Early Life and Career
Darling was born on 21 November 1870 in Glen Osmond, South Australia, the sixth son of John Darling, a grain merchant and his wife Isabella, née Ferguson. He was educated at Prince Alfred College, where he took an interest in cricket. At the age of 15, he scored a record 252 runs in the "inter-collegiate" match, the annual fixture against fierce rival St Peter's College. His future Test team mate, Clem Hill, would later beat this record, scoring 360. Not long after, he was included in a combined South Australian/Victoria XV that played the Australian XI in 1886. He made only 16 runs, but the manner in which he made them saw senior players hail him as a future champion.
His father, disapproving of Darling's fondness for sport, sent him away from his cricket and Australian rules football teams to spend twelve months at Roseworthy Agricultural School. Later, Darling worked in a bank for a time and before his father appointed him manager of one of a wheat farm. Working on the farm added size and strength to an already stocky and athletic frame. He was selected for the South Australian team at age 19, but his father would not allow him time off the farm to play.
After two years in the bush, Darling returned to Adelaide and cricket. He opened a sports store on Rundle Street, Adelaide and was soon selected to represent South Australia in inter-colonial cricket. He made his first-class cricket debut against New South Wales at the Adelaide Oval; scoring 5 and 32 as South Australia won the match by 237 runs. The next season, against the touring England team captained by Andrew Stoddart, Darling made 115, his maiden first-class century.
Read more about this topic: Joe Darling
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)