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Australian Aborigines in Victorian Britain
From: Science Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum
| By:
David Sampson |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
One of the best-loved stories from Australian sporting history is that of the 1868 cricketing tour of England by an Aboriginal cricket team. It is cited by many as a unique example of humanitarianism and genuine racial interchange. David Sampson, lecturer at the ex-University of Technology in Sydney, argues that this misty-eyed view of the 1868 tour should be reconsidered. The Victorian public flocked in great numbers not to see the cricketing skills of the Aboriginal team, but to witness the natives throwing spears and boomerangs during the breaks from the game. He argues that the Aborigines of the 1868 "tour" were just another in a long line of exotic and ill-treated performers brought in from the colonies to titillate the Victorian metropolitan crowds. This article is adapted from a lecture given at the "Locating the Victorians" conference held at the Science Museum in June 2001. |
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| David Sampson discusses the 1868 cricket tour. | |
 t is remarkable and probably unfortunate that between 1788 and the latter part of the twentieth century the single best-known event in white Australian and Aboriginal relations, and certainly in British and Aboriginal relations, is an Aborigine cricket tour of England in 1868. This was the brainchild of William Hayman, a young Devon immigrant to the booming sheep industry of western Victoria. In Australia's awful history of relations with Aborigines, the tour occupies a privileged position. In contrast to dominant images of dispossession, racism and exploitation, it has become publicly established as a unique exemplar of racial humanitarianism, opportunity and enlightenment. |
Aborigines are proud of the 1868 touring team. But their attitudes are often more challenging and complex than those of Australian politicians and cricket authorities. Tim Chatfield, the Aboriginal custodian of the area where most of the Aborigines originated, offered me this interpretation of the tour: |
It was only exploitation: a follow up from dispossession and scientific research on the Aborigines. It's really sad. These guys were taken away from their families and land and animals. They were put on show with strange people, savages. England would have been terrifying for them, no kangaroos, no wildlife, and no family. |
The interpretations of Chatfield and other Aborigines are more revealing than the tours' established historical position as an inexplicable and ahistorical symbol of Victorian racial enlightenment. The tour has attained this status because it has become part of a much-admired tradition: Anglo-Australian cricket. Consequently the tour has taken on cricket's mythology of gentlemanly conduct and equality on the playing fields. But the tour was less typical of cricketing ideals than of Victorian attitudes and practices of race. |
The gentleman's game
One of the most respected Victorian cricketing gentlemen most closely associated with Aborigines in England was William South Norton of Kent. Norton who hosted the Aborigines at his English home and who captained them at his cricket match was a cousin of William Hayman. |
Later Norton recalled the tour: "All but a few of the Aborigines," he remembered, "were boomerangers and spear throwers, rather than cricketers. I and others tried hard to conciliate and please these savages and to get friendly with them. But except as regards one of them, without success." |
Norton's bluntly patrician attitudes, tellingly reveal the fundamental realities of the tour. In its appeal to Victorian audiences, in the nature of its most popular performances and in the level of racially based subordination confronted by the Aboriginal performers, the 1868 tour is better appreciated in its Victorian context. It was a case of petty colonial entrepreneurs, objectifying and commodifying exotic races by bringing them to the British metropolis for public and scientific observation. |
The Victorian public was mildly curious about Aborigine cricketers. People were greatly interested in the prospect of seeing living Aborigines, one of the most legendary and backward races established in the Victorian racial imagination. In an age characterised by the ascendancy of racial science and assumptions of European superiority, Australian aborigines were the embodiment of characteristics which the Victorians associated with racial primitivism. To scientists and the British public, Aborigines were unique and fascinating, barely surviving relics of the stone age, fossilised in the Victorian present. The words of C.S. Wake, a noted ethnologist, summarised the popular and scientific significance of Aborigines in the Victorian era: "The natives of Australia show approximately the condition in which man generally must have existed in the primeval ages. So soon is the struggle for existence between man and man commenced." |
It was not an age of relativism, and even Victorian liberals did not doubt that the intellectual and moral inferiority of Aborigines would lead to their evolutionary extinction. At the time of the tour, British interest in Aborigines was heightened by the apparent extinction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal race. The managers of the 1868 team proclaimed that they were the last of their tribe, and British journalists urged the public to see the tourists because the opportunity could not ever recur. |
King Billy is dead
In 1869 the death of King Billy, supposedly the last male Tasmanian Aborigine, was a public event. James Stevens, a British poet who emigrated to Australia, was obsessed by race and wrote King Billy's Skull, a parody horribly based on reality. It described two doctors, Blank and Dash, eagerly awaiting King Billy's death, so that the victor could steal his skull and garner the prestige of donating it to the British Museum: |
And Blank and myself had sworn an oath
Secret from each yet sworn to both
To achieve some scientific note
In catalogue or anecdote
By the munificent presentation
Of King Billy's skull to the British Nation
Fancy the honour, the kudos the fame,
A whole museum thrilled with one's name
Fancy the thousands all crowding to see
Skull of the last Aborigine
Presented by Asterisk Dash MD.
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Although British institutions and individuals had amassed impressive collections of Aboriginal skulls, skeletons and weapons, few living Aboriginals had been seen in Victorian England. Travellers to Australia had occasionally brought Aboriginal children to Britain as trophies or experiments in civilisation. The results in the main resulted in the rapid death of the children. |
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| A depiction of the theft of King Billy's Skull. | |
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The performing Aborigine
Such aboriginal imports were meant to represent the benefits to natives of British colonisation. Therefore, they were dressed in European fashion and expected to have abandoned Aboriginal culture. British visitors to Australia, however, were much more interested in watching "primitive" Aborigines perform elements of their unique indigenous culture. Many paid Aborigines to throw boomerangs and spears. Charles Darwin paid Aborigines to perform a corroboree and throw spears at a target. There is no doubt that Aborigines became quickly aware that they could benefit from their native skills. In the first royal visit to Australia in 1867, Prince Albert became fascinated by primitivist Aboriginal performance. Coroborree's were repeatedly organised for his pleasure. |
In Britain, George Kaplan's displays of native Americans in the 1840s were hugely influential in establishing the popularity of entertaining and educational indigenous shows, and by the mid Victorian era the practice of commodifying colonised peoples by exporting them to the metropolis for scientific and popular consumption had assumed unprecedented respectability, scope and imaginative variety. The shows offered Britons the opportunity of seeing living specimens of the world's primitive and exotic races. Native Americans shooting bows and arrow, pygmies hunting and hurling darts, Inuits hurling spears, Maori performing hakkas. |
Two forms of representation covered the myriad range of performances. The first and most popular presented images of primitivism, that is, exotic races demonstrating native weaponry, exotic garments, indigenous cultural practices and semi-naked non-white bodies. The second form of representation, often presented as ironic contrast, may be described as transformationist. This presented exotic peoples demonstrating accomplishments derived from aspects of European culture. Presenting speeches or sermons in English, dressing as Europeans and demonstrating European etiquette, dancing a waltz or a minuet and performing European songs or on musical instruments. |
The evolution of modern sport in industrialised Britain offered an appropriate performance mechanism for displaying exotic peoples. George Kaplan's Indians had demonstrated archery and war dances at Lords. One year before the Aborigines arrived in England they were preceded by a troop of Iroquois Indians who demonstrated their game of lacrosse. |
Touring England
British newspapers comfortably anticipated the Aboriginal tour in 1868 as an established form of sporting and racial novelty. The team sailed from Sydney to England in February 1868 accompanied by Charles Lawrence, an English cricket professional who captained them in Britain. (They were captained in every instance by a white man.) Although they were illiterate, the Aborigines had signed a contract with their colonial management which indentured them to perform and play cricket in Europe and be returned home in 12 months. They would be paid £ 50 each on return. Exactly one year later, 10 of them returned to Sydney, again accompanied by Lawrence. One had died in England, two had been invalided and none received their £ 50. |
Although the team was drawn from a tiny pool of surviving Wimerra Aborigines, it amazingly produced two truly great cricketers. From May to October they played 47 cricket matches and halfway through the final day of each of their cricket matches, regardless of the state of the game, cricket was abruptly terminated so that crowds could see the primary attraction they had come to see. |
The Aborigines retired to their tents, changed out of their cricketing costume and returned as Victorian audiences expected Aborigines to appear. A black skin-tight woollen costume simulated nakedness, over which was worn a loincloth made of possum skin, while a headdress made of lyrebird feathers completed the native ensemble. The aborigines carried spears and separated into two groups, which marked two opposite sides of the ground. Using a wimerra, a native spear thrower, one group hurled its spears into the distance. The other group moved at the last moment so the spears could lodge between their feet. Then they hurled returning boomerangs, the implement that symbolised the unique nature of Aboriginal racial identity and established the legitimacy of the performers. They bounced the boomerangs into the ground or hurled them high into the air, making them hum and whirr as they curved around spectators' heads or trees outside the ground before returning to the hands of the throwers. These were astonishing performances, leaving journalists and scientists such as Pitt Rivers and Lubbock to awkwardly rationalise how a purely instinctual race of the lowest grade could create an instrument that had escaped their superiors. |
The wonderful performances of 1868 were perhaps the first fully successful demonstrations for British audiences of returning boomerangs. Boomerang crazes in Oxbridge, Dublin and in British toyshops 30 years previously had faded quickly when the British were unable to make the boomerangs return. |
There was a truly bizarre coda to the fame of the boomerang performances. In 1895, Cecil Rhodes was in England and conniving to get support for the abortive Jameson raid the following year. Rhodes had privately financed the first white South African cricket side which toured England in 1894. While lunching with Pelham Warner, the pillar of the MCC cricketing establishment, Rhodes explained his selection policies: "They wanted me to send a black fella called Hendrix to England," he complained. Warner commented that he heard that Hendrix was a good bowler. "Yes," conceded Rhodes, "but I would not have it. They would have expected him to throw boomerangs during the luncheon interval." |
Displays of tribal virtuosity
The last of the Aborigines' spectacular performances was a solo piece of virtuosity performed by John Gungenoe (or Dick-a-Dick). Still dressed in Aboriginal costume, clutching a narrow shield in one hand and an L-shaped club in the other, Dick-a-Dick confronted a group of spectators who hurled cricket balls at him from 10 metres. Beginning with a war cry, Dick-a-Dick parried or dodged the cricket balls with his shield or clubs. He gesticulated at the throwers failure to hit him, taunting them, advancing towards them, laughing and yelling encouragement at them. He would move his head to make the cricket balls miss by the slightest margin, dropped down on one knee and even poked out his tongue at his impotent challengers. The performances frequently roused audiences into a frenzy as at Lords where excited spectators burst through barriers and carried the triumphant warrior off the field. Audiences admired his amazing reflexes and understood that it was some sort of warrior performance but few understood the cultural origins of the display. |
In 1814 a manuscript published in London included an image of an aboriginal trial. This illustration depicted a lone aboriginal warrior protecting himself with a shield against combatants with spears. It explained that the trial was a result of the defendant transgressing against a woman of the other tribe. Five years later, in an article entitled "Australian Blacks," London's Chamber Magazine explained that the trial by single warrior against spears and boomerangs was a rational element of aboriginal law designed to satisfy honour while minimising bloodshed. Aborigines themselves adapted the activity into a daring activity and a test of manhood. |
But it was still being used for its original purpose while Dick-a-Dick was protecting himself in England. One testimony from Australia demonstrates how Dick-a-Dick adapted his own performance from its original source. An English visitor to Australia, W. Glanville Wills, who had taken a holiday for his health, attended one of Dick-a-Dick's earliest performances for the team in Redfern, Sydney, before they went to England. Glanville Wills described this performance in its original form: "Four of the blacks stationed themselves in different parts of the circle around him armed with spears, but he warded all the spears off with his shield. Then four of the white men took the places of the blacks armed with cricket balls, which they flung with all their force at him but he was prepared for each as it came." |
Repeated press reports of journalistic expectations and audience reactions leave no doubt that Victorian spectators were more eager to see the Aborigines' native performances than their cricket marches. Crowd estimates indicate that on the days that only cricket was played the average attendance was 1,500, while on the afternoons of the aboriginal performances crowds swelled to about 2,500. |
However, like most like most living exhibits of race brought to the Victorian metropolis, the Aborigines experiences in Britain were predominantly difficult and painful. They suffered death and frequent illness, along with cultural alienation and constant scrutiny. They were overworked and unpaid. They resisted being measured by an ethnologist and, to judge from the testimony of Maori performers in Britain in 1863, it is feasible that they were distressed by common discourses about their inferiority and imminent extinction. |
The major beneficiary of the tour was the Victorian public. Before 1868 few had seen living Aborigines. By the tour's end, crowds totalling 200,000 had seen Aborigines play cricket, compete in athletics, hurl spears and conduct expert demonstrations of returning boomerangs in flight, as well as seeing an aboriginal warrior defend himself. It is time that the full dimensions of the tour and all the Aborigines' achievements and sufferings in the Victorian metropolis were better recognised. |
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