ACT and Australian Indigenous cricketer Neil Bulger and ACT trailblazer Jodie Davis have been named as this year’s inductees into the Cricket ACT Hall of Fame.
Honoured at the recent ACT Cricket Awards, Davis and Bulger became the 15th and 16th members respectively since the Cricket ACT Hall of Fame was first established in 2019.
NEIL BULGER (1952 – 2022)
A hard-hitting left-handed batsman and left-handed medium pace bowler, Neil Bulger was one of the leading players of ACT cricket during the 1980s.
Neil came to Canberra in 1972 to play rugby league but ended up playing cricket for Queanbeyan. He was named ACT Player of the Year in that first season, as well as making his debut for the ACT the same summer. In the wake of his performance for the ACT, he was approached by Queensland Cricket but returned to Tumut to play rugby league.
He returned to Queanbeyan for the 1978/79 season and resumed playing for the ACT immediately, going on to represent the Territory in 27 matches.
During his career, Neil was named the ACT First Grade Player of the Year three times, ACT Representative Player of the Year twice, and was the 12th man for the Prime Minister’s XI when the match resumed in 1983/84.
He was appointed vice-captain of the Australian Indigenous team which toured England in 1988, a moment he describes as one of the proudest moments in his career.
In 1st Grade he played 135 matches, scoring just under 4000 runs and taking 253 wickets, but played for Queanbeyan for 25 seasons in all, scoring 7911 runs and taking 384 wickets – and was part of five premierships.
His incredible career continued down through the grades well into the late 1990s, and his contribution to Queanbeyan District Cricket Club was recognised by both the club and the then City of Queanbeyan council with the naming of the second Freebody Oval, the Neil Bulger Oval in 2015.
Neil passed away in 2022 and was also named in the Cricket ACT Men’s Team of the Century at the Cricket ACT Centenary Gala dinner in February 2023.
JODIE DAVIS
With a junior background in athletics and netball, Jodie was a relative late-comer to organised cricket as a 17-year-old but was selected to represent the ACT in just her second season (1985/86) and for Australia in her fourth (1988/89)
Although her international career was limited to a single appearance in a one day international versus New Zealand in January 1988, Jodie’s ability to bowl long spells of medium pace outswing combined with aggressive middle order batting enabled her to represent the ACT with distinction, and she remained a member of the Australian squad from 1988 to 1990.
Jodie represented the ACT in 44 matches across seven National Championships between 1985/86 and 1994/95.
Her ACT club career spanned 124 matches over 10 seasons from 1984/85 for three clubs (Woden Valley, Forsevin XI & Canberra North Daramalan) as well as a comeback season in 2018/19 for Weston Creek Molonglo. Jodie also had a long club career in Sydney, playing 133 matches for Gordon across 15 seasons from 1992/93.
As well as being a top-level player, Jodie also has a long history of coaching and cricket education in Canberra which has had a positive and long-lasting impact on local and international cricket. Jodie was the inaugural coach of the Pakistan Women’s Cricket Team which competed at the 1997 World Cup in India and was a satellite coach for the Australian Women’s Cricket Team, an ACT assistant and head coach across many junior and senior teams (both male and female), coached the Queanbeyan men’s team in 2006, and was the Australian Women’s Army Team coach in 2018
Jodie has also represented ACT in indoor cricket, baseball, and broomball, and in February 2023 was named in the Cricket ACT’s Women’s Team of the Century as part of Cricket ACT’s Centenary celebrations.