continued after Benaud's death in 2015, and the day two designation at the SCG has become semi-official.

Bay 13 at the MCG carries the longest reputation, dating to the 1970s and the World Series Cricket period, though the modern version is thoroughly policed and considerably tamer than the folklore. The Mexican wave, banned at the MCG in the mid-2000s largely because of what was being thrown during it, is the clearest example of a crowd ritual that was actively stopped.

The beach ball, the inflatable kangaroo, the paper cup snake and the fancy dress bay are the small change of an Australian cricket day, and every ground's stewarding policy shapes which of them survives. A guide to what to expect at each venue is set out in the Australian cricket grounds guide.

The Allan Border Medal night

The Australian game's annual awards evening carries its own accumulated custom. The Allan Border Medal for the men's player of the year and the Belinda Clark Award for the women's are voted by players, umpires and media across all three formats, and the night has become the closest thing Australian cricket has to a formal end-of-season ceremony.

The ritual element is smaller than the ceremony suggests. The vote counts are read out in stages, the recipients are almost always known to the room in advance, and the genuinely watched moment is the reaction of the players' families. It is a television event that has acquired traditions rather than a tradition that acquired a broadcast.

Rituals in the Big Bash

The Big Bash arrived in 2011 with no history and set about manufacturing customs, with mixed results. Some worked. The BBL club chants and the Perth Scorchers' orange-dominated home crowds are genuine. The Melbourne Derby between the Stars and Renegades has produced real animosity. Family sections and post-match pitch access for children have become fixed expectations rather than promotions.

Others did not take. Several presentation ideas introduced across the league's first decade were quietly dropped within a season or two, and the on-field innovations that shape a match — the Power Surge, the Bash Boost and the X-Factor substitute — are rules rather than rituals, and have themselves been revised repeatedly. The distinction is useful: a ritual survives because players and crowds insist on it, not because a competition schedules it.

Grade and club cricket customs

Below the professional game, the customs are older and less filmed. Sydney and Melbourne grade clubs still hold post-match presentations in a clubhouse, still name a player of the day, and in many clubs still have a song of their own sung in a change room after a win, on the same model as the national one. First XI caps are presented on debut at a great many clubs, in a direct imitation of the baggy green ceremony.

Country cricket adds the traveling rituals: the drive, the shared esky, the tea provided by the home club, the single roller shared between four grounds. Anyone joining a club will meet most of this in the first fortnight, and the practical side of that is covered in the guide to Australia's club and grade cricket structures.

The rooms the song is sung in

The physical setting shapes the ritual more than people expect. Australian Test dressing rooms are, by international standards, close to the field. The MCG and the SCG both have players' rooms that open onto viewing balconies above the boundary, which is why the sound of a song intended for eleven people regularly reaches several thousand.

The rooms also carry their own furniture of memory. The SCG's home dressing room has honour boards and a long association with the New Year Test. The MCG's rooms were rebuilt with the Great Southern Stand and again in the redevelopment before the 2006 Commonwealth Games, and the current room is a modern facility rather than the timber-lined space of the Chappell era. Adelaide Oval's players' areas sit under a heritage-listed scoreboard end. None of that is ritual by itself, but a custom that is performed in the same handful of rooms for fifty years takes on some of the room.

There is a practical consequence too. Modern rooms are shared with support staff, analysts, physiotherapists and, on television days, a camera crew. Players have said openly that the song is now performed in front of more people than it once was, and that some of the older, rougher dressing room habits did not survive the audience.

Personal routines and superstitions

Alongside the team customs sit the individual ones, which are numerous, unregulated and occasionally very visible. Steve Smith has the most watched batting routine in the modern game: the leave and shadow-play between deliveries, the repeated adjustment of pads and gloves, the marking of guard. It is a genuine preparation routine rather than a tic, and it is copied in nets and backyards across the country.

Other examples are older and better known as folklore than as fact. David Boon's flight from Sydney to London before the 1989 Ashes generated a beer-drinking legend that has been repeated so many times, with so many different numbers attached, that no version of it should be treated as verified. Australian cricket has a large stock of stories of that kind, and the honest position on most of them is that they are unverifiable and were probably improved in the retelling.

The line between routine and superstition matters for anyone watching closely. A batter re-marking guard every over is preparation. A batter who will not change a shirt during a winning streak is something else, and Australian dressing rooms have plenty of both.

What outsiders get wrong about the song

Three misconceptions come up repeatedly. The first is that the song is old. It is not; it dates from 1974, which makes it younger than one-day international cricket. The second is that Rod Marsh set an existing Lawson poem to a tune. He did not; the words are his own, and the poem was the inspiration. The third is that the song is sung on the field at the end of every match. It is a dressing room ritual first, and the outfield version after a series win is the exception rather than the rule.

A fourth, smaller one is worth adding. The song is not an anthem and has no official standing. Cricket Australia does not own it, license it or publish it. It belongs, in whatever sense a chant can belong to anyone, to the players who have sung it.

Which rituals have quietly stopped

Traditions disappear without announcement, which is the risk of not writing them down.

The captain's dressing room speech before day one of an Ashes Test, once a fixture, is now uneven and depends entirely on the individual. Ground-wide singing of Waltzing Matilda between innings, common through the 1990s, faded when public address programming changed. The habit of the Australian side walking a lap after a home series win still happens but is no longer automatic. And the older custom of the two teams drinking together in one dressing room after a Test, which survived the professional era longer than most people expect, is now occasional rather than expected, a casualty of tight schedules and separate recovery routines more than of any falling out.

Watching for the rituals as a spectator

Practical timing, for anyone attending. Arrive for the toss on day one of a Test to see the Welcome to Country, the anthems and any cap presentation, all of which happen in the half hour before the first ball. Watch the fielding side through the first session for the baggy green convention. On day three at Sydney, expect pink from the moment you reach the gates.

The song is the hard one. It happens behind a door, and the reliable chance of hearing it live is the end of a home series, when the players often come back out. Ticketing and access information for each venue is in the how to watch cricket in Australia guide, and the broader Australian sport calendar is at the Australia hub.

For the culture that sits alongside these customs, the history of Australian cricket covers the eras that produced them, the account of the Newlands ball-tampering affair covers the moment that culture was formally reviewed, and the guide to back-foot batting technique covers what Australian conditions do to the way the game is actually played. Player records are indexed under players, and the wider cricket section carries the rest.