Kookaburra Turf Cricket Ball

The Kookaburra Turf is a cricket ball for the longest form of the game: a sphere of dark red leather, 156 grams, made in four pieces and joined around its equator by a raised seam of six rows of white linen stitches. Stamped in gold on one face is a kookaburra perched on a branch, the maker's name arched above it and TURF below; on the other face, a ring of lettering reads Made by A. G. Thompson Pty Ltd in Victoria. Inside, five layers of cork and worsted yarn are quilted over a core of cork and rubber.

Its maker began as a saddler. Alfred Grace Thompson came to Melbourne from England in 1888 and two years later opened a shop in Brighton, making harness and leather goods. Cricket balls, sold under the name of a kookaburra that visited his workshop, became the firm's chief business as the motor car ended the trade in harness.

In 1946, with an English side due to tour, the Australian Board of Control asked the country's ball makers for samples. It chose the Turf, and Thompson's advertisements that summer announced the balls 'adopted exclusively for the 1946-47 Tests'. The firm says the Turf has been used in every Test in Australia since, and it is now the Test ball of most of the cricketing world, though not of England, the West Indies or India.

The ball has been remade more than once. In 1977 the company developed a new way of making it for Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket, which also gave the game its white ball; a pink Turf appeared for night Tests in 2015. Through all of it the red ball has stayed what it was: a hand-finished leather ball made to keep its shape and lose its shine slowly, over eighty overs, in a Test match.