Indigenous Australian Cricketers: 1868 to Today

The first cricket team to leave Australia and play abroad was not an Australian XI in any sense the game later recognised. It was thirteen Aboriginal men from western Victoria, who sailed for England in early 1868, played from May to October, and came home to a country that spent the next century and a quarter forgetting they had gone.

That tour is the natural place to begin a list of Indigenous cricketers, and it is also the reason the list is so short afterwards. The men of 1868 were good enough to hold their own across a full English season. What followed was not a pathway but a series of individuals who arrived, were obstructed, and in several cases were driven out of the first-class game on grounds that had nothing to do with cricket.

This page sets out who they were. It is not a ranking. The players below are grouped by the era they played in and the specific barrier each of them met, because the barrier is usually the reason a name is unfamiliar.

Who is on the list, and why the count is contested

Two definitions are in play whenever Indigenous representation in Australian cricket is counted. The narrow one takes players who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and have played Test cricket. The broader one takes everyone who has played first-class or international cricket for an Australian side.

The narrow count is the one usually quoted, and it is stark. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up close to four per cent of the Australian population; before Brendan Doggett's debut, Indigenous players accounted for well under one per cent of Australians who had played Test cricket. That gap is the single fact that frames everything below, and it is a gap that Australian cricket has publicly acknowledged rather than disputed.

The complication is that heritage was often unrecorded, sometimes hidden, and in at least one prominent case unknown to the player. Jason Gillespie did not know he was descended from the Kamilaroi people until it was reported publicly. Any list of this kind is therefore incomplete by construction, and the players named here are those whose heritage is documented and acknowledged.

The 1868 party

The team was drawn from Jardwadjali, Gunditjmara and Wotjobaluk country in western Victoria. Tom Wills — the same Wills who is central to the origins of cricket in Australia and to the invention of Australian football — coached and captained the side in its early Australian matches. By the time it reached England, Charles Lawrence, a former English professional who had settled in Sydney, was in charge.

They played 47 matches in England: fourteen won, fourteen lost, nineteen drawn. For a party of thirteen playing almost continuously across five months against club and county-standard opposition, that record is remarkable, and it was achieved with several men carrying injuries that could not be rested because there was nobody to replace them.

The tour was also, unavoidably, an exhibition. Matches were followed by displays of boomerang and spear throwing, and Jungunjinanuke — known on the tour as Dick-a-Dick — would stand in front of spectators and deflect or dodge cricket balls thrown at him with a shield and a club, apparently without ever being struck. Modern accounts are divided about how to read this. It drew the crowds that paid for the tour; it also framed the players as curiosities rather than cricketers, which is precisely the framing their cricket contradicted.

One member of the party, known as King Cole, died in England during the tour and was buried there. He was in his mid-twenties.

Unaarrimin

Johnny Mullagh, whose name was Unaarrimin, was the tour's outstanding cricketer and one of the outstanding all-rounders of the era. He played 45 of the 47 matches. He scored around 1,700 runs at an average in the low twenties, which in 1868 conditions on unprepared English wickets was a serious return, and he bowled an enormous volume of overs — well over 1,800 — taking close to 250 wickets at around ten runs each. A large proportion of those overs were maidens.

Contemporary accounts rated his batting technique the equal of any professional he faced. He was a Jardwadjali man from western Victoria, he returned to the district after the tour, and he later appeared in a first-class match. He is buried at Harrow in the Wimmera, and the ground there carries his name.

Cricket Australia inducted him into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame in 2020, more than 150 years after the tour. In the same announcement it created the Johnny Mullagh Medal, awarded to the player of the match in the Boxing Day Test at the MCG from that year onwards. Ajinkya Rahane received the first one, for a century that beat Australia — an outcome nobody choreographed and which arguably suited the honour better than a home win would have.

Twopenny, whose name was Murrumgunarriman, was among the first Indigenous cricketers to appear in Australian first-class cricket after the tour. Johnny Cuzens, a fast bowler and quick scorer, was the other member of the 1868 side whose cricket drew sustained comparison with professionals of the day.

The bowlers who were called

Between the 1890s and the 1930s three Indigenous fast bowlers reached Australian first-class cricket, and all three had their bowling actions questioned rather than their ability.

Jack Marsh played for New South Wales at the turn of the century and was fast enough that batters of the period spoke about him the way they later spoke about the great quick bowlers. He was no-balled for throwing repeatedly. Albert Henry, generally known as Alec Henry, played for Queensland in the same era and met the same treatment.

Eddie Gilbert is the most documented case. A Queenslander, taken as a child under the policies that produced the Stolen Generations, he bowled off a short run from what looked almost like a standing start and generated pace that unsettled everyone who faced him. In a Sheffield Shield match in Brisbane in 1931 he knocked the bat out of Don Bradman's hands and dismissed him for nought in the same over, along with the other New South Wales opener. Bradman later described that spell as the fastest bowling he ever faced — a judgement from the one Australian batter whose word on the subject settles the matter.

Gilbert was no-balled for throwing too. He was never picked for Australia, and neither was Marsh. Whether their actions were legal by the standards of the day is not something film can now resolve; what is documented is that the suspicion attached to all three Indigenous quick bowlers of the period and that contemporaries, including some who played with them, believed race was doing the work. The consequence for the national side is that Australia's celebrated line of fast bowlers has a hole in it where three of them should be.

Faith Thomas, 1958

The first Indigenous cricketer to represent Australia was a woman, and she did it in a single Test.

Faith Thomas was a fast bowler from South Australia and a working nurse. She was selected for Australia against England in 1958, played the Test, and then declined further selection because touring would have cost her her nursing career and she had no intention of giving that up. She lived a long life afterwards and became a well-known figure in South Australian public life.

Her selection came thirty-eight years before an Indigenous man played Test cricket for Australia. That ordering is not an accident of talent. The women's game in the 1950s was amateur, self-funded and organised outside the structures that controlled men's selection, and it was consequently a little easier to enter — and paid nothing, which is why she had to choose.

Jason Gillespie, and the gap either side

Jason Gillespie made his Test debut in 1996 and played 71 Tests, taking 259 wickets. He was, for several years, the third seamer in the best bowling attack in the world and better than that description implies: a bowler who hit the seam, moved the ball late and bowled long spells uncomplainingly. He also made a Test double century as a nightwatchman in Chittagong, which remains one of the game's odder records.

He is of Kamilaroi descent through his father's family, a connection he learned about as an adult, and he has spoken since about the discomfort of being held up as a representative of a community he had not grown up knowing. He is the first Indigenous man to have worn the baggy green in a Test match.

For twenty-five years after his debut he was also the only one.

Boland and Doggett

Scott Boland became the second Indigenous man to play a Test for Australia on Boxing Day 2021, at the age of thirty-two, and took six wickets for seven runs in his first innings — figures that were immediately among the most extraordinary in the history of the ground. He is a Gulidjan man from western Victoria, he had spent a decade as a Sheffield Shield professional, and the general view before that Test was that his chance had gone. He then kept taking wickets, in Australia and away, for years afterwards.

Brendan Doggett debuted in November 2025, at thirty-one, having built a long first-class record across two states. He is a Worimi man from eastern New South Wales. His selection meant that for the first time two Indigenous men appeared in the same Australian Test XI.

Both careers say something uncomfortable about the pathway. Neither man was a teenage prospect fast-tracked through an academy. Both were long-serving state professionals who were picked when injuries opened a door in their thirties. The system did not identify them early; they outlasted it.

Player	First played for Australia	Nation	Note
Faith Thomas	1958, women's Test	South Australia	Fast bowler; one Test, then chose nursing
Jason Gillespie	1996, Test	Kamilaroi	71 Tests, 259 wickets
Ashleigh Gardner	Test debut 2019	Muruwari	Long international career across formats
Scott Boland	Boxing Day 2021, Test	Gulidjan	6 for 7 on debut at the MCG
Brendan Doggett	November 2025, Test	Worimi	Debut aged 31 after a long state career

Ashleigh Gardner

Ashleigh Gardner is the most decorated Indigenous cricketer Australia has produced. A Muruwari woman from Sydney, she came into the national side as a hitter and an off-spinner and developed into a genuine match-winning all-rounder in all three formats, in a team whose standards are set out in the guide to Australia's women's dominance. Her Test debut came against England in 2019, and she was the first Indigenous woman to play a Test for Australia since Faith Thomas.

She has also been the most publicly political of the players on this list, consistently raising what Australia Day means to Aboriginal people during a period when domestic cricket scheduled fixtures around it, and establishing a foundation that funds Indigenous education. The Women's Big Bash League gave her a platform earlier in her career than the international game would have, and she used it.

Dan Christian, a Wiradjuri man, played white-ball cricket for Australia across a long career and captained the Indigenous men's side that toured the United Kingdom in 2018 to mark 150 years since the 1868 tour, with Gardner leading the women's side. Each squad numbered thirteen, and each player was paired with one of the original tourists.

The Imparja Cup, and what grew out of it

The reason the modern list is lengthening at all is a competition that started in Alice Springs.

The Imparja Cup began as a local Indigenous carnival in Mparntwe, on Arrernte country, and grew over three decades into the central event in the Indigenous cricket calendar. In 2016 Cricket Australia used it as the foundation for a national tournament, the National Indigenous Cricket Championships, contested by state and territory sides.

The first eight editions of the standalone championships were played in Alice Springs before the tournament moved to Yuwibara country at Mackay in Queensland. The men's competition now runs to eight teams, with New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory among them. The women's division has grown more recently, adding South Australia and drawing in players from the Northern Territory and Papua New Guinea. The Imparja Cup itself continues in Alice Springs alongside it.

The championships matter for two reasons. They are a scouting event — state pathway staff attend, and players have moved from the carnival into state programmes. And they are the only week in the Australian season when Indigenous cricket is the main event rather than a theme attached to somebody else's fixture, which is a distinction the players themselves tend to draw.

What the list says about Australian cricket

The honest reading is that Australia produced world-class Indigenous cricketers in 1868, obstructed the next three generations of them, and has only in the last thirty years fielded them in the national side with any regularity — and that the recent arrivals came through as adults rather than as products of the development system.

The structural work now happening sits mostly below the professional level: Indigenous participation programmes, remote-community cricket, the championships, and pathway places reserved and funded. Whether it changes the count is a question the next decade answers rather than this page. What the record establishes is that the shortage was never about ability. Mullagh, Gilbert and Marsh settled that question a long time ago, and the reasons their careers ended where they did are matters of history rather than of cricket.

The broader story of who has played the game here, and on whose terms, runs on into the guide to multicultural cricket in Australia, while the competition Gilbert and Marsh played in is described under the Sheffield Shield. The Victorian district that produced the 1868 side is covered in cricket in Victoria, and the rest of the Australian game sits on the cricket in Australia hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on the National Museum of Australia's and the State Library of New South Wales's holdings on the 1868 tour, Cricket Australia's own reporting of the Johnny Mullagh Medal, his Hall of Fame induction, the 2018 commemorative tour and the National Indigenous Cricket Championships, Wisden's account of Indigenous representation in Australian Test cricket, and Northern Territory Cricket's material on the Imparja Cup. Career figures for the 1868 tourists survive in incomplete and sometimes inconsistent form, and where published totals differ they are given here as approximations rather than exact numbers. Statements about heritage follow the players' own public identification. No total on this page has been derived from our datasets; the account is descriptive throughout.