Libby Beath had wanted her son to be a tennis player. Growing up in the remote northern Australian outpost of Darwin, Jake Weatherald’s weekends were mainly spent at football grounds during the wet seasons that drench the tropical capital, and cricket ovals in the dry season when the agonising humidity is mercifully dialled back for a few months.
While Weatherald represented the Northern Territory in tennis as a junior, his mother accepted she was fighting a losing battle. The young left-hander was showing his preference for cover drives over forehands. Still, Beath’s ability with a racquet in hand came in handy at their home in the northern suburban of Jingili.
“We hadn’t built under the house, so between the poles, that was his cricket pitch,” Beath recalls of their former house that was elevated by stilts, a typical Northern Territory build designed to increase cooling air-flow and avoid flooding during the monsoonal months.
“I used to get a tennis racquet and a tennis ball, and that was how I bowled to him. The only danger was that he would hit it so hard and it would come back and hit me. Every afternoon he would ask me to come out and bowl with the racquet and that was the way I did it.”
Football was also an early rival to cricket. The Weatherald name has a strong association with the Australian Rules code in Adelaide, where both Beath and Jake’s father Robbie are originally from. Tim Weatherald, Jake’s cousin on his dad’s side, won a Magarey Medal as the best player in the South Australian National Football League (SANFL) in 2002. As Beath recalls, Jake eventually figured he was neither big nor quick enough to pursue the sport past a junior level.
So began his insatiable appetite for hitting balls. But there was another decisive childhood moment that put Weatherald on the path to becoming the NT’s first born-and-bred Test cricketer.
In 2003, Australia’s all-conquering men’s side travelled to the far north for the first time to face Bangladesh in a pair of Tests (the other was played in Cairns). In addition to Beath going with her son to see Steve Waugh’s men topple the visitors by an innings and 132 runs at Marrara Oval, she also took him to meet two of the team’s biggest stars at an indoor cricket centre just off the Stuart Highway, the road that connects Darwin to the rest of the continent.
“He got one of the little autograph bats and he’d get all the signatures from all the players as they’d come up to the boundary,” says Beath.
“And he went to the Darwin cricket centre where Brett Lee and Jason Gillespie were there signing autographs. I got this photo of him standing there in between those two guys.
“I think getting their signature and getting that photo – I framed it and put it on the wall in his bedroom – I think it really inspired him.”
Jason Gillespie, Jake Weatherald, age 8, and Brett Lee in Darwin in 2003 // Libby Beath
Eight years later, Gavin Dovey took over as the Australian team’s manager, a job he would remain in for more than a decade. A year after he left the role, Dovey was appointed chief executive of NT Cricket in 2023. Darwin has not seen any Test cricket in the intervening years.
“When I came up, I couldn’t work out how it had been 2003 since we last had a Test match, and 2007 and 2008 since we had one-dayers. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it,” Dovey tells cricket.com.au.
“You don’t expect it every year, but it had been a really long time.”
It may not be a coincidence either that of the 471 Australian men’s Test players that have come before Weatherald, only the Katherine-born Damien Martyn (whose family relocated to Western Australia when he was young) has NT roots.
Jake Weatherald and his mum, Libby Beath // supplied
Dovey successfully lobbied for the return of top-flight cricket to the Top End this year, with South Africa playing two T20Is on drop-in pitches at Marrara, before more games in Cairns and Mackay. Australia’s women’s team also spent time in the NT this year as part of a bonding trip to Kakadu National Park.
NT Cricket is, per Dovey, “cautiously bullish” Darwin could get one of two Tests Cricket Australia has pencilled in to play against Bangladesh in August next year. He hopes the format’s long-awaited return could draw out the next Jake Weatherald.
“You need to inspire kids to play cricket and touch their heroes and expose them to that,” says Dovey, who identified Sam Barker, Cadell McMahon and Tye Beer as some of the region’s brightest junior male cricketers.
“Just having elite cricket is inspirational for our talented boys and girls, to see these guys up close. It’s part of our overall strategy for how we advance cricket up here.”
A young Jake Weatherald playing in Darwin // Supplied
When Weatherald’s family, including his step-dad Ian Crundall and sister, Elza, moved to the beachside suburb of Nightcliff, the increasingly keen junior cricketer’s afternoons were spent playing cricket after school with Tom Andrews, the left-arm spinner who has gone on to play domestic cricket for South Australia, Tasmania and Sydney Thunder, along with his brother Will.
“He just was active all the time,” says Beath of her son. “Most parents say to their kids, ‘You’ve got to get off the screens, go out and play outside’.
“I used to say, ‘You have to sit down and watch television – you’ve got to calm down before you go to bed’.”
Jake Weatherald, bottom right, along with Tom Andrews, bottom left, with their Darwin CC U15 side. ‘Ronnie’ Andrews is top right.
Tom and Will’s father David ‘Ronnie’ Andrews was not only instrumental in Weatherald’s development before he moved south to complete his final years of school at Adelaide’s Prince Alfred College, but, along with another Weatherald mentor in Tony Judd, was also a key figure in a golden generation of cricket exports from the NT.
Kane Richardson and D’Arcy Short, three and four years Weatherald’s senior respectively, were two other Australian representatives who benefited from the now defunct Norther Territory Institute of Sport (NTIS) cricket program.
“Once that (NTIS) got decommissioned and the (NT) government made a decision that it was just not worth investing to that level – because maybe the population is too small, and we were not producing the talent that’s good enough – there’s been a big gap,” says Dovey, who more recently has brought in Nick Winter, the former South Australia swing bowler, and Trent Keep, a coach who played for Tasmania’s second XI, to lead the NT’s high-performance program.
“These guys that I mentioned are all in their 30s – so we’ve had a big gap between them and the next guys coming through. That’s been one of my goals, to work out what’s the right level of investment NT Cricket needs to make and what does the pathway need to look like?
“The game is changing so quickly. Historical talent development pathway structures aren’t necessarily the way they need to be in the future for a small place like the NT.”
It was a full-circle moment earlier this year when the Weatherald-Andrews-Richardson-Short quartet turned out for the Northern Territory Strike in this year’s Top End T20 competition that featured several KFC BBL sides along with teams from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and the USA.
Weatherald in fact spent the whole winter in his old stomping ground, playing for Australia A, as well opening the batting for his old club, Darwin CC. Two-and-a-half months after batting at the quaint harbourside Kahlin Oval he grew up playing junior cricket on, he will walk out to bat in front of a sold-out Perth Stadium. Australia’s smallest capital city will be cheering him on from afar.
“It is a capital city, but it is a small town – it’s a country town, really,” says Dovey, “so anytime you get anyone in any industry that excels on the national or international stage, people are extra proud that there’s one of us that has made it.
“Everyone’s just so proud and so excited for him.”
Jake Weatherald envirsaging batting on Test debut at Perth Stadium this week // Getty
The 183 Weatherald scored against Sri Lanka A in July in Darwin helped build the case for the Test debut that will materialise this week. Along with Dovey, Beath will be there to see him receive his Baggy Green before play on Friday and then face the likes of Jofra Archer and Mark Wood in the ensuing days.
Beath admits she is a nervous watcher at the best of times. “A lot of people say to me that being an opening batsman is the hardest spot in the game,” she says. “Well, I’m sorry, but it’s not – the hardest is being the mother of an opening batsman.”
The rest of the country will be just as eager to see the opener from the Top End succeed.
2025-26 NRMA Insurance Men’s Ashes
First Test: November 21-25, Perth Stadium, 1:20pm AEDT
Second Test: December 4-8, The Gabba, Brisbane (D/N), 3pm AEDT
Third Test: December 17-21: Adelaide Oval, 10:30am AEDT
Fourth Test: December 26-30: MCG, Melbourne, 10:30am AEDT
Fifth Test: January 4-8: SCG, Sydney, 10:30am AEDT
Australia squad (first Test only): Steve Smith (c), Scott Boland, Alex Carey, Brendan Doggett, Cameron Green, Travis Head, Josh Inglis, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Michael Neser, Mitchell Starc, Jake Weatherald, Beau Webster
England squad: Ben Stokes (c), Harry Brook (vc), Jofra Archer, Gus Atkinson, Shoaib Bashir, Jacob Bethell, Brydon Carse, Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett, Will Jacks, Ollie Pope, Matthew Potts, Joe Root, Jamie Smith (wk), Josh Tongue, Mark Wood
