Chris farewells his grass castle

After 48 years tending to UWA's McGillivray Oval

Chris Marsh looked out onto his 18-hectare backyard every day for 34 years and reminded himself how lucky he was.

That backyard, his “green desert”, was his world for every one of those days.

“People used to say I was just a gardener,” he said.

“They might have been right but it was a pretty good garden.”

Chris has just retired after 48 years at the University of WA, most of them taking care of the grass, turf and various sporting fields of McGillivray Oval where he lived in the caretaker’s house for more than three decades.

Chris Marsh has just said goodbye to McGillivray Oval where he lived and worked for most of his 48 years at University of WA.

He and wife Sandra were moved out 10 years ago when one of the regular UWA audits decided that having a live-in ground manager and turf curator in a lonely cottage far from company constituted an untenable insurance risk.

Chris did not see it that way.

Once surrounded by bush and the paddocks containing agriculture department sheep, with his solitude only disturbed by the occasional inebriated student recovering from a Triple P night or disoriented tourist searching for the beach – though the odd body discovered in the changerooms or carparks provided some angst – he was in his element.

“It was a brilliant place to work,” he said. “And to live.”

“This place gave me so many more challenges.

“Whether it was preparing cricket wickets from week to week, putting down the clay courts at the tennis club or having the synthetic hockey surfaces out the back.

“The running track is a different beast again then you add the baseball diamonds and things like that.

“This is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, multi-sport complex in the country.

“We had so many sports, so many events and so many people go through here.

“I worked out once that tens of thousands of people a year use the facility, making millions over the time I’ve been here.

“What a life!”

That life started in 1977 when Chris, who qualified as an architect but was more eager to work with his hands and outside, got a job at the UWA grounds department.

He was a solid club cricketer at Claremont-Cottesloe and footballer at University, keenly interested in sport and curious about the elements that made cricket pitches work.

Those elements combined in his new working life though he realised that he needed a tertiary qualification to underpin his formal position and to qualify for a salary as a skilled tradesman.

A certificate in turf preparation from Bentley TAFE provided the formal foundation for the next few decades as one of the best cricket curators in the state.

Chris prepared three pitch squares at McGillivray, usually rotating his heavy roller across the west, east and north blocks, while commuting to the main campus at Crawley where he was responsible for the pitches at James Oval.

That ground provided one of his great memories when he responded to a call from a cricket friend involved in promoting Elton John’s imminent concert tour.

“He told me that Elton wanted to play a cricket match in Perth and could I help?” he said.

“I prepared a pitch at James, the uni was happy to host the match and before you know it, Elton was walking out to play with Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh.

“Elton got a duck and dropped his daks on the way back in to moon the crowd but was pretty happy with the day.”

Elton John and Dennis Lillee played at UWA’s James Oval in 1984.

That high point was matched by an Australian hockey Test at McGillivray that Chris said was played on the most immaculate sward of grass he produced in his time at UWA.

The trials Chris faced ranged from the organic challenges of maintaining high quality grass for high-use events to the changing political winds that blew though the university.

He operated through the tenures of 11 different vice-chancellors, some of whom were far keener on the value of sport, while about six separate master plans threatened to transform the Marsh backyard.

They included proposals for West Coast to use the facility as a training base, a WACA plan to convert one oval into a state cricket ground suitable for Sheffield Shield matches and other deals with the Western Force and Perth Glory.

There were also challenges within the university’s academic arms.

John Bloomfield was UWA’s more prominent and most highly regarded physical education figure for many years.

He was also a keen golfer who was keen to use McGillivray as his own driving range.

That was a no-no for a ground manager equally keen to maintain his physical and metaphysical turf and it took a concerted – and mostly good-humoured - effort to keep the influential Bloomfield at bay.

“I thought I had won that battle only to look out the window one day and there was Professor Bloomfield and a group of phys ed students all swinging golf clubs on my grass,” Chris said.

“He had introduced a golf unit into the curriculum and had organised to use McGillivray for the practical element. He was too good for me.”

Chris’s major interest was preparing cricket pitches and he applied for the job as the curator of the Melbourne Cricket Ground during the days when his former Claremont team-mate John Lill was secretary, as well as a WACA Ground vacancy.

But the lure of such high-profile positions was soon sapped when he realised that he did not want to leave the paradise that he had helped create.

“I was young and rash when I applied at the MCG and a while later Ian Brayshaw suggested I put in for the WACA job and so I had an interview with the CEO Tom Ivankovich,” he said.

“It was not me though.

“I didn’t want to be stuck in a stadium just doing wickets. I had started to become interested in athletics, and baseball and all the sports that were here.

“I love cricket but preparing the athletics track to help Steve Hooker become a world champion, or getting the place ready to host the World Police Games or World Masters or Gay Olympics, provides plenty of motivation and fulfillment.

“Yeah, this place has given me so many more challenges.”

Chris said he would continue to drive past and through McGillivray, while his growing interest in photography and documenting the sports that he has influenced would provide a pursuit for years to come.

McGowan wins confidence vote

WACA chair Gail McGowan has survived a board vote of confidence prompted by my recent revelation that NRL newcomer Perth Bears would be based at the WACA Ground as a condition of the government’s recent $15million handout.

McGowan has paid positions on two statutory boards – the Mid West Ports Authority and Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority – and a long working relationship with Treasurer and Sport Minister Rita Saffioti from her time as director-general of the Department of Planning.

Saffioti’s office made it clear to the WACA this year that McGowan was the only suitable candidate to replace outgoing chair Avril Fahey.

McGowan asked fellow board members last Friday to vote on whether she had a conflict of interest in the WACA’s negotiations with government over the funding deal. The vote came back in her favour.

I sent McGowan a series of questions, including how it was in WACA’s best interests to host the Bears for the next few years, whether WACA members should be consulted and were there were any other conditions tied to the funding. She did not respond.