In 1868 the first Australian cricket team to tour England was composed of Aborigines. This podcast tells how the team was formed in rural Western Victoria two years earlier and its earliest matches in Edenhope and Hamilton. The story is all the more remarkable because it took place against a background in which the indigenous people of Australia were facing extinction from the combined pressures of disease, alcohol addiction, land grabs and cold blooded murder.

This episode also tells us something of Tom Wills, once acclaimed Australia’s finest cricketer. Grandson of a convict, he was educated at one of England’s finest public schools and found himself coaching the Aboriginal team five years after his father had been killed by natives in Queensland.

Australia in the mid-nineteenth century was an untamed land of opportunity for white settlers, with fortunes to be made from sheep ranching and the goldfields. For black Australians they were dark days with many commentators predicting that the aboriginal population would be extinct within a generation or two, but this small group of men set out on an epic two year journey which would take them around the world to challenge the prejudices of the time.

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