Origin of Cricket in Australia: How the Game Began

Cricket arrived in Australia as cargo. It came off ships with soldiers, officers and free settlers, and it was played on rough ground in a penal colony within a few years of the First Fleet's arrival. What happened next is the more interesting part. Within two generations the colonies had permanent clubs, purpose-built grounds and a fixture between Victoria and New South Wales that people travelled hundreds of miles to watch. Within three, an Australian eleven beat England on level terms.

This page covers that formation, up to the first Test in 1877 and the intercolonial competition that became the Sheffield Shield. For the national team afterwards, read our history of Australian cricket.

When did Australia start playing cricket

The earliest documented cricket in Australia appears in the Sydney press in the opening decade of the nineteenth century, in notices describing matches played by officers of the colony and crews of visiting ships. The game was being played on open ground near the settlement, in a colony barely fifteen years old, by men who had learned it in England and had no intention of giving it up.

Those first matches were not organised sport in any modern sense. They were occasional, socially exclusive and dependent on whoever happened to be in port. But cricket had two advantages in colonial Australia that few other pastimes shared. It required almost no equipment beyond a bat, a ball and some flat ground, all of which the colonies had in quantity. And it was a visible assertion of Englishness in a place a very long way from England, which made it attractive to the free settler class that increasingly ran the colonies.

The first clubs

Permanent clubs followed permanent settlement. The Australian Cricket Club was formed in Sydney in the 1820s, and cricket in Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, was organised early enough that Hobart Town had a club by the 1830s playing regular fixtures. Tasmanian cricket in this period was strong relative to the size of its population, which is why it features so prominently in the first intercolonial match.

The most consequential foundation was the Melbourne Cricket Club, established in 1838, three years after the settlement at Port Phillip began. The club moved sites more than once in its early decades before settling on the ground that became the Melbourne Cricket Ground. From that address the MCC would go on to host the first Test match, the first one-day international, and the annual fixture described in our guide to the Boxing Day Test at the MCG.

Sydney's cricket infrastructure developed alongside, with military and civil clubs playing on the Domain and later at the Association Ground, which became the Sydney Cricket Ground. Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth followed as their colonies grew.

Gold, population and the making of a cricket culture

The gold rushes of the 1850s transformed Australian cricket by transforming Australia. Victoria's population multiplied within a decade. The new arrivals were overwhelmingly young men, mostly from Britain, many of them with money in their pockets and Saturdays to fill. Melbourne acquired the wealth to build grandstands and the crowds to fill them.

The consequences were immediate. Club cricket in Melbourne and Sydney became competitive rather than merely social. Grounds were levelled, turf was cultivated, and admission was charged. Cricket became a commercial proposition in Australia decades before most people would have predicted it, and it was the commercial opportunity, not sporting idealism, that brought the first English teams out.

The intercolonial matches

The first intercolonial cricket match in Australia was played at Launceston in February 1851, between Victoria and Tasmania. Tasmania won. The fixture was arranged partly as a sporting contest and partly as a piece of colonial assertion, and it established a template: colonies played each other, the results were reported at length, and civic pride attached itself to the outcome.

New South Wales and Victoria first met in 1856 in Sydney, and that fixture rapidly became the most important cricket played in the country. It was contested twice a season, home and away, and it produced the first generation of Australian cricketers with a reputation beyond their own colony. South Australia entered intercolonial cricket in the 1890s as its playing strength developed, with Queensland and Western Australia joining the first-class structure much later.

Intercolonial cricket did the essential work of raising standards. It gave batsmen three-day matches against the best bowlers in the country, on prepared pitches, in front of hostile crowds. Everything Australian cricket did against England from the 1870s onwards was built on it.

From intercolonial matches to the Sheffield Shield

In 1891/92 an English team toured Australia under the patronage of Lord Sheffield, an English aristocrat with a serious interest in the game. When the tour concluded, he donated a sum of money to the New South Wales Cricket Association for the good of Australian cricket. The colonies used it to fund a trophy and a formal competition between New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. The Sheffield Shield was first contested in 1892/93 and won by Victoria.

That competition, expanded over the following century to include all six states, remains the foundation of Australian first-class cricket and the pathway into the Test side. Our guide to the Sheffield Shield sets out how it works and why it has retained its status in a crowded calendar.

The English tours

Australian cricket's development is inseparable from the visits of English professional teams, and the first of those visits was arranged by caterers.

In 1861/62 the Melbourne firm of Spiers and Pond, having failed to secure a different attraction, sponsored a tour by a team of English professionals captained by H.H. Stephenson. The commercial gamble paid off spectacularly. Tens of thousands watched the opening match at the MCG. The English team played against odds throughout, facing eighteen or twenty-two local fielders rather than eleven, which was the standard arrangement when a professional side met colonial opposition.

George Parr brought a second team in 1863/64, including E.M. Grace, and went through the tour undefeated. W.G. Grace himself led a side out in 1873/74. Each tour did the same three things: it showed Australian players what the highest standard looked like, it produced enormous gate receipts, and it made the eventual question unavoidable. How long would the colonies keep accepting a handicap?

The 1868 Aboriginal tour of England

In 1868 a team of Aboriginal cricketers from the Western District of Victoria toured England. It was the first organised group of Australian cricketers of any description to tour overseas, and it took place nine years before the first Test match.

The players were drawn principally from Jardwadjali, Wotjobaluk and Gunditjmara communities in western Victoria, many of them working on pastoral stations. They had played together as a team in Victoria from the mid-1860s, appearing at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Boxing Day 1866 before a large crowd. An earlier attempt to take a team abroad had been made, and the Victorian Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines had sought to prevent Aboriginal players being taken out of the colony. The 1868 party left from Sydney.

The side was captained and coached by Charles Lawrence, an English professional who had stayed in Australia after the 1861/62 tour. The team played 47 matches across England between May and October, winning 14, losing 14 and drawing 19, against club and county opposition. The itinerary was punishing by any standard, and the tour finances depended on the matches being accompanied by displays of boomerang and spear throwing, which were advertised alongside the cricket.

The outstanding cricketer of the tour was Johnny Mullagh, whose Aboriginal name was Unaarrimin. Tour records credit him with 1,698 runs and 245 wickets across the trip, an enormous workload in a schedule of that length. Other prominent members of the party included Johnny Cuzens, Twopenny, Dick-a-Dick, Bullocky and Tiger. One player, King Cole, died in England during the tour, and two others returned to Australia early in poor health.

Aboriginal cricketers did not play Test cricket for Australia in the decades that followed. Mullagh played once for Victoria in an intercolonial match. Recognition of the 1868 team came very much later: the players are now formally acknowledged as the first Australian representative touring side, and the medal awarded to the player of the match in the Boxing Day Test at the MCG is named after Mullagh.

The road to 1877

By the mid-1870s the case for a match on even terms was becoming difficult to dismiss. Australian bowlers had begun taking wickets against English touring sides even with the odds in place. A wicketkeeper from New South Wales named Billy Murdoch and a fast bowler from the same colony named Fred Spofforth were emerging. Charles Bannerman, English-born but raised in Sydney, was scoring heavily.

In March 1877, a Combined Australian XI met James Lillywhite's English professional team at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, eleven against eleven. The match is now recognised as the first ever Test match. Bannerman scored 165 before retiring hurt with a split finger, which remains the first century made in Test cricket and, at the time, considerably more than half his team's first-innings total. Australia won by 45 runs. A return match a fortnight later was won by England, which established immediately that neither result had been a fluke.

The English side that lost was not the strongest available. It contained no amateurs, had come to Australia via New Zealand, and was without its first-choice wicketkeeper. Australians pointed out, reasonably, that they had not selected from a full-strength pool either, and that nobody had given them extra fielders.

What 1877 changed

Before 1877	After 1877
English teams played colonial sides against odds of 18 or 22	Even elevens, on the same terms
Australian cricket measured itself against other colonies	Australian cricket measured itself against England
Touring was a commercial venture arranged by promoters	Touring became a representative national undertaking

The following year, an Australian team toured England and beat a strong MCC side at Lord's inside a single day, with Spofforth taking wickets in both innings. In 1882 the same bowler won a Test at The Oval by seven runs, and a satirical obituary for English cricket in a London newspaper created the Ashes. Our own compiled records now count 72 Ashes series since 1882/83, with Australia ahead 34 to 32 and six drawn, across 340 Tests. All of it descends from a colonial fixture that started as a way of selling tickets.

Grounds, pitches and the physical conditions

Colonial cricket was played on surfaces that bore little relation to the manicured squares of later Australian grounds. Early matches took place on grazed common land, on parade grounds and on cleared paddocks, and the ball behaved accordingly. Batting was a hazardous occupation, scores were low, and the shooter that kept along the ground was as common as the delivery that reared.

The change came with money and machinery. Once clubs owned their grounds and charged admission, they could justify investment in turf. Heavy rollers, mowers and dedicated groundstaff arrived in Melbourne and Sydney through the 1860s and 1870s, and the pitches that resulted were among the best in the world. Australian curators developed a particular expertise in producing hard, true surfaces that lasted, which had an enduring effect on how Australians learned to bat and bowl. A batsman raised on a firm pitch with reliable bounce plays off the back foot; a bowler on the same surface learns that pace and bounce, rather than movement off the seam, are what earn him wickets. That inheritance is visible in the lineage traced by our guide to the greatest Australian fast bowlers.

Equipment changed alongside. The heavy, curved bats of the early colonial period gave way to the straight-bladed, spliced bat that had become standard in England, and protective equipment arrived slowly and was regarded with some suspicion. Wicketkeepers stood up to fast bowling without the aids that later generations took for granted, which is why the Victorian keeper Jack Blackham, who dispensed with a longstop behind him, made such an impression on English observers.

The colonial associations

Australian cricket needed administrators as well as players, and the colonies produced them in a characteristic pattern. Clubs came first, then a governing association within each colony, and only much later a national body.

The New South Wales Cricket Association was formed in 1859, giving that colony a central authority earlier than most. South Australia followed with its own association in the 1870s, Queensland in the same decade, and Western Australia in the 1880s. In Victoria the Melbourne Cricket Club held effective control of the colony's cricket for much longer, which produced a rivalry between club and association interests that persisted for decades.

The absence of a national body until well after the first Test is one of the odder features of Australian cricket's origins. For nearly thirty years, Australian teams that toured England were essentially private ventures: the players organised themselves, split the profits, and selected the side. That arrangement produced excellent cricket and a lasting sense among Australian players that the team belonged to them rather than to an institution. When a national board was eventually established in the twentieth century and asserted control over touring and finances, the resulting conflict was severe, and versions of the same argument have recurred ever since.

The first great Australian cricketers

The generation that played in 1877 had learned the game entirely within Australia, and several of them would have walked into any side in the world.

• Charles Bannerman was born in Kent and raised in Sydney. He batted with a freedom that colonial pitches did not encourage, and his 165 retired hurt in the first Test remains the innings on which Australian batting was founded.
• Fred Spofforth, born in Sydney, bowled at genuine pace with a high action and a change of pace that batsmen could not read. He declined to play in the first Test because Blackham rather than his preferred keeper was selected, then spent the next decade proving what Australia had missed.
• Jack Blackham kept wicket for Victoria and Australia for twenty years and effectively redefined the position by standing up to the stumps to bowling that nobody else would have attempted.
• Billy Murdoch captained Australia in England and was, for a period in the 1880s, regarded as the finest batsman in the colonies.
• Tom Wills, a Victorian all-rounder educated in England, was among the most influential figures of the pre-Test period. He was involved in the early codification of Australian rules football and coached the Aboriginal team in its Victorian matches before the 1868 tour.

None of these men were products of a development system, because none existed. They came out of club cricket in two cities, improved by playing intercolonial matches and by facing English professionals, and they were good enough that England's assumptions about colonial cricket did not survive contact with them.

Crowds and the barracking tradition

Australian cricket crowds were loud from the beginning, and English visitors said so repeatedly. The gold-rush cities produced a large, young, well-paid working population that treated a day at the cricket as public entertainment rather than genteel observation. Barracking, the running commentary directed at players from the outer, became a recognised feature of Australian grounds within a few decades of organised cricket beginning, and it developed its own conventions and reputations.

That crowd culture had consequences beyond atmosphere. It meant Australian cricket was financially self-supporting early. It meant players performed under pressure from their own supporters as well as from opponents. And it established the expectation, still present, that Australian cricket is played in front of large crowds with something at stake, whether at a Test match or at a Big Bash fixture in the same stadiums.

Key dates in Australian cricket's origins

Date	Event
Early 1800s	First documented references to cricket being played in Sydney
1830s	Organised club cricket established in Hobart Town
1838	Melbourne Cricket Club founded
February 1851	First intercolonial match, Victoria against Tasmania at Launceston
1856	First New South Wales against Victoria fixture
1859	New South Wales Cricket Association formed
1861/62	First English touring team, sponsored by Spiers and Pond
1868	Aboriginal team tours England, the first Australian side to tour overseas
March 1877	First Test match, Melbourne, Australia win by 45 runs
1892/93	First Sheffield Shield season

What the origin story left behind

Several features of modern Australian cricket are direct inheritances from this period. The state-based structure, with selection flowing upward from six strong domestic sides, comes from the intercolonial fixtures. The size and prominence of the grounds comes from the gold-rush wealth that built them. The commercial instinct, the willingness to treat cricket as an entertainment business, was present from the first English tour and would resurface dramatically in the 1970s.

So did the assumption that Australian cricket should be run by Australians rather than deferred to England, which is why the eventual formation of a national board and the long argument between players and administrators followed the shape it did. Those developments belong to the history of Australian cricket.

The modern game in Australia now includes a franchise Twenty20 competition described in our guide to the Big Bash League, with clubs including the Perth Scorchers, Sydney Sixers and Melbourne Stars playing across an Australian summer that also contains Test cricket and the Shield. For an overview of how those competitions fit together, see cricket in Australia.

The same colonial machinery that carried cricket to Sydney and Hobart carried it elsewhere, and our companion accounts trace the equivalent stories for England, India, New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies. All of them are collected at our cricket history index.