An Aboriginal Team Makes Australia’s First Cricket Tour of England

On 25 May 1868, an Australian cricket team walked onto the field at the Oval in London to face Surrey before a large and curious crowd. Every visiting cricketer was an Aboriginal man from the Western District of Victoria, making this side the first organised sporting group from Australia ever to travel abroad. Their departure preceded any representative tour by white Australian cricketers by a full decade, occurring at a time when international athletic contests of any kind were exceptionally rare.

The team's origins lay in the pastoral stations around Edenhope and the Wimmera region, where European station owners had introduced Aboriginal pastoral workers to cricket during the early 1860s. Local exhibition matches led to the assembly of an Aboriginal eleven coached by Victorian cricketer Tom Wills. On Boxing Day in 1866, Wills captained the side before an estimated 10,000 spectators at the Melbourne Cricket Ground against the prestigious Melbourne Cricket Club. An ensuing attempt by an entrepreneur named Captain Gurnett to take the players on an extended tour collapsed in Sydney due to embezzled funds, leaving the cricketers stranded until former Surrey professional Charles Lawrence stepped in to assist them.