Cricket Australia Picks an Indigenous Player and Searches for More

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PERTH, Australia — For six months in 1868, a squad made up exclusively of Indigenous Australians went on a cricket tour of Britain, the first trip of its kind by an Australian team. The squad performed well, but the trip was never repeated. A year later, the Australian authorities gained complete control over the residence, employment and marriage of their country’s indigenous people, the start of a heavy-handed form of oversight that rendered future tours impossible.

The loss of opportunity foreshadowed how many Indigenous Australians — those who are Aboriginal or hail from the Torres Strait Islands — were excluded from cricket for the next century. In 1902, Jack Marsh, an indigenous fast bowler from New South Wales, was dropped from a state match against a touring England team after the England captain refused to play against him. In the 1930s, Eddie Gilbert was considered one of the world’s fastest bowlers, but he had to obtain written permission merely to travel outside his indigenous settlement in Queensland. He was never picked for Australia.

Even as recently as 2015, one indigenous cricketer complained to researchers that in his local club’s locker-room fine system — where players were sanctioned for mistakes like dropping catches — he was always fined a modest amount simply because he was indigenous. “Everyone thought it was hilarious,” he said in a report on the state of indigenous cricket in Australia. “I never said anything though, ’cause in a way the blokes thought it was kind of including me, but it actually really hurt me.”

“Cricket has this unfortunate trait where cultural bias sits there, and it’s unconscious,” said John McGuire, who played in grade cricket — the level below the state team — in Western Australia for two decades from the mid-1970s, and is a former chair of the Western Australia Aboriginal Cricket Council.

McGuire spoke from bitter personal experience. In the 1980s, McGuire — who has two indigenous parents and said he endured racial abuse in “just about every game” of his career — became the 24th batsman from his state to score 7,000 runs in grade cricket. The other 23 all had been selected for Western Australia at some stage; even though he reached 10,000 runs, McGuire never was.

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“People will say, ‘It’s not a race thing; we’re not racist; our best mates are black Australians,’” McGuire said. “But the unconscious bias won’t allow them to select an Aboriginal person.”

In this context, Monday’s selection of D’Arcy Short for Australia’s Twenty20 internationals against England and New Zealand at the start of next month was a powerful symbol of change. Short was chosen by Australia’s national selectors because he is an explosive T20 batsman; he also happens to have indigenous heritage, making him a member of an exclusive club: Only a handful of indigenous cricketers have ever represented Australia in international competition.

His selection is another sign of progress in a campaign by cricket authorities to bring more diversity into the game. Every Australian state and territory association, for example, now has a staff member specifically responsible for driving indigenous participation programs, and the country’s top league both recently held themed matches to bring attention to those efforts.

Playing numbers among indigenous people have risen significantly in recent years — from 8,000 in 2011-12 to 54,000 in 2016-17, according to the governing body’s figures — but still lag behind those for Australian rules football, the sport that traditionally rivals cricket for the mantle of Australia’s favorite game. Today, there are 82 male Aboriginal players in the Australian Football League, the Australian rules professional competition — about 10 percent of the total number of contracted players. (There are no official statistics for the female competition.) But there are only seven Aboriginal players across cricket’s Big Bash League and the Women’s Big Bash League — about 2.5 percent of the total player pool. Indigenous people make up 3.3 percent of the total Australian population, but the figure is significantly higher for those in their 20s, the prime age for playing professional sports.

“Aussie Rules have promoted themselves a lot better than cricket,” said Larry Kickett, a prominent indigenous Australian rules football player who became the Western Australian Cricket Association’s first Aboriginal programs coordinator in 2015. “That transition from school to community cricket is the roadblock we’ve got to knock down.”

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Before Short, only five cricketers with acknowledged indigenous heritage have represented Australia in men’s or women’s cricket. And only 2 of the 623 Australians to have played Test cricket, the five-day format traditionally regarded as the most prestigious, are indigenous.

In 1996, Jason Gillespie became the first, but the general public only became aware of Gillespie’s heritage several years later. “When I was a player I felt a little bit more could be done,” Gillespie said. Now, he said, Cricket Australia is “making a really concerted effort” both to increase participation but also to celebrate indigenous history.

Since 2001, Cricket Australia has held an annual national competition, now called the National Indigenous Cricket Championships, to showcase indigenous cricketers. In 2016, Australia’s Test players wore indigenous artwork on their playing shirts in a Boxing Day match. This year — to mark the 150th anniversary of the first tour — Cricket Australia will send national indigenous men’s and women’s squads to tour Britain.

“It’s a proud story, it’s a wonderful story,” said Paul Stewart, Cricket Australia’s indigenous engagement specialist. “It’s something that we want to continue to promote, to show that Aboriginal Australian people have been involved in the game for more than 150 years.”

William Fogarty, a co-author of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies report in 2015, praised Cricket Australia’s effort, saying it is to be “belatedly commended on moving this area of development of race relations and the game forward.” Nine of the 10 recommendations in the report he helped create have been adopted.

“They’re starting to realize that there’s talent around in indigenous players — it’s just finding it and trying to keep them on the right path,” Short said. “It’s always in the back of my mind that I want to be a role model for young indigenous players.”