Harrow,
Australia (CNN)Growing up in the small community of Harrow in southern Australia, 86-year-old Lachie Turner spent his childhood hearing legends of the great Aboriginal cricketer Johnny Mullagh. "The story used to be that he could win a match, batting with just the handle of a pickaxe," said Turner, with a smile.
Mullagh was a hero in Harrow, and the surrounding livestock communities, where homesteads dot the landscape along miles of single-lane dirt roads.
At a time when being Indigenous meant you could be thrown off your land, forced into Christian missions or even shot, Mullagh -- of the Jardwadjali people from western Victoria -- grew from being a farmhand on a local estate to a world-famous cricket player.
Yet until recently, most Australians didn't know Mullagh's story, or anything about the journey that took him and 12 Aboriginal cricketers from farmsteads in Victoria, to Melbourne, Sydney and then, finally, England in 1868 -- making them Australia's first sporting team to play overseas.
But when the Aboriginal cricket team returned in 1869, their achievements couldn't save them from the institutional racism shown by colonizers towards First Nations people. Most of the team were immediately placed in missions, away from their communities and their homes. When they died some were buried in unmarked graves.
They were never paid for their historic tour.
Now, more than a century later, Australia's cricketing bodies are seeking to give the Indigenous team the recognition they deserve. The team is increasingly referred to as "Australia's First XI," a term usually reserved for a region's best cricket line-up.
On the 150th anniversary of their England tour in 2018, an all-Indigneous team was sent to the UK in their honor -- with each young player taking the name of one of Australia's First XI. Last December, Mullagh, whose Aboriginal name was Unaarrimin, was inducted into Australia's cricketing Hall of Fame and a medal created in his honor.
Paul Stewart, deputy chief executive of Australia's Lowitja Institute and a Taungurung man from central Victoria, said he felt both "pride and sadness" when he thought of the story of Australia's First XI, and what they accomplished.
"Off field it was a sad story, on the field it's a bloody ripper of a story," he said.
Colonization
All but two of the members of the First XI came from the same region in western Victoria, which had been home to Australia's Indigenous people for tens of thousands of years.
Some were part of the last generation to live in Australia before the white colonizers drove them off their land and destroyed their way of life.
Yanggendyinanyuk, also known as Dick-A-Dick, who played in the England tour, was born in the 1830s, and for about the first 10 years of his life he lived on the land with his people, the Wotjobaluk, according to his great-great-grandson Richard Kennedy.
Yanggendyinanyuk was a child when large numbers of white settlers began to arrive in the region. The colonists pushed Aboriginal people off their land and depleted or wiped out their traditional sources of food. In 1866, local newspaper the Hamilton Spectator published a letter from one settler boasting how he and other landholders had, in the past five years, killed more than 150,000 kangaroos, which they viewed as pests that ate grass needed for livestock. Native grains and vegetables were destroyed by the hooves of European cattle.
Without their traditional food sources, Kennedy said some Aboriginal people began to take sheep from farms. If caught, they and their families could be shot. The University of Newcastle's map of colonial frontier massacres in Australia -- still incomplete -- records 56 massacres of over 1,200 Aboriginal people by colonizers in what is now the state of Victoria. The atrocities that have recorded so far occurred in that region between 1834 and 1859.
