Indigenous Cricket in Australia: The 1868 Tour and Since

The first sporting team to represent Australia overseas was an Aboriginal cricket team. It sailed from Sydney on 8 February 1868, played its opening match at The Oval in London on 25 May, and did not stop until October, by which time it had played forty-seven matches — winning fourteen, losing fourteen and drawing nineteen. That was six years before the first white Australian side toured England and fourteen years before the contest that became the Ashes. Indigenous cricket in Australia does not begin as a footnote to the national story; it begins before it.

What happened afterwards is the part that has to be told without softening. The men were not paid. One of them, Bripumyarrimin, died of tuberculosis in London during the tour and was buried in a cemetery in the East End. Two more were sent home ill. Four members of the earlier party had already died in New South Wales during the botched 1867 attempt to get the tour away. And within a year of the team's return, the Victorian parliament passed legislation that gave a government board control over where Aboriginal people could live, work and travel, which shut the door on any repeat.

This page covers the 1868 tour in full — how it was assembled, who was on it, what it asked of the players and what it cost them — and then follows Indigenous cricket in Australia through the long exclusion that followed, the players who broke through anyway, and the structures that exist now: the Imparja Cup, the National Indigenous Cricket Championships, the Johnny Mullagh Medal and the small handful of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cricketers who have worn the baggy green. For the wider colonial story of how the game arrived here, see the origins of cricket in Australia.

Cricket on the Western District stations

The players who made up the 1868 side were mostly Aboriginal men working as station hands in Victoria's Western District, on pastoral runs around Edenhope, Harrow and Lake Wallace. They were working on their own Country, on land taken from their people within living memory, for European pastoralists who had introduced cricket as a station recreation in the mid-1860s.

They were good at it very quickly. Contemporary accounts are consistent on this point and are not especially patronising about it: the station teams that included Aboriginal players started beating district sides, and word travelled to Melbourne.

The pastoralists' motives were mixed and mostly self-interested. A cricket team was a novelty, a spectacle and, before long, a business proposition. But the skill was the players' own, developed in conditions — rough grounds, hard light, sparse equipment — that bear no resemblance to anything a modern pathway player would recognise.

Tom Wills and the Boxing Day match of 1866

Tom Wills is the hinge of the early story and an uncomfortable figure in it. He was the leading Victorian cricketer of his generation and one of the founders of Australian rules football, he had grown up in the Western District and spoke Djab Wurrung as a child, and in 1866 he took on the coaching and captaincy of the Aboriginal side.

He also came to that role five years after the killings at Cullin-la-ringo in central Queensland, where his father Horatio and eighteen others were killed by Aboriginal people in 1861, and after the large-scale reprisal killings of Aboriginal people that followed. Nothing about Wills's involvement is simple, and accounts that present him purely as a benefactor leave out the most important context in his life.

On Boxing Day 1866 Wills led the Aboriginal XI against the Melbourne Cricket Club at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of a reported crowd of more than ten thousand. The team lost, but the reception was extraordinary by the standards of the time, and it is the moment the idea of an English tour became plausible. That the same ground now hosts the Boxing Day Test with a medal named after one of those players is a symmetry worth sitting with.

The 1867 attempt and the men who died

The first attempt to get the team to England was a disaster and is usually skipped over. In early 1867 a promoter took the players to Sydney to prepare for a tour. He then embezzled the funds and left, stranding the team in a colony none of them knew.

Four members of the party — recorded under the names Sugar, Watty, Jellico and Paddy — died during that period. Charles Lawrence, an English professional who had come to Australia with the 1861-62 tour and was then running a hotel in Manly, took the survivors in and organised matches to keep them fed. The remainder returned to Victoria in May 1867.

The Central Board appointed to watch over the interests of Aboriginal people in Victoria was, by this point, actively trying to stop any further travel. The team's eventual departure for England went out through Sydney rather than Melbourne, which is not a coincidence.

Lawrence, Edenhope, and the squad that sailed

Lawrence was contracted as captain-coach in 1867 and trained the players for about two months at Lake Wallace near Edenhope before selecting the final party. The tour was financed by a group led by the Sydney lawyer George Graham, with William Hayman as manager. William Shepherd, from the Surrey ground staff, travelled as umpire and general assistant.

Thirteen Aboriginal players, plus Lawrence, made up the playing group that reached England. They departed Sydney aboard the Parramatta on 8 February 1868, arrived at Gravesend on 13 May, and spent a short period recovering in Kent before travelling on to London.

None of the Aboriginal players were paid.

The men on the 1868 tour

The English names in the table below were imposed by station owners and organisers. The traditional names are given in the forms most commonly recorded, and spellings vary between sources.

Tour name	Recorded traditional name	Note
Johnny Mullagh	Unaarrimin	Leading all-rounder of the tour; played 45 of 47 matches
Johnny Cuzens	Zellanach	The other outstanding player; died of dysentery in 1870
Bullocky	Bullchanach	Wicketkeeper
Dick-a-Dick	Jungunjinanuke	Famous for parrying thrown cricket balls with a shield
Twopenny	Murrumgunarriman	Later played for New South Wales against Victoria in 1870
Red Cap	Brimbunyah	Believed to have died in the early 1890s
King Cole	Bripumyarrimin	Died of tuberculosis in London, June 1868
Charley Dumas	Pripumuarraman	Batter
Jimmy Mosquito	Grougarrong	Batter
Tiger	Boninbarngeet	All-rounder
Peter	Arrahmunijarrimun	All-rounder
Sundown	Ballarin	Sent home ill in August 1868
Jim Crow	Jallachniurrimin	Sent home ill in August 1868

The Oval, and what an English summer asked of them

The opening match was played at The Oval on 25 and 26 May 1868, in front of a reported crowd of around twenty thousand. From there the team travelled almost continuously for five months, playing forty-seven matches — an average of roughly two a week with no professional support staff, no rotation and no rest.

The opposition were mostly strong club and county-district sides rather than first-class county teams, which is the honest framing. Against that standard, an even record of fourteen wins to fourteen losses was a genuinely creditable result and it surprised English observers who had come expecting an ethnographic curiosity.

The cricket was not the whole job. After matches the players were required to give exhibitions of boomerang and spear throwing, and Dick-a-Dick performed a display in which he parried cricket balls thrown at him by spectators with a narrow shield and a club. In a ball-throwing contest, a twenty-year-old W. G. Grace narrowly out-threw the visitors at 118 yards. The men were, in other words, contracted as both cricketers and a travelling exhibition, and the second half of that arrangement was as heavily promoted as the first.

• 1698Runs scored
• 245Wickets taken
• 1877Overs bowled
• 831Maiden overs

Best available reconstruction of Unaarrimin's tour figures from museum and contemporary records, not a modern scorecard. Overs are four-ball overs of the period.

Illness, death and the return

King Cole fell ill during June and died of tuberculosis. He was buried at Victoria Park Cemetery in London's East End, ground that is now Meath Gardens in Tower Hamlets. Sundown and Jim Crow were sent home in August, both unwell. The remaining players finished the tour a man short in every practical sense.

On 16 October the players were presented with commemorative bats at the Canterbury Music Hall in London, in the company of Surrey members and the public. They sailed for home and reached Sydney in February 1869, a year to the month after they had left.

• Won29.8%
• Lost29.8%
• Drawn40.4%

Results as recorded across the English summer of 1868, mostly against club and county-district opposition rather than first-class counties.

Show the numbers

The 47 matches of the 1868 tour

Item	Value
Won	14
Lost	14
Drawn	19

The 1869 Act and the door that closed

In 1869 the Victorian parliament legislated to give the Board for the Protection of Aborigines control over the residence, employment and movement of Aboriginal people in the colony, including a requirement for approval before Aboriginal people could be removed from Victoria. Comparable regimes were established in the other colonies over the following decades.

The practical effect on cricket was immediate and total. A team of Aboriginal men could not be assembled, contracted and taken overseas again without government permission that would not be given. Individual Aboriginal players could not move between colonies to chase a career. The 1868 tour was not the beginning of something; it was the last thing of its kind for well over a century, and the reason was legislation, not a decline in ability or interest.

What happened to the players afterwards

Twopenny played for New South Wales against Victoria in 1870, which made him the first Aboriginal cricketer to appear in what is now counted as first-class cricket in Australia. Cuzens died of dysentery the same year.

Mullagh was engaged professionally by the Melbourne Cricket Club and, in 1879, played for Victoria against a touring English side, top-scoring in the second innings with 36. He returned to the Western District and lived there until his death in August 1891, aged fifty. He is buried at Harrow, where a cricket centre now carries his name and the Johnny Mullagh Memorial Trophy is played for.

Recognition came very late. The 1868 team was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 2002. Cricket Australia retrospectively issued the players with Australian representative cap numbers in 2004. Mullagh was inducted into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame in 2020, the first Aboriginal cricketer to be honoured there.

Jack Marsh and Eddie Gilbert: the players the system stopped

Two names carry the weight of the exclusion period.

Jack Marsh was a genuinely fast bowler who played for New South Wales around the turn of the twentieth century and was repeatedly no-balled for throwing by umpires, in circumstances that contemporaries and later historians have both regarded as suspect. He never played for Australia. He died in 1916 in Orange after being beaten in the street, and the men responsible were acquitted.

Eddie Gilbert played for Queensland in the 1930s and was, by the accounts of the batters who faced him, one of the fastest bowlers in the country. He dismissed Don Bradman for a duck at the Gabba in 1931, in a spell Bradman later described as the fastest he ever faced. Gilbert lived under Queensland's protection legislation: he required official permission to travel to matches, and his wages were controlled by the state. He too was called for throwing, was never selected for Australia, and spent his last decades in an institution, dying in 1978.

Neither man's exclusion can be explained by ability. Both stories sit inside a legal framework designed to control Aboriginal people's movement and earnings, and cricket administration operated comfortably inside that framework.

Faith Thomas, 1958

Faith Thomas, a Ngarrindjeri woman born at Nepabunna in South Australia, became the first Aboriginal person to represent Australia at Test level when she played against England at the Junction Oval in Melbourne in February 1958. She was also the first Aboriginal woman to represent Australia in any sport.

Her route in was unusual. She trained as a nurse in Adelaide, learned from colleagues that women played organised cricket at all, was invited into a club game, and was selected for South Australia after about three matches. She played one Test, then returned to nursing and to raising a family — a career length that says more about the resourcing of women's cricket in the 1950s than about her.

She was honoured in the Australian honours system in 2019 for services to cricket and to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, and she died in April 2023 aged 90. Until Ashleigh Gardner's Test selection in 2019 she was the only Indigenous woman to have played a Test for Australia.

Jason Gillespie and the modern men

Jason Gillespie, a Kamilaroi man, debuted for Australia in 1996 and played seventy-one Tests, taking more than 250 wickets and, in 2006 at Chittagong, making an unbeaten double century as a nightwatchman. He was the first Aboriginal man to play Test cricket for Australia, and for a quarter of a century he was the only one.

That is worth stating flatly. Between 1868 and 2021, exactly one Aboriginal man played Test cricket for Australia. He went on to coach at first-class and franchise level, including a period in charge of Yorkshire, and to work in the Australian domestic system.

Dan Christian, a Wiradjuri man, played white-ball internationals for Australia and had a long Big Bash career across multiple clubs, captaining the 2018 Aboriginal XI on its tour of England. Ashleigh Gardner, a Muruwari woman, has been a fixture in the Australian women's side across all formats since 2017 and played her first Test in the 2019 Ashes.

Scott Boland and Brendan Doggett

Scott Boland, a Gulidjan man from the Colac region of Victoria, made his Test debut in the Boxing Day Test of the 2021-22 Ashes at the MCG and took six for seven in England's second innings. He was awarded the Johnny Mullagh Medal for that performance, in the match named for the man whose 1868 side he had followed to England in 2018.

Brendan Doggett, of Worimi descent, debuted during the 2025-26 Ashes at the age of thirty-one, seven years after first being named in a Test squad. He had taken an eleven-wicket haul and won player of the match in a Sheffield Shield final. When he and Boland played in the same XI, they became the first two Indigenous men to appear together in an Australian Test team — 157 years after an entire Australian side was Aboriginal.

Counting the women's team, five Indigenous Australians have played Test cricket for Australia: Faith Thomas, Jason Gillespie, Ashleigh Gardner, Scott Boland and Brendan Doggett. The Sheffield Shield is the competition that decides most of those selections, and it is where the pipeline is thinnest.

The Imparja Cup

Modern Indigenous cricket in Australia runs through Alice Springs. The Imparja Cup started in 1994 as a single match between Alice Springs and Tennant Creek, organised by Shane and Mervyn Franey with Ross Williams. The name comes from an Arrernte word for tracks or footprints.

Northern Territory Cricket took on the organisation by 1998, and Cricket Australia made it a national competition in 2001. It grew into a multi-division carnival — men's and women's, major centres, community teams playing shortened formats, and an indoor division added in 2016 — held in the Red Centre in the Australian winter dry season rather than the summer, which is a practical adaptation to Central Australian conditions.

National Indigenous Television has broadcast the tournament since 2009, which for many communities is the only cricket on television featuring people they know.

The National Indigenous Cricket Championships today

In 2016 Cricket Australia lifted the state and territory divisions out of the Imparja Cup and made them a stand-alone event: the National Indigenous Cricket Championships. The men's competition runs as a round robin with a one-day final; the women's runs as a Twenty20 round robin with a Twenty20 final.

The first eight stand-alone editions were played on Arrernte Country at Mparntwe, Alice Springs, before the tournament moved to Yuwibara Country at Mackay in Queensland. The Imparja Cup continued in the Northern Territory alongside it as the community and major-centres carnival.

1. 1Community cricketAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players compete in local club and community competitions, including the Imparja Cup community and major-centres divisions.
2. 2State and territory Indigenous programmesEach state and territory association runs Indigenous talent squads and camps that select representative sides.
3. 3National Indigenous Cricket ChampionshipsState and territory men's and women's teams meet annually in a carnival that acts as a scouting window for selectors.
4. 4State pathway squadsPlayers who impress move into second XI, academy and Sheffield Shield or Women's National Cricket League programmes on the same terms as everyone else.
5. 5National selectionTest, one-day and Twenty20 selection follows from domestic performance, with no separate quota or pathway.

Structural summary of the current pathway, not a ranking. Entry points vary by state and territory.

The 2018 tour that retraced 1868

In 2018, Cricket Australia sent Aboriginal men's and women's teams to England to mark 150 years since the original tour. Dan Christian captained the men, Ashleigh Gardner the women, and the schedule took in Surrey, Sussex, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and the Marylebone Cricket Club.

Both Scott Boland and Brendan Doggett were in that men's squad, which gives the trip a retrospective significance nobody could have claimed at the time. The party also visited King Cole's burial ground at Meath Gardens.

The tour was commemorative rather than competitive, and its value was mostly in visibility and in putting a group of Indigenous players in the same environment for a sustained period, which the domestic system rarely does.

The Johnny Mullagh Medal and the Boxing Day Test

From the 2020-21 season, the player of the match award for the Boxing Day Test at the MCG has been the Johnny Mullagh Medal, introduced under Cricket Australia's Reconciliation Action Plan. The medal is a recreation of the belt buckle worn by the 1868 team, and it is presented each year by a different descendant of that side. Ajinkya Rahane, of India, was the first recipient.

Placing the award on the biggest Test of the Australian summer was a deliberate choice. It puts the 1868 story in front of the largest cricket audience the country produces, every year, without requiring anyone to seek it out. Whether that constitutes meaningful recognition or comfortable symbolism is an argument worth having, and Indigenous cricketers themselves have made both cases publicly.

Barefoot Circle, playing shirts and Reconciliation Action Plans

Three other visible practices sit alongside the medal. The Barefoot Circle, adopted from around the start of the 2020-21 summer, has players from both teams stand barefoot in a circle before play to connect to Country and acknowledge past injustice. Indigenous playing shirts designed by Aboriginal artists — including artists descended from the 1868 team — are worn by Australian teams and by Big Bash League clubs during designated rounds. And Cricket Australia has published successive Reconciliation Action Plans setting out participation, employment and representation commitments.

The reasonable criticism of all of this is that ceremony is cheaper than structural change, and the numbers give that criticism force: three Indigenous men have played Test cricket for Australia in 157 years. The reasonable defence is that visibility precedes participation, and that the current NICC generation is the first to grow up seeing Aboriginal players in Australian sides regularly.

Why the tour has been so often mythologised

The 1868 story has been retold in documentaries, a stage play, a stamp issue and a great deal of promotional material, and the retelling has a habit of flattening it into a feel-good origin story: plucky Aboriginal cricketers charm England, everyone learns something.

That version omits most of the facts. It omits the four men who died in New South Wales before the ship sailed. It omits King Cole's grave in Tower Hamlets and the two men invalided home. It omits that the players were unpaid while the organisers were not, that they were contracted to perform spear-dodging exhibitions after play, and that the promotional material sold them as much on their difference as on their cricket. And it omits the legislation that followed within a year and made a repeat impossible.

Holding both halves at once is the only honest way to tell it. The cricket was genuinely good — an even record across forty-seven matches in an English summer is not a charity result, and George Tarrant, one of the fastest English bowlers of the era, said after bowling at Mullagh that he had never bowled to a better batsman. The circumstances were exploitative. Both things are true, and the second does not diminish the first.

Where to see the history in person

There are a handful of places in Australia where this history is physically present rather than described.

The Johnny Mullagh Cricket Centre at Harrow, in western Victoria, sits near where Mullagh lived, played and is buried, and holds material relating to the 1868 side. Edenhope, a short drive away, has memorials at Lake Wallace where the team trained before sailing. The MCG hosts the Mullagh Medal presentation every Boxing Day, and its museum carries material on the tour. In London, Meath Gardens in Tower Hamlets — the former Victoria Park Cemetery — is King Cole's burial ground and now carries a memorial.

For anyone travelling in Central Australia in the winter, the Imparja Cup in Alice Springs is the most direct way to see where the game actually lives in Aboriginal communities now, and the National Indigenous Cricket Championships is the elite end of the same week. Both are open to spectators and both are broadcast.

What is still missing

The gaps are not mysterious. Indigenous representation in Sheffield Shield and Women's National Cricket League squads remains low relative to population, and lower again in coaching, umpiring and administration. Remote and regional communities where interest is highest are furthest from turf wickets, indoor centres, coaching accreditation and the two-day grade cricket that the state pathway assumes. Travel costs for a family in Central Australia to keep a junior in a representative programme in a capital city are prohibitive without support.

The 2024 withdrawal of a Northern Territory side from the national championships — in the Territory that gave the tournament its name — was a reminder that the funding underneath these programmes is not secure.

None of this is unique to cricket, and some of it is common to every rural sport in the country. But cricket has a specific history here that other codes do not, and the 1868 team is the reason. The Australian game's first overseas representatives were Aboriginal men who were not paid, one of whom is buried in London, and whose successors were then legislated out of the sport for a century. Everything built since — the Imparja Cup, the NICC, the medal on Boxing Day — is being built on that.

For the wider Australian cricket picture, the Australia hub and the cricket section set out the structures around this one, the history of Australian cricket covers the national side's development, and the companion pages on the Women's Ashes points system and multicultural cricket deal with the other two questions of who plays this game in this country. Details of the venues named throughout are in the grounds guide and the Adelaide Oval page, and the domestic structure that feeds selection is set out in the Cricket Australia section and on the players index.