The market for cricket books is large and growing in cricket-playing countries. Many new titles are written and sold each year but there is also a continuing demand for second- hand books, of which Cricket Crisis (Cassell, London, 1946) by JH Fingleton is an example. Several specialist antiquarian bookshops service the market, which includes a substantial collectors' component. Publishers like cricket books because of the established sales pattern, especially if the marketing of the book can be associated with an event like a test tour.

Having written a number of commissioned business biographies, I was encouraged (nagged) by a cricket fan to research and write a biography of a famous test cricketer of the 1920s and 1930s, Bill Ponsford, who was my friend's neighbour for many years. Eventually I approached the Ponsford family, who retain quite good records, although no correspondence, and the Melbourne Cricket Club, where Ponsford worked for thirty-seven years. The result was that both parties were supportive and a former publisher was pleased to undertake the production.

Most cricket books are about matches, scores, runs and balls. Already a respected book had been written about Ponsford's playing career (Marc Fiddian, Ponsford and Woodfull: a premier partnership, Five Mile Press, 1988). My proposal was to take the statistical details as read and write a book about Ponsford as an individual, constructed along the lines of my other biographies. This would involve research into the forebears of the family and their occupations, their migration to Australia and settlement in their new country. It would mean searching for details of their marriages, births and deaths and their housing and schooling. It would also mean researching details of Ponsford's employers, which were in turn The State Savings Bank of Victoria, The Herald and Weekly Times and the Melbourne Cricket Club.

Little was known of the Ponsford forebears except that Bill's father, William Ponsford, worked in the postal service in Melbourne and that his grandfather, also William, married in Bendigo, having migrated from Devon in England in 1862. As usual in family research, the first port of call was Public Record Office Victoria in North Melbourne. Using the birth, death and marriage indexes on the PROV reading room computers I tracked down the relevant dates for each generation of Ponsford forebears. This enabled me to locate the actual certificates of birth, death and marriage online at the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages website (which can be accessed through http://online.justice.vic.gov.au/servlet/bdm-home) and to print out my own copies at home. As a result I gained very valuable information on parentage, causes of death, places of origin, spouses, and names and ages of children. From the shipping records at PROV I found the vessel on which the first Ponsford arrived in Australia, the size of the ship, its captain, the length of the voyage and the names and occupations of Ponsford's fellow passengers, most of whom were optimistic miners on their way to the goldfields in central Victoria. Further details of the Ponsford individuals were gained from the City of Melbourne Citizen Lists and/or Citizen Rolls (VPRS 4029) and Rate Books (VPRS 5708), which revealed information on residential dimensions, rates paid and names of neighbours. Wills and probate records found in VPRS 7591 and VPRS 28 respectively provided data on real property and personal assets and names of executors. The well-selected collection of reference books and history classics in the PROV North Melbourne reading room was also helpful. In my case, Henry Gyles Turner's The history of the colony of Victoria (Longman's, London, 1904) and Geoffrey Serle's The rush to be rich: a history of the colony of Victoria, 1883-1889 (Melbourne University Press, 1971) provided useful background material about the goldrush period.