Lawn Bowls

 My kitchen window looks down upon this patch of green, and for the last two weeks I could not figure out what these old blokes came to play every Tuesday and Thursday.  Today I had a breakthrough and discovered it was the game of lawn bowls.  The green is typically 37-40 square meters, and a rink (which is what one game of lawn bowls is played on) is between 5.5 and 5.8 meters across.  This spacing ensures that more than one game can be played at once on a green.  The game consists of two different balls, a bowl and a jack or kitty.  The while ball below is a jack/kitty, and the two black ones are bowls.  The bowls are not perfectly rounded, so that when bowled their path curves.  The game begins by the jack being rolled the length of the green (wherever is stops becomes the end of the rink), and then it is placed in the center of the rink and becomes the target for bowls. When bowling, the goal is to aim for the jack and not go past the end of the green.  As you can imagine, there are both offensive and defensive shots.  An offensive shot is called a draw shot, where the bowl is bowled with isolated placement being the goal.  Examples of defensive shots are the strike, upshot, and block--all are bowled with the goal of knocking another player's bowl out of placement or blocking another player's draw shot.  A round of bowling is ended when each player has bowled all of their bowls, and the bowl closest to the jack receives the most points.  There can be teams of 4 all the way down to a solo bowler.  

Australian History of Lawn Bowls:  The first recorded game of bowls occurred in 1845 at Sandy Bay, Tasmania, with the first club established in 1846.  1864 marks the creation of the oldest existing bowls club--the Melbourne Bowls Club.  Today there are interstate contests, and a World Bowls Championship which includes teams from Australia, New Zealand, Africa and various parts of Europe.