Cricket and Migration: How Australia's Game Changed

Multicultural cricket in Australia is no longer a programme or an initiative. It is the shape of the game. Cricket Australia's 2024-25 census recorded 103,232 registered South Asian participants, passing a target of 100,000 that had been set for 2027, and close to one in five of all Australian cricket participants now come from South Asian backgrounds. In large parts of suburban Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Brisbane, migration is the only reason the local club still fields the number of teams it does.

That is a recent development, and it took much longer than it should have. Australia's migration settings changed with the dismantling of the White Australia policy in 1973. Cricket's playing and administrative ranks stayed overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic for decades afterwards — one count found that of 272 Australian Test cricketers since 1946, only about ten had non-British heritage. The national game did not treat diversity as a strategic question until around 2010, and did not publish a formal multicultural action plan until December 2023. Half a century separates the country changing from the sport responding.

This page sets out what actually happened: why post-war European migration went to football rather than cricket, when and how South Asian migration changed the picture, what the census numbers say now, which clubs migration has kept alive, why the pathway to state and national selection has lagged so far behind participation, and what Cricket Australia has committed to doing about it. For the parallel and much older question of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation, see the companion page on Indigenous cricket in Australia.

The Anglo-Celtic century

For most of its first hundred years, Australian cricket reproduced the population it came from without effort or reflection. Clubs, associations and selection panels were run by and for people of British and Irish descent, and the game's rituals — the Saturday afternoon, the two-day match, the shared beers afterwards, the particular register of on-field verbal aggression — were built around that group's habits.

None of this required an explicit policy of exclusion, and mostly there was not one. It required only that the game keep doing what it had always done in a country whose immigration policy was doing the same. The result was a sport whose national team, in the second half of the twentieth century, looked almost nothing like the streets around the grounds it played in.

The one visible concession was assimilation. Names got anglicised, accents got flattened, and difference was something to be managed quietly rather than represented.

Post-war migration went to football, not cricket

The great post-war intake from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Malta and Poland transformed Australian cities from the late 1940s onward. It did not transform Australian cricket.

Football was the sport those communities brought with them, and football clubs — many still carrying their founding community's name today — became the organising centres of migrant social life. Cricket had nothing equivalent to offer. It was a summer game with an established club structure, a set of unspoken rules about how to behave, and no reason of its own to go looking for new members while the existing supply held up.

There were exceptions, and they are instructive. Len Pascoe, who bowled fast for Australia through the late 1970s and early 1980s, was born Leonard Durtanovich to Macedonian parents. Michael Kasprowicz, of Polish descent, took more than 100 Test wickets from the 1990s. Both were exceptions that proved the pattern, and the anglicised name in the first case says most of what needs saying about the era. The relationship between migration and Australian football is covered in the football section.

Nineteen seventy-three, and the fifty years after it

The White Australia policy was formally dismantled in 1973. The composition of the migration intake shifted steadily toward Asia over the following decades, with the sharpest change from the 1990s onward as students, skilled migrants and family reunion arrivals came from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

This was migration from cricket countries. Unlike the post-war European intake, these arrivals came with the game already central to their lives — not as a sport to be taken up but as one they had played since childhood and expected to keep playing. That is the single most important fact in the story, and it is why the change since roughly 2000 has been so much faster than anything that happened between 1945 and 1990.

India has become one of the largest overseas birthplace groups in Australia, with several hundred thousand India-born residents recorded at recent censuses and continued strong growth since. Where those communities have settled, cricket participation has followed almost immediately.

• 103232Total registered
• 21914Boys aged 5 to 12
• 5346Girls aged 5 to 12
• 12109Cricket Blast boys
• 4909Cricket Blast girls

Registered participant figures from Cricket Australia's 2024-25 national census. Background is self-reported at registration, so these are registration counts rather than a demographic survey.

What the 2024-25 census actually showed

The headline number was 103,232 registered South Asian participants, which cleared a target that Cricket Australia had set for 2027. It was reached two years early, which tells you the projection was conservative rather than the growth extraordinary.

Underneath it, the junior numbers matter more than the total. Boys aged five to twelve rose around 7 per cent to 21,914; girls in the same bracket rose around 8 per cent to 5,346. In the Woolworths Cricket Blast entry programme, South Asian girls rose about 11 per cent to 4,909 and boys about 5 per cent to 12,109. Junior growth is the number that determines whether the change is durable, because a participant who joins at eight has a fifteen-year runway and one who joins at twenty-eight has a social competition and not much else.

The female growth rates being higher than the male ones is the most interesting line in the release. It indicates that the constraint on South Asian girls playing cricket in Australia was access and invitation, not interest.

Measure	2024-25 figure	Direction
Total registered South Asian participants	103,232	Passed a 100,000 target set for 2027
South Asian boys aged 5 to 12	21,914	Up around 7 per cent
South Asian girls aged 5 to 12	5,346	Up around 8 per cent
Cricket Blast South Asian boys	12,109	Up around 5 per cent
Cricket Blast South Asian girls	4,909	Up around 11 per cent
Share of all participants from South Asian backgrounds	Close to one in five	Rising

The clubs that migration saved

Talk to committee members at suburban clubs in Melbourne's south-east, Sydney's west or Perth's northern corridor and the story is consistent. Through the 1990s and 2000s, clubs were folding lower-grade teams. Volunteers were ageing out. Junior numbers were falling as families found other things to do with a Saturday.

South Asian migration reversed that in specific postcodes, and it did so fast. Clubs that had been down to two senior sides now field four or five. Men in their thirties who had played serious cricket in India, Sri Lanka or Pakistan turned up wanting a game, brought friends, and then brought their children into juniors a few years later.

The change is geographically uneven because settlement is. It follows the same map as the migration itself, so it is transformative in some suburbs and barely visible in others thirty minutes away. That unevenness is worth naming, because national participation totals disguise it completely.

Why Saturday afternoon is a barrier

The largest structural obstacle in Australian club cricket is the schedule, and it has nothing to do with anyone's attitude.

Grade and district cricket is built around Saturday afternoons, often across two-day matches, with weeknight training. That assumes a particular working life: weekends free, evenings free, a car, and a family able to absorb a whole Saturday disappearing for six months a year. Many migrant families run small businesses whose busiest trading is on weekends, work shifts, or send children to community language schools that run on Saturday mornings.

The competitions that have grown fastest in migrant communities are the ones that do not make those assumptions — Sunday one-day competitions, midweek Twenty20, indoor cricket and independent community leagues that operate outside the association structure entirely. Those leagues are large, well organised and largely invisible to the official participation figures, which is one reason the census numbers should be read as a floor rather than a ceiling.

The independent leagues nobody counts

Across the major cities there are substantial community-run cricket competitions organised on cultural, regional or linguistic lines — sides drawn from particular Indian states, Sri Lankan and Pakistani community associations, Nepali and Bangladeshi leagues, tape-ball competitions played on concrete and matting.

These are not fringe. Some run to dozens of teams with formal fixtures, finals and sponsorship. They exist because they solve the scheduling problem, because they are socially comfortable, and in some cases because their organisers had bad experiences in association cricket and built an alternative.

From an administrator's point of view they are both an achievement and a problem: a very large body of active cricketers who are not registered, not insured through the association system, not producing pathway data and not connected to the junior structures that feed state cricket. Bridging that gap is one of the harder pieces of work in Australian community sport, and it will not be done by asking those leagues to fold themselves into the existing structure.

Participation is not representation

Here is the central gap. Close to one in five Australian participants come from South Asian backgrounds, and around 18 per cent of players at youth national championships have been reported as South Asian. Representation in first-class, state and Big Bash squads has sat well below that.

Cricket Australia's own target reflects the size of the problem: 8 per cent South Asian representation in those squads by 2027, which is a target set well under the participation share precisely because closing the gap entirely was not realistic in four years.

71%29%

• Share of all participants20
• Target share of elite squads by 20278

Compares the approximate South Asian share of all Australian cricket participants with the 8 per cent representation target Cricket Australia set for state, first-class and Big Bash squads by 2027. Different measures, shown together to size the gap.

Show the numbers

Participation share against the elite representation target

Item	Value
Share of all participants	20
Target share of elite squads by 2027	8

The reasons for the gap are the same ones that keep people out of grade cricket in the first place, compounded over a decade. A pathway that requires a family to fund and transport a junior through representative age groups from about twelve to about nineteen filters on household resources and flexibility long before it filters on talent. Add a coaching and selection workforce that does not reflect the participant base and the outcome is predictable.

Usman Khawaja and what visibility does

Usman Khawaja was born in Islamabad, moved to Australia as a child, and made his Test debut at the Sydney Cricket Ground in January 2011 as the first Muslim and the first Pakistan-born player to be capped by Australia. For a period he was the only player of Asian background in Australian first-class cricket.

He has been consistent and blunt about what that was like — the absence of anyone who looked like him at every level he passed through, and the near-total absence of South Asian coaches, selectors and administrators around him. He has also been public about the assumptions made about him, and about the difference it makes to a nine-year-old in western Sydney to see a name like his on a scoreboard.

The measurable effect of visibility is hard to isolate from migration volume, and honest analysis should not claim a causal number. What can be said is that the fifteen years since his debut have coincided with the sharpest growth in South Asian junior registrations Australian cricket has recorded.

Fawad Ahmed and the questions a migrant player gets asked

Fawad Ahmed arrived in Australia from Pakistan as an asylum seeker, took wickets in Victorian grade and state cricket, had his citizenship processed on an accelerated basis in 2013 and played white-ball internationals for Australia. He also declined, as a practising Muslim, to wear the beer sponsor's logo on his playing shirt — a request his teammates supported and which generated a week of national argument.

The episode is a useful marker of where the game was. A player asking not to advertise alcohol was treated as a constitutional matter by parts of the commentary, and as an unremarkable accommodation by the dressing room. The dressing room's view has since become the ordinary one.

The citizenship question attracted its own noise. It was not a new practice — cricket, like every Australian sport, has processed residency and citizenship for players before — but it was applied to a Pakistani asylum seeker and drew a volume of comment that similar cases involving British or South African-born players did not.

Australians from everywhere else

South Asia dominates the story because of scale, but it is not the whole of it.

Marnus Labuschagne was born in South Africa and moved to Queensland as a child, part of a large South African migration to Australia in the 1990s and 2000s that has fed directly into Australian cricket at every level. Ashton Agar's mother is Sri Lankan-born. Gurinder Sandhu is the son of Indian migrants. Richard Chee Quee, a Chinese-Australian batter for New South Wales in the 1990s, was for years the most visible non-European face in Australian first-class cricket.

African communities — Sudanese, Somali, Zimbabwean, Kenyan — and Pacific communities, particularly Fijian and Papua New Guinean, have smaller but growing footprints in Australian club cricket, often introduced through school programmes rather than family tradition. Afghan communities in Melbourne and Sydney have built substantial competitions of their own within a decade of arrival.

Crowds, and what a Border-Gavaskar summer looks like now

The change is more visible in the stands than anywhere else. An India tour of Australia now fills grounds with a crowd that is substantially diaspora, and the atmosphere at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for a Boxing Day Test against India bears no resemblance to the same fixture against England.

The 2022 Twenty20 World Cup in Australia was the clearest demonstration. Matches involving India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan drew large, loud crowds that were overwhelmingly local rather than travelling, and Cricket Australia has since treated that audience as a core commercial constituency rather than a bonus. Doubling South Asian match attendance to around 200,000 a year is a stated target of the Multicultural Action Plan.

The Big Bash League has the same opportunity and has been slower to convert it, which is partly a scheduling and pricing question and partly about which players are on the park. Format details are in the Big Bash format guide, and broadcast options are covered in the guide to watching cricket in Australia.

The Multicultural Action Plan

Cricket Australia launched its Multicultural Action Plan in December 2023, running to 2027, with South Asian communities as the primary focus. It sets out roughly ten action areas.

The commitments cluster into four groups. Participation: grow registered South Asian players substantially, with the 100,000 figure since exceeded. Representation: reach 8 per cent South Asian representation in first-class, state and Big Bash and Women's Big Bash squads by 2027. Workforce: fund and support culturally diverse coaches, umpires and volunteers from grassroots to elite level, which is the area with the furthest to travel. Attendance: roughly double South Asian match attendance to about 200,000 a year.

The plan is a policy document rather than a guarantee, and the workforce commitments are the ones to watch. Participation growth was always going to happen given the migration numbers; a South Asian head coach in a state programme or a selector on a state panel would represent a change the demography does not deliver on its own.

Racism, and what gets reported

Any honest account has to deal with this directly. Players from South Asian and African backgrounds have publicly described racial abuse in junior and club cricket in Australia, and there have been incidents involving spectators at elite matches that led to ejections and bans.

The formal position is clear enough. Codes of behaviour from Test level down to under-age club cricket carry specific anti-discrimination provisions, with penalties considerably heavier than for general abuse — up to deregistration at community level, and up to lengthy bans under the international code. Venue conditions of entry allow ejection, and major grounds run in-match reporting lines.

The gap between the code and the Saturday morning under-13 game is where the actual work is. Clubs that enforce it lose a player or two and keep families. Clubs that treat it as banter lose whole cohorts and never learn why.

What clubs that have grown actually did

The practical measures are unglamorous and repeatedly effective.

Offering formats that do not require a whole Saturday: Sunday competitions, midweek Twenty20, shorter junior formats. Making costs visible and low, and having a quiet mechanism for covering fees and equipment. Recruiting committee members, coaches and umpires from the communities already playing at the club rather than waiting for them to volunteer into an unfamiliar room. Rethinking the social side so that the post-match function is not built entirely around a bar. Providing prayer space during long match days where there is demand. And enforcing the code of behaviour when someone crosses the line.

None of that requires a national programme. Most of it requires a committee to notice that the club's playing membership no longer matches its committee.

Surfaces, kit and the practical business of playing

Some of the friction is physical rather than social, and it gets overlooked because it is boring.

Association cricket in Australia is played predominantly on turf at the senior grades and on synthetic in juniors and lower grades. A player who grew up on matting in Colombo, on concrete in Karachi or on a hard bare outfield in Punjab arrives with a technique calibrated to a different bounce and a different ball. The Kookaburra ball used across Australian cricket behaves differently from the balls used in much of the subcontinent, and Australian pitches generally offer more carry. None of that stops anyone, but it does mean an experienced overseas club cricketer often has a season of adjustment before their record here matches their record there, and selectors who do not know that read the first season as the whole story.

Cost is the other practical barrier. A junior playing representative cricket in an Australian capital needs pads, gloves, a bat, a helmet, whites, a club kit and a season of fees, plus transport across a metropolitan area most weekends from October to March. That is a serious annual outlay for a household still establishing itself, and it arrives before anyone can tell whether the child is any good. Clubs that quietly maintain a kit bank and a fee-relief arrangement retain families that clubs without one lose.

Tape-ball cricket deserves a mention here too, because it is the format most South Asian arrivals actually grew up playing — a tennis ball wrapped in electrical tape, played on any hard surface, no pads required. It is enormously popular in Australian parks and car parks, it costs nothing, and the conventional structure has almost no idea what to do with it.

What the change looks like from the association's side

State and district associations have been the slowest layer to adapt, and it is worth being fair about why.

An association is a federation of clubs run largely by volunteers, with fixture and grading structures that have accumulated over a century and that change only when a majority of member clubs want them to. Its constitution, its two-day format, its Saturday scheduling and its grading ladder are all things that existing clubs voted for and largely still like. A migrant community arriving in a suburb does not have a vote in that room until it has a club in it.

That is the mechanism, and it explains a lot of the lag without excusing it. The associations that have moved fastest have done two things: admitted new clubs founded by community groups rather than requiring those players to join existing clubs, and created Sunday or midweek divisions that do not compete with the Saturday programme for grounds. Both are administratively annoying. Both work.

Ground access is the constraint underneath all of it. In the outer growth corridors where most recent migration has settled, councils have not built ovals at the rate the population has arrived, and the clubs that want to add teams frequently cannot get a wicket to play on. That is a local government question as much as a cricket one, and it is the single most common thing club committees in those suburbs will tell you about.

Women, girls and the next decade

The fastest growth rates in the 2024-25 census belonged to South Asian girls, in both the general registration figures and the Cricket Blast entry programme. From a small base, that is the most encouraging trend in the numbers.

It also has the longest lead time. A cohort entering Cricket Blast now reaches Women's Big Bash contention in the mid-2030s, and the female pathway is thinner than the male one at every rung between those two points. The Women's Big Bash League has done more than any other competition to make elite women's cricket visible in this country, and it is the obvious destination to point a diverse junior cohort toward. The Women's Ashes sits at the top of that same pathway.

How the census counts, and why the number is soft

One caution before anyone builds a business case on the figures above. Cultural background in the Australian cricket census is self-reported at registration, the categories have shifted over the years, and registration itself is inconsistent — a social midweek Twenty20 player may or may not be counted depending on how their competition is affiliated.

That cuts in both directions. The 103,232 figure almost certainly undercounts the number of people of South Asian background playing cricket in Australia, because the independent community leagues sit outside the registered system entirely and are large. At the same time, a registration is not a season: a participant counted once in October may have played two matches. Cricket Australia's own reporting is careful about this, and secondary coverage generally is not.

The practical advice is to treat the direction as reliable and the absolute number as indicative. Growth in South Asian junior registrations across consecutive census years is a real signal about where the game is heading. A single-year total quoted to the person is a registration count, not a headcount of players, and it should not be used as one in a grant application without checking the definitions in the current release.

What to watch next

Three things will tell you whether the change is structural or cosmetic.

The first is the representation number against the 8 per cent target for 2027 — not participation, which will keep rising regardless, but state and Big Bash squad composition. The second is the workforce: whether South Asian coaches, umpires and administrators appear in state programmes in numbers, which is a slower and more revealing indicator than player selection. The third is whether the independent community leagues are brought into the registered structure on terms they find acceptable, which would both count tens of thousands of existing players and connect their children to junior pathways.

Australian cricket's demographic shift has already happened at the base. Whether it reaches the top depends on decisions that have very little to do with talent identification and quite a lot to do with schedules, fees, committees and who gets asked to coach. The Australia hub, the cricket section, the history of Australian cricket and the Cricket Australia section cover the surrounding structures, and the grounds guide covers the venues where the crowds have changed fastest.