In the raucous symphony of World Cup football, comes an interlude from cricket.

Usman Khawaja has been picked for the Australian Test squad. That the team he is a part of will play Pakistan next month (in England) is a sweet piece of poetry. But his inclusion - and that of Daniel Christian in the Australian T20 squad - is a flare.

That the last cultural fortress of world cricket, its Bastille, has been breached.

To say this of a country whose ‘mateship' gave cricket its earliest egalitarianism is to sound like a pedantic nit-picker. Australian cricket was always without division, without class. No amateurs and professionals, elite public schools and humble clubs, no whites and coloured, no Hindus and Muslims.

Other cricketing countries were always asked about segmentation, barriers. On England's 1993 tour of India, a visiting journalist asked the local press box whether Vinod Kambli belonged to the Bhandari caste. No one had an answer because we just didn't know and, Bhandari, otherwise, was just a surname that didn't belong to Vinod. "Well, his dad's a factory motor mechanic", is all that we could say. In 2004, Irfan Pathan was asked in Pakistan what it was like being a Muslim on the Indian team.

South African selection is put through the wringer on the ‘quota' issue. The leagues in England have teams full of Asian and Afro-Caribbean background. Sometimes in a self-imposed alienation, they have their own leagues which annoy the English authorities. The West Indies has represented the cultures of the Caribbean, grinding dissonance and all. A Tamil is Sinhala-majority Sri Lanka's biggest star, Pakistan XI have included both Hindu and Christian and Su'a and Patel have played for New Zealand.

In all of this, was Australia. In most parts, it was cricket's new world and home to its modernisers - in skills, in entrepreneurship, in television. Yet at its highest level, it looked like an Australia caught in an older age, its classness diluted down to sameness. A Filipino-Australian cricket-nut friend once told me the team looked like they belonged to the 1950s. Like little England, with better, harder cricket.

For an outsider, Australia's maths just didn't add up. Its cricket-watching public was generous, welcoming to confident outsiders who showed their stuff. We had all heard about the ticker-tape farewell to Frank Worrell's team in 1961 and seen people jump to their feet to Tendulkar. At the 2003-04 Sydney Test, I saw John Howard and his body-guards start a quick jog towards the SCG clubhouse just after the PA system announced that the new batsman in was VVS Laxman.

We were told one third of Sydneysiders were born in another country and that the most common surnames in the Melbourne telephone directory were Smith, Brown, Jones and Nguyen. The serious broadsheets listed Muslim and Jewish prayer times every day. And still. At the highest level of cricket, the rest of the Australia rarely showed up.

There was a small scattering of non-English sounding names among first class cricket - Richard Chee Quee for one or Michael Di Venuto. Kasprowicz stood out for a while as did his partner Jason Gillespie's Aboriginal background. Briefly, then, there was a flash of Jason Krezja. For there to be so few seemed a waste, despite Australia's enormous success on the field.

Diversity is a powerful idea particularly in sport. In the 1980s, as India suffered from religious riots and disturbances, a peace group designed a simple poster. It had the faces of Kapil Dev, Mohammed Azharuddin, Roger Binny and Maninder Singh (Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh) and said, "If we can play together, we can live together." It is not as if India has no more religious differences, but at its best, its cricket stands for inclusion, acceptance. Australian cricket's distance from its country's vibrant multi-cultural identity remained a mystery.

Until now when within four months, come Christian, Aboriginal in identity and introduction, and Khawaja, Islamabad-born and Sydney-raised. Someone, somewhere did something right. Who knows where and how far the careers of these young men will go but their arrival will not be forgotten. All they must do is take that first step. It's easy enough though - their world is now flat.