In 1988, an Aboriginal cricket team toured England as part of Australia’s Bicentenary celebrations. The tour retraced the steps of the 1868 Aboriginal cricket team and was captained by John McGuire. A prolific batsman in Perth grade cricket, McGuire was one of the three players to score over 10,000 runs, though he never represented Western Australia. As Bob Reece contends in The Invincibles: New Norcia’s Aboriginal Cricketers 1879–1906, McGuire’s non-selection stemmed from ‘the continual climate of racial discrimination’ in Western Australian cricket. Reece tracks this discrimination to the treatment of the New Norcia Benedictine Mission’s highly successful Aboriginal team of the late-nineteenth century. McGuire’s great-grandfather, John Blurton, was a team member. Like McGuire, he was among the finest cricketers of his day.
Reece has resurrected Blurton and his fellow Invincibles’ stories in both words and evocative photographs from the period, and has credited them with raising Perth’s early cricketing standards. As such, The Invincibles is both a welcome addition and corrective to the game’s history in the West. As Reece details, the Invincibles triumphed over Perth and Fremantle’s best teams. The team’s founder and captain was an Irish Protestant, Henry Lefroy. Educated at Rugby School, Lefroy settled on the Victoria Plains in the early 1870s, and became friends with New Norcia Mission’s founder, Bishop Rosendo Salvado. As Reece explains, the Spanish-born Salvado sought to civilise the Aborigines, banning their traditional ways and moulding them into a self-sustainable, God-fearing agricultural community. Drawing from his Rugby education, Lefroy convinced Salvado of cricket’s civilising benefits. By 1883, the New Norcians – or Invincibles – were considered the colony’s best team and Blurton its finest player.
Despite their on-field successes, the Invincibles and Aborigines in general were still considered lesser beings on evolutionary and cricketing scales. The Invincibles’ access to Perth fixtures was dependent on Lefroy’s patronage and Salvado’s influence. When Lefroy left the region in 1883, the tours stopped. They resumed in 1886, with the Invincibles recording the then highest team score (214) in an innings in the West. However, as Reece notes, Perth cricket changed with the Western Australian Cricket Association’s (WACA) establishment in November 1885. It introduced a local competition, comprising teams which the Invincibles had defeated. As the WACA committee had little sympathy for Aborigines, the Invincibles were not invited to join the new competition. According to Reece, the committee comprised mainly pastoralists who were in conflict with Aborigines over land disputes and livestock raids.
This was the start of Aboriginal cricket’s exclusion in the West. The Invincibles’ cricketing prowess had won plaudits in Perth society, but they were never accepted fully. Reece remarks that after-match dinners were thrown in the Invincibles’ honour, but they were never allowed to make a speech. Their voices were not heard, and so their story was appropriated, reproduced and celebrated as an example of white paternalistic rule over so-called lesser beings on the evolutionary scale. Reece details paternalism’s darker side: the burials of Invincibles in unmarked graves or ‘heathen pits’; the suppression of their traditional culture; and the racial segregation from settler society to ward off miscegenation and the demon drink.
The Invincibles returned to Perth in 1906 after a 19-year absence, defeating the town’s finest teams again. According to Reece, the likes of Blurton were now household names, but the team’s circumstances had changed. Salvado was dead and the Benedictine settlement was moving from an Aboriginal missionary to a general Christian education focus. Furthermore, the 1905 Aborigines Act altered the legal position of Western Australia’s Aborigines. Under a protectionist facade, the Act segregated Aborigines from the white community and enabled the Chief Protector to control all aspects of their lives. Reece documents the impact of these changes on the lives of New Norcia’s Aboriginal cricketers. Those who left the mission to take up landholdings or enter trades ended their lives on rations under the Chief Protector’s control, and many were buried in pauper graves. As Reece suggests, despite their cricket ability, ‘their fates were not so different to that of their fellow Nyoongahs who had not excelled at cricket’.
By entitling his book The Invincibles, Reece draws an obvious analogy with Don Bradman’s undefeated 1948 Australian Test team. Reece’s Invincibles, however, confronted more off-field obstacles than Bradman’s team. They struggled for acceptance in a game controlled by a white, Protestant and pastoral elite, which had little time for Aborigines. Reece convincingly argues that such attitudes resulted in Aborigines preferring football’s more ‘proletarian’ and accepting culture than the elitist and race-based game of cricket.
The Invincibles may lack the scope of Colin Tatz’s study of racism in Australian sport, Obstacle Race, and the craftsmanship of Sean Gorman’s masterful Brotherboys on the Krakouers. But, like Mike Colman and Ken Edwards’ work on Eddie Gilbert, and Bernard Wimpress’ Passport to Nowhere on the 1868 Aboriginal team, Reece tells an important yet forgotten story. He suggests that the only memorial to the Invincibles is the old New Norcia cricket ground. Another has just been added with Bob Reece’s finely illustrated book.