"Where stands now the Carrington Hotel, at the corner of Byng Street and Lord's Place, Mrs Elliott kept another hotel, but it was not the Carrington then. Further along Lord's Place, to the north, was the White Hart… There was situated the old handball court of Orange. The only game then played in Orange was handball.”

It was the above reminiscence of local pubs in the 1880s* that grabbed our attention here at OC Life and led to us to once again delve into the newspaper archives on Trove to find out more about this handball craze in Orange.

The handball referred to above is not the common schoolyard “hand tennis” most readers today would be familiar with, although they no doubt come from the same origins. The game was somewhat like squash or racquetball and played in a three-walled court with a hard, twine- and leather-wrapped cork ball like a small cricket ball.

The origins of the handball are lost in time, but some claim the ancient Greeks and Romans played versions of the game and variants are played the world over.

“Handball is a faster tennis without racquets,” wrote a sportswriter describing a revival of the game in Adelaide during the 1930s.

“The server stands near the centre wall of the court, he bounces the ball on the floor, then drives it with his hand hard against the wall. It rebounds high and fast down the court. The battle is on.”

The boxer Tommy Burns is said to have played many strenuous games of handball in preparation to meet Jack Johnson at the Sydney Stadium for the heavyweight title in 1908. Handball, he said, was the fastest game that could be played and he used it to liven up the footwork he was noted for.

The handball court at the White Hart Hotel was the first in Orange, built in 1879 by the then licensee, a Mr Rice. The game was introduced and principally played by young Irishman, one of whom was a man named Langham who claimed to have been the Irish champion. As the game grew in popularity, it wasn’t long before Orange had its own local champion, Jimmy Keenan, who went on to become champion of Australia. Contemporary sportswriters rated Keenan as one of the best players of the game anywhere in the world in his day.

“Keenan was a wonderful handballer,” recalled Jack Gillespie to a journalist of the Orange Leader, when the old White Hart Hotel courts were finally demolished in 1937.

Keenan, said Gillespie, once defeated three top handballers on his own, three against one. “He won easily, serving aces with the hardball,” he added.

It was around 1902 that a “soft ball” replaced the hard, cork ball in the local game, which was then played at a court adjacent to the Carrington Hotel, the White Hart courts having fallen into disrepair.

The zenith of local popularity in the sport was reached in the early 1920s. The foremost players of the period in Orange were then said to include Charles Walker, Fred Press, Jack Gillespie, Bill McKellar, and Bill Carroll.

In 1939, the 60th anniversary of the game’s introduction to Orange was celebrated with the official opening of a “modern championship court” at De La Salle College in Summer Street.

Jack McMurtrie, who provided information on the history of the game in Orange for an address delivered at this occasion, said he considered handball to be superior to both cricket and football, “the ‘daddy’ sport of them all, both as a game and as an exercise.”

“If the young men of today could be enticed to place a few games,” he added, “they would realise that what I have written is true in every detail.”