Little Harrow honours Johnny Mullagh, our first cricket legend

The sports ground in the little old village of Harrow, perched on the bank of the Glenelg River to the west of the Grampians, is called the Johnny Mullagh Oval.

The Johnny Mullagh Cricket Centre at the Harrow Discovery Centre.

Right next door is Johnny Mullagh Park, shaded by river redgums.

Just down the way is the Harrow Discovery Centre, home of the Johnny Mullagh Cricket Centre.

Next weekend, tiny Harrow will play host to the Johnny Mullagh Championship Cricket Match, just as it has done for the past quarter-century. A team of indigenous players, some of them descendants of Australia’s first international cricketers, will take on a Western District team.

It’ll be quite a weekend.

Daredevils from all over the place will bring their billycarts to the National Bush Billycart Championship, requiring them to charge at up to 100 km/h down a long steep hill leading to Harrow’s main street on Sunday morning. Make it in less than a minute – which no one has – and there's $5000 on offer.

There’ll be an art prize and exhibition, a farmers' market and a shearing competition, too.

But the big events are the Johnny Mullagh Championship Cricket Match, followed by a Sunday-night concert headlined by Isaiah Firebrace, the young indigenous singer who was Australia’s entrant in last year’s Eurovision.

Isaiah Firebrace performing for Australia at last year's Eurovision.Credit: AP

Firebrace, as it happens, has an ancestral link to one of Mullagh’s close companions.

If you’re curious to know who this Johnny Mullagh is, you won’t find his likeness cast in bronze outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground among the legends who have played there, though he and his mates ought to have been feted as the first of those legends.

Cricketer Unaarrimin, also known as Johnny Mullagh.

The 300 residents of Harrow and district – there are only around 90 in the village itself – are planning to put that to rights.

They want to cast two bronze statues of Mullagh: one for the village and the other to be offered to the Melbourne Cricket Club.

Problem is, they’re short $130,000 or so.

Funds from government or sponsorship by Australian companies hasn’t been forthcoming.

Truth is, the great Mullagh has been all but given the cold shoulder by officialdom for a century and a half, though Cricket Australia, to its credit, has spent the past couple of years raising public awareness about him and the team he played with.

Mullagh and his mates lived and died as outsiders, whatever their achievements. Mullagh himself ended in obscurity in his rabbiter’s hut on a station property not far from Harrow.

And yet he was the standout star of the very first Australian sporting team to travel abroad. Of any sport.

It happened to be the first Australian cricket team to tour overseas.

The First XI left Australia for England on February 8, 1868: almost precisely 150 years ago.

It’s why Johnny Mullagh’s home district of Harrow is in such a fever all these years later.

But did that pioneering team get wild acclaim when it returned to its own country? Not likely.

Johnny Mullagh and his teammates of the 1868 touring side.

The poorly named Board for the Protection of Aborigines refused permission for Mullagh and his teammates to travel overseas in the first place, and they had to be smuggled out.

Mullagh was an Indigenous man, and all but one of the other members of that first touring team were Indigenous too. They worked on station properties around Harrow’s rich grazing district, south of Horsham in western Victoria. And at weekends they played cricket, having been taught by a couple of squatters’ sons.

The team’s early success – they played an MCC team at the MCG in 1866, drawing a huge crowd - led to a scheme to tour England.

Captained by the only white man on the team, a former Surrey all-rounder named Charles Lawrence, these first Australians – once they were sneaked out of their own country – gave the Poms quite a shakeup.

The men of the 1868 touring side. Johnny Mullah (sic) is in the second row from the top, on the left.

Over 47 matches on 40 grounds, Australia won 14 and lost the same number.

Mullagh batted, bowled, kept wicket and caused a sensation from Lord's to the counties.

At Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire, he top-scored with 42, his bowling arm took four Englishmen for 59, he caught a fifth and as wicketkeeper he stumped the other five.

Just to round things out, Mullagh demonstrated to the crowds his prowess as a boomerang thrower and cleared a high-jump bar at 5 feet 3 inches (160 centimetres).

A watch presented to Unaarrimin, also known as Johnny Mullagh, by Sussex players for "a fine display of cricket at Brighton".

Let’s honour him with his real name. Unaarrimin.

The men of Australia’s first XI all had Indigenous names, but were denied them and given whitefella names that tied them to the properties on which they worked, or were simply throw-away nicknames that stuck.

Johnny Mullagh came from Mullagh Station. His team mates included Tiger, Sundown, Mosquito, Cuzens, Bullocky, Dick-a-Dick, King Cole, Red Cap and Charley Dumas.

Two brothers were landed with differently spelled surnames: James “Jimmy Mosquito” Couzens (traditional name Grougarrong), and his brother Johnny Cuzens (Yellanach) were splendid players in that first team.

Their memory is why next weekend’s Sunday-night concert is particularly special. Isaiah Firebrace is descended from both Couzens and Cuzens.

And Johnny Mullagh?

The grave of Unaarrimin, also known as Johnny Mullagh.

Little Harrow’s not going to forget him.

They want him cast in bronze, and government and industry can expect some pointed calls this 150th anniversary year.

You’d think no one should even have to ask.