A high-profile Australia-English cricket series

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australian agency. To register to receive it by email. This week’s issue was written by Melbourne reporter Natasha Frost.

This week, not for the first time, Australia has been rocked by a major cricket controversy that has divided cricket fans in England and Australia. (It invited comm. More than 150 years ago, another Australian tour on Britons.ent even caught the eye of Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese: “Same old Aussies – always winning!”)

More than 150 years ago, another Australian tour caught the attention of the British. In 1868, over 47 matches in over five months, an entire Aboriginal team played across England, winning 14 matches, drawing 19 and losing another 14.

“It is clear that the team should not be regarded as the beginning of Test cricket,” said Bernard Whimpress, a leading Australian cricket historian. “But it was a very interesting issue, in terms of colonial relations.”

In the second half of the 19th century, when the traditional way of life of the Aboriginal people came under enormous pressure from the often violent European colonization, many Aboriginal people had little choice but to work for white settlers, either in domestic service either as herdsmen, herdsmen or shearers.

The young Aboriginal people who grew up on the colonial ranches known as “stations” in western Victoria lived much like the whites they worked with, speaking English, wearing Western clothes and eating differently than they were used to, writes Whimpress in his book, “Passport to nowhere.”

Learning cricket – a sport that British settlers around the world believed could be used to “civilize” colonized populations – was part of that transition, and from the early 1860s, matches between Aboriginal and white teams were promoted as a novelty.

In 1866, farmer William Hayman and cricketer Tom Wills formed a West Victoria team of young Aboriginal men who toured New South Wales and other parts of Victoria.

But it was not until a series of matches against the Melbourne Cricket Club late that year – including a Boxing Day match with a crowd of 8,000 – that the great commercial potential of an Aboriginal tour came into focus.

Within weeks, Hayman and a fellow farmer, Tom Hamilton, had signed a 12-month contract for the team of 13 to travel to Sydney and then England, backed by Sydney-based England professional player Charles Lawrence.

At the time, there was great British interest in what were seen as “exotic peoples from the Empire,” Whimpress writes, “especially those threatened with extinction,” making the scheme even more appealing.

After 74 days at sea, they disembarked at Gravesend, England, and were apparently warmly welcomed by a curious public, particularly attracted by demonstrations of boomerang and javelin throwing during intermissions in the game, which Lawrence promoted as “traditional Aboriginal games ‘.

The players themselves were introduced with nicknames such as Johnny Mullagh (for Unaarrimin) or Cuzens (who was known to Yellana), and wore different colored sashes and caps decorated with a silver boomerang and bat.

“They are the first Australian natives to have visited this country on such a new expedition, but one should not conclude that they were savages,” reported The Sporting Life, a British sports newspaper, after an early game.

“The cricket was good quality club cricket, of a reasonable standard,” said Whimpress. “They did well, given their opponents and the very foreign climatic conditions.” The players were almost always traveling or working, playing 99 days out of a possible 126 in 15 English counties.

Their success, writes Chris Harte in the Penguin History of Australian Cricket, was a clear indication of the Aboriginal people’s ability “to adapt their substantial skills to European customs”, and a number of players were all-rounders of remarkable ability.

But the tour also had its tragic moments. Although it earned the organizers thousands of pounds, there is no evidence that the team was paid for its work, and one player, Bripumyarrimin, who was known as King Cole, died after suffering a “chest complaint”. Two others, whom historians believe were in poor health and may have been mourning their teammate, returned to Australia two months ahead of schedule.

Just a year later, a law was introduced restricting the Aboriginal people’s ability to move freely, ostensibly to prevent their exploitation. Many of the players returned to Aboriginal reserves and several died in obscurity. Only Johnny Mullagh, a star player, continued to play and remained free of reserve life.

“The traditional view is that cricket was never played by Aboriginal people again,” Whimpress said. Instead, he characterizes what actually happened as “discontinuity.”

“There were attempts all over the country, some through missions, some with station play, but it would start and after a while it would fail,” he said. “There were several reasons for this, some of them racist. But for the people themselves – their lives were broken, they were pushed around and the idea of ​​playing cricket wouldn’t necessarily have been a big concern to them.

Here are the stories of the week.

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