‘Handsome physiognomy and blameless physique’: indigenous colonial sporting tours and British racial consciousness, 1868 and 1888

Abstract

It is seldom recalled in popular accounts, and less so with any degree of accuracy, that the first Australian and New Zealand sporting teams to visit Britain were both indigenous: the 1868 Aboriginal cricket team and the 1888-89 New Zealand Native1 rugby team. Even the most dedicated chroniclers of their respective sports have rendered these tours more in the manner of vaudeville than serious endeavour. What has generally been preserved is a catalogue of the sensational and disreputable. Despite John Mulvaney's Cricket Walkabout, first published in 1967, the Aboriginal cricketers were entirely ignored in the context of the 1977 Centenary Test celebrations.2 The Native team suffered a similar fate during the centenary of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union in 1992. The pioneering position of both teams obviously entitles them to much wider consideration. Yet they are equally important for the light they cast on Victorian attitudes to race. While much has been written of race relations and policy on the frontiers of Empire, comparatively less has been said regarding those Englishmen 'securely at home' whose opinions were not shaped by imperial experience.3 Given that the itineraries of the two tours presented more opportunities for sustained public and press attention than did those of most other nonwhite individuals and groups visiting Britain during the nineteenth century, it follows that they may reasonably be used as a barometer of British opinion. Moreover, along with two Parsee cricket tours of Britain in 1886 and 1888, the Aboriginal and Native teams were the only groups to test their qualities against British stock under the direct and quantifiable conditions imposed by an enclosed sporting arena.4 Other visits to Britain were mostly of a more abstract cultural or academic interest. The fact that these visitors were sportsmen was to have a crucial bearing on their reception. In the end, comparatively little attention was paid to the racial aspect of either tour - leaving one to conclude that the social and moral values ascribed to Aboriginal cricket and Maori rugby were to some