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  • Baseball in Tasmania
  • George Gmelch (bio)

Ever since I was a youth watching Puerto Rican winter league games on Saturday-morning television, I've had an interest in how baseball is played in other cultures. A few years ago, when my wife and I decided to move our anthropology term abroad from Barbados to the Australian island state of Tasmania, I wondered if there might be baseball there (in Barbados, like the rest of the former British Caribbean, cricket is the national passion, leaving no room for another bat and ball game). My online search came up with a website for the "Tasmanian Baseball Association" which fielded several teams in Kingston, a town just to the south of Hobart, the island's small and charming capital city. However, when I arrived in Tasmania and drove to Kingston, there was no baseball diamond to be found. I soon learned that the baseball fields, the only two left in all of Tasmania, had been replaced with a cricket pitch and a soccer field.1 It seems the president of the Tasmanian Baseball Association ran off with all of the organization's funds, about $40,000, causing the collapse of the organization—and with it the end of baseball. I wondered if baseball could really be that fragile. That was 2004, and over my next three trips to Tasmania I never gave baseball another thought.

Then, in the summer of 2010, one of my anthropology students, Alan Zulick, who was studying sport in Hobart, offhandedly mentioned hearing about a baseball league in the northern suburbs. He and I went to investigate, and in this brief note I describe what we found. But first I should provide some background to Tasmania and its involvement with America's national pastime.

Tasmania is an island about the size of Ireland or West Virginia, located about two hundred miles off the south coast of Australia. If mainland Australia is "down under," Tasmania is "down, down under." With just five hundred thousand people, it is sparsely populated (scarcely twenty people per square mile), and half its population lives in the capital city of Hobart. Tasmania [End Page 93] was first settled by Europeans in 1803 when it became a British penal colony. Then known as Van Diemen's Land, most of its residents were either convicts, former convicts, or military guards. The native aboriginals were mostly wiped out by the 1860s. For many decades, Tasmania was a "convict society," and many present-day Tasmanians are descendants of these early prisoners who were "transported," often for minor transgressions (e.g., stealing a loaf of bread in London drew a seven-year sentence to Van Diemen's Land).

Tasmania has an image problem among mainland Australians, many of whom view the island as somewhat backward, a place that has failed to grow or develop as fast as the mainland—the little brother that never quite made it. Tasmanians are to "real Australians" as the Irish once were to the British, or Newfoundlanders are to mainland Canadians—sort of country bumpkins. As Hobart journalist Peter Timms notes, the jokes mainlanders tell about Tasmanians "usually involve poverty and inbreeding—like one about a Tasmanian virgin being a girl who can run faster than her brother."2 On the other hand, Tasmania gave birth to the world's first Green party, and its middle-class residents rank among the greenest people in the world.

Tasmania today is a major tourist destination, attracting visitors for its old-growth forests, world heritage wilderness, and exotic marsupials (such as the Tasmanian Devil of Warner Bros. cartoon fame). The island's temperate climate has become a selling point to mainland holidaymakers concerned with melanomas so often associated with lounging on the beach in the sun. Although Tasmania draws nearly a million visitors a year, it is still not well known to many Americans. In fact, my students say, when explaining to others at home where they are going on their term abroad, that people often confuse Tasmania with Tanzania. One student received The Lonely Planet Guide to Tanzania from her grandmother as a Christmas present. Little wonder that Americans often score badly at world geography.

Baseball made...

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