Might England’s much-loved all-rounder Moeen Ali have grown up in Australia? Believe it or not, yes.
Without the White Australia policies of the first half of the 20th century, Moeen Ali’s grandfather Shafayat Ali could easily have turned a stint working as a merchant seaman into a permanent life down under.
Moeen Ali (right) with Aaron Finch.Credit:Getty Images
Instead, Shafayat moved to England, where he met Moeen’s grandmother Betty Wilson, and they married in 1949, just as restrictions on non-European migration to Australia were beginning to be lifted.
“I didn’t know this until about two or three years before he passed away and I was coming to Australia,” Moeen tells The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. “He said, ‘I was there for two years, worked on the boats … it was all right, but then I ended up going to England, I left after a couple of years, and that’s how our next generation started.’
“So he came from Kashmir in Pakistan, ended up in Australia for two years and then ended up in England somehow. He would’ve stayed in Australia [had he been able to]. I think he was one of the first Pakistani Asians at the time to arrive in England from Pakistan. I think he saw an opportunity.”
This extraordinary twist in the tale of Moeen, who has carved out an admirable career across formats for England, provides a reminder of the deep currents in Australian life that contribute, even now, to huge crowds for games played by India and Pakistan at this Twenty20 World Cup without many of those spectators going to see Australia or Big Bash League teams play.
“This was the era of the White Australia policy after the war, when the government, keen to get the British to migrate there, tried to attract the Ten Pound Poms. But they had to be white,” he wrote in his 2018 autobiography, Moeen.
“It was not long after this that Harold Larwood, having terrorised Australian batting during the 1932 Bodyline series and fed up with running a small shop in Blackpool, migrated to Australia under the Ten Pound Pom scheme. Many others – estimates say it was over a million and half – did the same. Who knows how my life would have turned out had Australia then allowed migrants from Asia?”
The phenomenon of huge, cricket-loving crowds that exist virtually in parallel with the Australian cricket establishment is something that Moeen has observed up close during England’s Cup campaign, which has led to a semi-final showdown with India at what promises to be another packed and vocal crowd at Adelaide Oval.
In the same way Moeen and others have shown the way for south Asian players in Britain – even amid the pain and recriminations of the Yorkshire racism scandal – he believes that Usman Khawaja and other players following in his wake represent Australia’s best chance of getting more involvement from the same communities.
“When you look at India playing, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, there’s a lot of following, and a lot of those guys have Aussie accents,” Moeen says.
“The other night, went out for dinner with my family and we saw Bangladeshi supporters in the restaurant with Aussie accents and I found it a bit strange – I think the next generation in Australia, we will see it become more like England where more south Asian background kids are coming through.
“From watching the BBL, there’s a few more coming through anyway, and it just takes a bit of time and a few players. Uzzy’s one of those players who shows the path and can be an inspiration to all those kids that hopefully he’ll inspire to play for Australia. That’s going to be great for Australian cricket and the country itself.”
At 35 and now focused solely on white-ball formats, Moeen had a clear answer to how young players following him should approach the cricket system: don’t feel like you have to conform to succeed.
“I feel that to be yourself and don’t try to be anything or anyone else is really important,” he says. “If you have a culture, your faith, or whatever you have at home and you’re comfortable with, do that, and don’t try to fit in. Because I found very early on, to be yourself, and if they like you, great, if they don’t like you that’s their problem. That’s one thing I’ve always stuck by.
“When I say ‘they’, it’s just this mindset, probably the wrong mindset, that if you’re coming through it’s going to be hard and you’ll have to change.
“But actually, you’ll get respected a lot more if you just be yourself and stay true to who you are. I don’t think that’s just for a south Asian background, that’s for anyone coming into the system.
“But sometimes we have this thing in our mindset that it’s hard work and you’ll be treated differently. But if you be yourself, you actually don’t get that.”
Moeen Ali says Australian cricket is finally building on the south Asian presence in the community.Credit:AP
By way of fate (and racist Australian legislation at the time) Moeen’s story is one of English cricket rather than Australia’s. But there is much for this country still to ponder in the telling.
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