First published in the 2018 edition of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, Geoff Lemon looks at the under-representation of the Indigenous population in Australian cricket.
When you research Aboriginal Australian cricket, you find 1868. Then you keep finding it. You cast around for the next thing, and grasp empty air. But this one story, it tumbles along, a hundred retellings dressed in the same trimmings of novelty. A team from western Victoria who sailed to England and caused a sensation, having done the same at home. The extra narrative sauce that Tom Wills, the lionised founder of Australian Rules football, ran the team for a time.
Here a book, there a thesis, a documentary, surely a feature film to come. Cricket Australia are running a 150th anniversary tour in 2018. Increasingly, there’s a willingness to grasp the story as a foundation myth. But if this is a massif in the subject’s landscape, it ends in a cliff.
Australian cricket is all about whiteness. It’s the glare of sun washing out TV screens. Pitches baked to chalk by January heat. Picket fences and fresh uniforms and smears of zinc across the nose. Blank scorecards and high summer cloud, new Kookaburras for night games. Our Test history is rich in whitewashes, from Armstrong to Johnson, but the history itself is a whitewash.
Scan the list of players to find a barely broken white line, uphill on a highway. A parade of Anglo monikers – Hassett to Bradman to Harvey, Chappell to Walters to Waugh – with the odd O’Reilly or McCool. Through a century and more, only Nitschke, Meuleman and Benaud even cross the Channel. Cricket remains the island of Robert Menzies’s fantasy: “Where Great Britain stands, there stand the people of the entire British world.”
It’s a deeply complex subject, with the potential for hurt. A favourite strand of Australian racism, next to abusing those deemed Indigenous, is the abuse and denial of identity of those deemed not Indigenous enough. Efficient racists can even double-dip. Sections of white Australia seem obsessed with arbitrating Indigenous identity, effectively writing fractions on slips of paper to pin to people’s shirts.
This is based on the narrow conception of what a white society thinks Indigenous people are supposed to look like. Aboriginal academic Anita Heiss named her memoir Am I Black Enough For You? Actors Nakkiah Lui and Miranda Tapsell host a podcast called Pretty For An Aboriginal. In one episode, the rapper Briggs pursues the issue: “I’ve got cousins with red hair, who look super white. I’ve got another cousin who’s as black as Wesley Snipes. You put us three in a room and you might not even know that we’re related. But we’re all family.” Lui responds: “My mum calls them crayons. Different group of blackfellas in a room: box of Crayolas.”
Paul Stewart says: “I’m as fair as Dan Christian, but Dan’s a Wiradjuri man and I’m a Taungurong man, and this is what we do in the Imparja Cup. We write our club against the fixture, and we write who our mob is, our date of birth, whether we’re a left-hand bat or a right-arm off-spinner.”
Christian elaborates. “I grew up part of an Aboriginal family and Aboriginal culture. My dad’s one of nine – huge family – so I’ve got lots of cousins and very close second cousins. I loved my upbringing, and it’s nice to be able to represent them now as I’ve gotten older.”
Short has experienced “people saying I wasn’t Aboriginal. But that’s just out of people being idiots, or maybe a bit of jealousy in terms of where I was with my cricket.” There are grimmer historical undertones, though: the 1937 Commonwealth State conference concluded that “the destiny of natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in ultimate absorption”. Short is part of a movement that rejects this, embracing and amplifying his descent.
While McGuire’s point could be twisted into an attack, it reflects the need for breadth in representation. In another episode of Pretty For An Aboriginal, (white) actor Yael Stone explains it in terms of the series Orange is the New Black, hailed for its nuanced depiction of inmates in a women’s prison. “Once you have more than one person of colour, there’s a reason to go into deeper complexity of characters, and have interactions that are multilayered. I walk around the streets of New York, and that’s what the streets of New York look like. For a long time we’ve had a very strange popular culture reflection back at us. Maybe, for a lot of white people, we say: ‘Oh yeah, that’s my life, that feels accurate – cool, cool, cool.’ But for anyone else, it’s like a weird fairytale that’s not recognisable, that you can’t connect with. Even if you’re not insulted by it, it’s completely isolating.”
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With CA’s reform, that sort of representation may be possible. “It’s a step in the right direction, let’s put it that way,” says Christian. “I think it’s a long, long way from a finished product.” The same is true in a broader social sense. Personal abuse is one thing, systemic discrimination another: barriers of economy and access, time and transport, perception and safety and encouragement.
This is still a country whose national celebration is January 26, the anniversary of colonisation. It’s a country suspicious of accountability, lashing out when told of problems. Aboriginal AFL champion Adam Goodes spoke about racial inequality late in his career, and spent his final season being booed around the country. On Australia Day in 2018, politicians raged against a young Aboriginal activist, Tarneen Onus-Williams, for rhetorical fire in a speech, while media outlets made her a target on front pages and bulletins, knowing threats and abuse would follow.
It’s also a country where tens of thousands marched in protest; a country where Briggs had a hit with the scathing track “January 26”. Appetite for progress is undiminished. Onus-Williams said she hoped Australia burns to the ground. “It was a metaphor,” was her weary explanation. “I just want everything, all the governments, to fall apart, because our people are dying and nobody cares and the whole system needs to change.”
That’s not hyperbole. Indigenous Australians are disadvantaged on every conceivable measure: life expectancy, health, income, employment; more arrests, jail time, deaths in custody, suicide, institutional abuse. In 2018, Melbourne’s Age newspaper was still saying “the greatest failing of Australia, one of the most prosperous nations, is the gulf between the situation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and that of the rest of the population”. The same day, online clips of Olympic ice skater Harley Windsor were trolled with slurs: he was both Aboriginal and not Aboriginal enough.
Problems this big can be addressed only by a million small actions. Cricket can be part of it. Asked what he hopes the future holds, Short says: “I’d like to see that it’s just the norm having Indigenous people picked in Australian sides, all the time. It would still be a massive thing, but not like ‘He’s the third or fourth to be playing for Australia.’”
For Christian: “I’d like there to be more than five guys playing first-class cricket with Aboriginal heritage. I’d love to see a full Indigenous round next year, like we see in the AFL and NRL. To have an Indigenous squad that’s together for a lot of the year, and can go on tours and play against state teams, and make it a viable goal for kids growing up and coming through. Something you aspire to – to grow up and play for the National Indigenous team.”
Next, that team tour England in June. Even for those who see symbolism as toothless, and even if the pace is glacial, it’s some kind of movement. Far from the dubious aspects of 1868, this team will visit in a completely different way, respected from the outset, and clear in what they represent. There’s reason to hope that this time it’s the start of something, not the end.
Geoff Lemon is an Australian writer and broadcaster, on cricket and otherwise.
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