Australian Aboriginal cricketers
1867
Albumen photoprint on cardboard with lithographed letterpress
Bequest of Sir William Dixson, 1951
DL Pf 140
The 16 portraits that make up this composite image were taken by colonial surveyor Patrick Dawson at his photographic studio in the Victorian town of Warrnambool in the months before the team’s departure for England. Each player was individually photographed – five of the Aboriginal team members were posed with cricket bats or stumps but most with weapons such as boomerangs, spears, clubs and shields. The captain, ex-English player Charles Lawrence, holds a ball.
Dawson assembled the individual portraits into a composite, which he also issued as a cased-ambrotype for a small-scale souvenir. The players are identified on each of the individual portraits, along with their team managers at the top and bottom. Two of the photographed players (Harry Rose and Tim Draw) did not end up going on the tour, and were replaced by Jim Crow Jallachmurrimin and Charles Dumas Pripumarraman.
At the end of a cricket match, the Australian
team would demonstrate boomerang throwing and other physical feats. Reporting
on the game held at Lords in May against the Surrey Club before an estimated
crowd of around 4000, the Times
commented that Dick a Dick (Jungunjinanuke) protected himself against ‘a shower
of cricket balls hurled at him by Messrs. Burrup, Garland, South, Norton and
Shepherd’ from the opposing team by a routine of ducking and dodging with a
shield.*
Footnotes
*‘The Black
Cricketers’, The Sunday Times, Sunday
31 May 1868; p 6.
‘At an exhibition of native
Australian sports by the aboriginal cricketers at Bootle, near Liverpool on
Saturday, a boomerang, thrown by Mullagh, was carried by the wind among the
audience. It struck a gentleman on the head, cutting through the hat and
inflicting a severe wound across the brow. Surgical aid was at once procured,
and the gentleman was able to return home.’*
Footnotes
*Pall
Mall Gazette, Monday 14 September, 1868;
Issue 1121
In May 1988 a team of
Aboriginal players, captained by John McGuire and managed by Mark Ella, toured
England to mark the Australian Bicentenary. This team retraced the steps of the
original 1868 tour to commemorate the first Australian team.
During the tour, in June
1868, one of the team members, King Cole (Brippokei) died from tuberculosis and
was buried in Tower Hamlets in London. Sundown (Ballrinjarrimin) and Jim Crow (not
pictured in Dawson’s photograph) went home in August due to ill-health.
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