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key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lAboriginal wizards of Oz10 June 2001 -Mark Whitaker reports on the pioneering Australians who toured England - nine years before the first Test match Australia has changed. It has become progressively less British since the Second World War and sport has offered new immigrant communities a route to acceptance and status. Look down almost any Aussie Rules or rugby league team sheet and there will be Italian, Greek and, increasingly, eastern European names. It's the same with boxing, soccer and athletics. But not cricket. It remains an Anglo-Irish preserve. And if sport has an important role to play in Australia's becoming a genuinely multicultural society, then it has an even more important one in helping to heal the country's deepest racial faultline - that between whites and Aborigines. Here again cricket is out on a limb. The 12 Aboriginal cricketers who disembarked at Gravesend on 13 May 1868 - after a three-month voyage from Sydney - weren't just the first Australian players to arrive in England; they were the first overseas tourists, playing, incredibly, 47 matches, criss-crossing the country by rail. The team won a third of their matches and one of its members, Johnny Mullagh, was immediately recognised as a cricketing genius. But the tour was a commercial operation, dreamt up by white businessmen in Sydney and Melbourne, and race was unashamedly its selling point. 'BLACK CRICKETERS AT LONGSIGHT', screamed a typical advertisement on the front page of the Manchester Courier. And when more than 7,000 people turned up at The Oval for the Aborigines' first appearance in London, the Times , no doubt accurately, suggested that the main attraction was the 'physical confirmation' of the tourists rather than their 'cricketing acquirements'. And throughout the summer local cricket reporters around the country couldn't resist detailed physical comparisons between the Aborigines and what one Liverpool paper referred to as the 'legitimate niggers' of America. It was assumed that one Aboriginal face would be indistinguishable from another, so the players wore coloured sashes on the field. And at the close of play they had to get out of their whites, don 'native costume', and give exhibitions of spear and boomerang throwing. Yet there was almost no English interest in the most curious thing of all - how a group of Aborigines came to be playing serious cricket in the first place. The Times reassured its readers that the team was 'perfectly civilised' but there was no attempt to explain what the Aboriginal cricketers had lived through before finding themselves in England. The names they played under say it all. They weren't down in the score card as Brimbunyah, Unaarrimin, or Brippokei - their real names - but as King Cole, Tarpot, Red Cap or Bullocky - names they'd been given by British sheep barons in the colony of Victoria. Slave names, to all intents and purposes. The members of the Aboriginal team were among the few surviving members of their clans, and they'd grown up in the shadow of 'dispossession' - the forcible seizure of their ancestral lands by Europeans for whom indigenous Australians hardly qualified as human beings at all. 'I can remember when we used to shoot down the blacks in this colony as you would do kangaroos,' wrote one of the early white settlers. By 1853 another could say: 'Nearly the whole of the tribe belonging to this district is dead : I do not believe I have seen a native black for these four years.' An estimated 10 per cent of the Aboriginal population of Victoria died - either shot or the victim of white diseases such as measles, smallpox and VD. While the vast majority of white Australians came to think that Aborigines were doomed to extinction, a minority - including a handful of settlers in the western part of Victoria - disagreed. Aborigines, though not their culture, they thought, could survive: provided they became Christians and adopted English ways as quickly as possible. What better tool than cricket to instil both discipline and cultural values? What transformed this local initiative into the strange odyssey of the 1868 tour to England was simply the remarkable skill that a few Aborigines showed at cricket. They became a marketable phenomenon, touring Victoria and New South Wales in the Australian summer of 1866-7. But professional cricket at the time was inseparable from gambling and alcohol; and when it got out that business interests were seriously thinking of taking an Aboriginal team to England the Victorian government - which had set up an Aborigines Protection Board in 1862 - did everything it could to stop it. Under the pretence of their being taken on a 'fishing trip' the team met a steamer off the Victorian coast thence to Sydney; and from there to England. One would love to know what they thought of England, but they left no record. There was only one recorded incident of possible racial discrimination against the Aboriginal team on tour. During a game at York they weren't allowed into the pavilion for lunch. The club said they barred any professional team, so maybe the incident was more to do with class than race. In England they could be treated, patronisingly, simply as a racial curiosity. But when they got back to Australia in early 1869 they found they were viewed as something far more problematic. Most of them were forced, under the terms of new Victorian legislation, to live on specially created reserves. Aborigines and whites, the new orthodoxy decreed, were to live separately. The Aboriginal team had been together for more than two years, had played good cricket and had made reasonable money for their white backers. But Aboriginal cricket was just stopped in its tracks - hitting the buffers of Australia's own long-lived commitment to apartheid. The 'official' histories of Australian cricket make no mention of the Aboriginal game. One can't help thinking it would be good for Australian cricket - and for the country itself - if they did and that the men who came to England in 1868 were recognised for what they were - the first Australian tourists. 'The Aboriginal Cricket Tour to England in 1868' will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 8pm on Thursday Clip from The Observer related links:
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