Outside Cricket
Following his retirement from big cricket, Darling returned to his Tasmanian sheep station, where he was involved in a range of agricultural activities. He pioneered measures to eradicate rabbits, an introduced pest then in plague proportions throughout Australia. He was an active member of organisations such as the Tasmanian Stock Holders and Orchardists' Association and the Royal Agricultural Society of Tasmania, the organising body of the Royal Hobart Show. Darling imported South Australian merino rams to improve his flock, and his wool topped the Hobart sales on several occasions. He also introduced subterranean clover to Tasmania.
In 1919, Darling moved from Stonehenge to Claremont House, around which the Hobart suburb of Claremont later formed. He was elected to the Cambridge electorate in the Tasmanian Legislative Council in 1921 as an independent. He retained his position in the Parliament until his death in 1946. In Parliament, one of his colleagues was Charles Eady, his teammate from the 1896 tour of England. Darling was recognised by his colleagues as a forceful, no-nonsense speaker. In the 1930s, he won an exemption from land tax for small farmers, and toward the end of his parliamentary career, a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate charges Darling had made regarding maladministration. The findings of the commission, released after his death, saw a government Minister and two others found guilty of accepting bribes. Darling was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1938 in recognition of his work as a member of the Legislative Assembly.
Darling married Alice Minna Blanche Francis, a wheat farmer's daughter from Mundoora, South Australia in 1893. Together they raised 15 children: ten sons and five daughters. After surgery for a ruptured gall bladder, Darling died in Hobart on 2 January 1946. He was buried at Cornelian Bay cemetery after a Congregationalist ceremony and was survived by his wife and twelve of his children.
Read more about this topic: Joe Darling
Famous quotes containing the word cricket:
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)