On the 25 May 1868, Johnny Mullagh, Bullchanach, Sundown, Dick-a-Dick, Johnny Cuzens, King Cole, Red Cap, Twopenny, Charley Dumas, Jimmy Mosquito, Tiger, Peter and Jim Crow walked onto The Oval in London ready to take on the English at their revered national game in the first of 47 matches across the course of a six-month tour. Johnny and the boys were not only the first Australian XI to take on the Poms at home, but also the first Aboriginal XI.
I first learned of the Aboriginal XI back in 2000 when living in London and my brother’s friend Baden was part of another Aboriginal XI undertaking a commemorative tour of England, including playing on the ground known as the Home of Cricket, Lords. I recently visited the Don Bradman Museum in his hometown of Bowral, which includes a fabulous display about the boys and their momentous tour. (See ‘Further reading and viewing’.)
Over 20,000 spectators turned up to see the first Aboriginal cricket team to tour England on this day in 1868. Their arrival twelve days earlier had caused quite a stir, with the English fascinated by “the conquered natives of a convict colony”, as they were described in The Times, although not all were pleased about this “travestie upon cricketing at Lords”, aka the hallowed ground of cricket.
The team had been playing together since the 1866 selection series in Victoria. Initially captained by William Hayman, captaining duties then fell to Tom Wills, who was captain of the Victorian cricket team.
In 1867, the team acquired a new coach, Charles Lawrence, who negotiated the finance for and organised the tour of England of the first Australian cricket team.
In the lead up to their first match on 25 May 1868, speculation was rife in the newspapers about just how good these “conquered natives” could possibly be at this most English of games. The Sporting Life ran a story on May 16 with the journalist surmising:
“They are the first native Australians to have visited this country on such a novel expedition, but it must not be inferred that they are savages; on the contrary. …They are perfectly civilised, having been brought up in the bush to agricultural pursuits. …With respect to their prowess as cricketers – that will be conclusively determined by their first public match.”
‘The arrival of the Australian Aboriginal cricket team in England’, The Sporting Life, London, 16 May 1868, Wikipedia.
The First XI performed most admirably, much to the surprise of the English. Of the 47 matches played during their six-month tour, they won 14, lost 14 and drew 19. The anticipated annihilation of the natives from the colonies didn’t happen; Johnny and the boys turned out to be very adept at this most English of games.
Unaarrimin, or Johnny Mullagh, of the Jardwadjali people in Victoria, was the player of the series scoring 1,698 runs, bowling 1,877 overs (831 maiden overs), took 245 wickets and, as his Wikipedia profile proclaims, “[as] if this wasn’t enough, he would occasionally don wicket-keeping gloves, achieving four stumpings”. The first Aboriginal cricketing all-rounder! In December 2020, 129 years after Unaarrimin’s death in 1891, his excellence with the bat, ball, gloves and everything else, led to his induction in the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame. Selection is based, as the ACHF website states, “on the players status as sporting legends in addition to their outstanding statistical records”. Better late than never.
As we get ready here in Australia to acknowledge and learn about the history of the oldest living civilisation in the world during National Reconciliation Week (27 May – 3 June), I thought I would start my participation and learning sharing this fabulous story of the greatest sport in the world and the first Aboriginal XI who showed the unsuspecting English some power from Down Under; a taste of what was to come when we won what became the first ‘The Ashes’ series in 1882. HOWZAT!
Further reading and viewing
‘Aboriginal Cricket’, Deadly Story website.
‘Aboriginal Cricket Team’, Monuments Australia website.
Bernard Whimpress, ‘Johnny Mullagh: Western District Hero or the Black Grace?’, Aboriginal History, vol. 18, 2011. (Available via the State Library of NSW)
Cricket fan, Stephen Fry, narrates the History of The Ashes
‘The First Aboriginal Cricket Team to England’, Bowral Museum, NSW, Google Arts and Culture.
‘The first Indigenous cricket tour of England in 1868’, State Library of New South Wales.
‘In the footsteps of the 1868 Aboriginal Cricket Team’, Australian History Mysteries website.
National Museum of Australia, ‘Defining Moments’.
The Plodding Historian 
