Courtesy: Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart.

David Walsh owns a cricket bat autographed by stars of the 1980s: Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee, Viv Richards and Abdul Qadir to name a few (the bat got signed mostly at the 1983–84 Australian Tri-Series, where Australia hosted Pakistan and the West Indies). Walsh shows his mates and they refuse to bowl at him. ‘You can’t play cricket with that!’ they cry. ‘Of course I can, it’s a fucking cricket bat,’ he replies. He’s wrong, of course, and he knows it. Not only does he know it’s a special cricket bat—an unsigned bat cannot take its place—it’s no longer really a cricket bat at all.

This is not an exhibition about cricket. But the status of Walsh’s non-cricket bat brings certain questions into focus. Why are we drawn to certain objects and people? What makes the big names big: Porsche, Picasso or Pompidou? What is the nature of status and why is it useful? Is it just culture, or is there something deeper? Do we have certain ways of caring that our distant ancestors shared, and maybe even benefitted from? Are our choices shaped by culture, or is our culture shaped by nature’s choices?