If you know anything about cricket, you'll know that a cricketer's bat is very important. Find out more about cricket bats, how they're made, and why it's so difficult to get it right.


TIM LEE: It's the last net session before the Australian Test team flies to England to contest the Ashes - world cricket's most famous trophy.

Top-class players use bats made from the very finest English willow, grown in England, and there is many who will tell you it remains the only willow acceptable to the elite.

Lachlan Fisher, an ardent cricketer and former artist turned artisan, is a crusader for using Australian-grown cricket bat willow.

But as a player in the world game, competition is fierce.

LACHLAN FISHER (CRICKET BAT MAKER): Well, we're a cricket bat manufacturer so we have to make money from selling cricket bats. At the moment, 100 per cent of our willow comes in from England at great expense. So our margins are pretty tight on those imported blocks, because they're manufactured here.

TIM LEE: The quest to grow quality Australian willow took root here at Shepherd's Flat near Daylesford in the Central Victorian highlands in 1903.

International cricket umpire Bob Crockett was sent six English cricket bat willow cuttings by English Test captain Archie MacLaren who had recently toured Australia.

As legend has it, only one cutting survived the journey, but grafted to a river willow, its progeny flourished. By the 1920s, bats made from Australian wood were shaped and sold under the Crockett label. The company made 5,000 bats annually, until its demise in 1956 when swallowed by Slazenger.

The Tinetti family, who in recent years bought the Crocket farm, continues both as tree growers and bat shapers.

Here, young visitors have the chance to craft their own bat.

IAN TINETTI (CRICKET WILLOW, SHEPHERD'S FLAT, VICTORIA): And for me, it's good. I hope the next Bradman or Belinda Clarke comes in here and makes something here and goes out there.

TIM LEE: 'Out there' is a full-sized oval, reclaimed from an old gold mining area, and a museum of five rooms of cricket memorabilia.

IAN TINETTI: Mr Crockett used to reckon these were the best things for boning in the edges. I think he just got lucky and probably a kangaroo had conked out down amongst the willows and he grabbed its bone, a shin bone, and used it on the bats.
But all bat makers that I've had contact with use a bone of some sort. So possibly, I'm not changing from the kangaroo.
This one here belonged to the prince of bat makers, Harry Preston. You know, I've still got it here. Some of ours we've worn out.

TIM LEE: Tinetti has also begun to make first-class bats out of premium local willow.

IAN TINETTI: If people are careful and grow the trees right, they're comparable to any other tree grown in the world, because it is up to the farmer, or the willow, or the bat maker to pick the tree. The trees will be fine if they're looked after and grown properly. They're as good here as anywhere else. The trouble is sometimes the heat might affect them a bit - different seasons, dryness.

TIM LEE: Stuart Cransbula, who made the bat used by Matthew Hayden in setting a world-record Test score of 380, is eager to use local willow.

STUART CRANSBULA: We'll leave to see when the trees are 25, 30-years-old and then we'll have a good look. As long as it's consistent growth, which is the most important. Therefore it's been grown healthily over a consistent amount of time.