The Aboriginal Australian Cricket Team in England — 1868, the First Australian Tour

By the 1860s Aboriginal cricketers in country Victoria had been playing against white settler sides for at least a decade. The Edenhope team of 1866-67 was good enough that Tom Wills's coaching produced match wins against local club opposition. The commercial promoters of Melbourne, who had brought Stephenson and Parr out, identified an English tour by an all-Aboriginal side as a marketable novelty. Government pass laws restricting Aboriginal travel — the Victorian Aborigines Protection Act of 1869 — were not yet in force, but the political climate was already hostile; the team had to leave from Sydney rather than Melbourne to avoid an attempted government injunction.

After two abortive earlier attempts to bring an Aboriginal side to England, including a tour shut down by Victorian authorities in 1867, Lawrence finally sailed his party from Sydney on the Parramatta in February 1868. The voyage took 81 days. The party arrived in Gravesend on 13 May and opened at the Oval twelve days later.

The team had its origins in country Victoria in the early 1860s, where stockmen of the Jardwadjali, Wotjobaluk and surrounding Aboriginal nations played station cricket against white settlers. Tom Wills, the white former Rugby School pupil who had also helped invent Australian Rules football, coached an Aboriginal side at Edenhope in 1866-67. After Wills withdrew, the Sydney-based English professional Charles Lawrence — who had stayed behind from the Stephenson tour of 1861-62 — assumed coaching and captaincy duties and took the project on as a commercial enterprise. The party of thirteen who finally sailed from Sydney on the Parramatta in February 1868 included Mullagh (Unaarrimin), Bullocky (Bullchanach), Dick-a-Dick (Jungunjinanuke), Tarpot (Murrumgunarrimin), Twopenny, Cuzens, Mosquito, Sundown, Red Cap, King Cole, Charley Dumas, Peter and Tiger. The tour opened against Surrey at the Oval on 25 May 1868 in front of around 7,000 spectators; the Aboriginal side lost by an innings but Mullagh's bowling was favourably noted in the press. The team played a punishing schedule of three or four matches a week through the summer, mostly against club elevens. King Cole died of tuberculosis at Guy's Hospital in London on 24 June and was buried at Victoria Park; Sundown and Jim Crow withdrew injured. After matches the side put on exhibitions of boomerang and spear-throwing — billed as their 'native sports' — which Lawrence had built into the tour package and which were sometimes more lucrative at the gate than the cricket itself. The party returned to Sydney in February 1869.

“Their fielding was very smart and the bowling of Mullagh and Cuzens has been described as straight and very fast.”

“Nothing of interest occurred till about half-past 5, when poor King Cole was buried in the cemetery at Victoria Park.”

The 1868 tour did not result in further Aboriginal English visits. The 1869 Victorian Aborigines Protection Act effectively confined Aboriginal Australians to government missions and ended the freedom of movement that the tour had depended on. Several of the players returned to mission life and played little organised cricket again. Charles Lawrence stayed in Australia and continued coaching. In Britain the tour was reported as a curiosity rather than a sporting equal and the line of touring evolved, with W.G. Grace's private Australian tour of 1873-74 and Lillywhite's 1876-77 tour leading directly to the first Test match.