I have been asked to write an article about my cricketing journey from Colombo to Melbourne.. I have some reservations about how relevant my article will be. However, I trust that it will serve essentially as an insight to the exhilarating schoolboy cricketing era of the 1950s. I debuted for Royal in ’54 and captained in ’57. A couple of weeks after the Royal-Thomian I migrated to Australia, and was the first Sri Lankan to play District (Grade) cricket in Melbourne. In the ‘50s, Sri Lanka was far from attaining test status. Sri Lanka possessed great players such Mahadevan Sathasivam, F C de Saram, C I Gunasekera, Vernon Prins, and Mike Tissera, et al. The only exposure to international cricket that Sri Lanka had was a one-day friendly played when the English or Australian teams passed through Colombo on their way to Australia or England every two years. In Australia ...

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