Sydney Festival’s Black Cockatoo: race, reconciliation and cricket

The long-neglected story of the Aboriginal cricket team that made history is finally etching its way into the national psyche.

Sydney Festival director Wesley Enoch. Picture: Hollie Adams/The Australian

The first Australian cricket team visited England in 1868. The great irony? ­England wasn’t the “motherland” of any of the players.

They were Aboriginal men, men who then had no social or political standing under British occupation of the land that had once been theirs. They were 13 Jardwadjali, Gunditjmara and Wotjobaluk people from Victoria’s Western District. They had already played the Melbourne Cricket Club on Boxing Day 1866, coached and captained by Charles Lawrence, a former all-England cricketer.

“They are the first native Australians to have visited this country on such a novel expedition, but it must not be inferred that they are savages,” wrote London’s Sporting Life in May 1868. “On the contrary … They are perfectly civilised, having been brought up in the bush to agricultural pursuits … With respect to their prowess as cricketers — that will be conclusively determined by their first public match.”

Out of 47 matches the Aussies had 14 wins, 19 draws and 14 ­losses. It would be nine years before the start of the enduring institution of Test cricket, played originally between England and the settler societies of Canada, Australia and the US. Why did they agree to go to England? Indeed, why did so many indigenous men volunteer to fight for the coloniser in World War I? These are questions that intrigue Wesley Enoch, director of the Sydney Festival and of the play, Black Cockatoo, about that first cricket team, which features in the festival program.

Geoffrey Atherden, the celebrated playwright, had already written a film script about those first international cricketers but the deal had fallen through. He recreated it as a play. Another director workshopped it at Ensemble Theatre in Kirribilli, on Sydney’s lower north shore, but no one committed to producing it.

That’s when Enoch got wind of it. In the three years he’s run the Sydney Festival — the first one was programmed already and he basically sat back to watch how it was done — he has altered its raison d’etre. Traditionally a fun summer celebration, it has morphed under him into a more political interrogation. He has aimed, he says, to turn it into a conversation that the city has with itself. Not that there’s no fun to be had.

Chenoa Deemal and Aaron McGrath at the Ensemble Theatre in Kirribilli. Picture: Richard Dobson

An indigenous playwright and director with a high-powered CV — he was most recently artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company — Enoch has made that conversation revolve around reconciliation.

“The First Nations conversation has been my career, so I’m not going to stop being me when I’m in this position,” he says with a mildly challenging look. “I’m engaged in a cultural conversation with our city, not in the tourism and economic conversation that exists already in other places.”

One of Enoch’s abiding interests in theatre has been to unearth and share “neglected stories”, as he calls them, especially stories that intersect with those that modern Australia tells itself. “So what does it mean that the first cricket team to tour overseas was an Aboriginal team?” he asks rhetorically.

Cricket Australia, too, has taken on that search for meaning. “They are reinvestigating their narrative, especially after the whole ball-tampering discussion and how that went to the very heart of an Australian icon, and now that women’s cricket is really taking off,” Enoch says. “Cricket has become a flashpoint for reinventing Australian identity.”

Indeed, as part of Cricket Australia’s reconciliation program, it recently announced a new medal named after Johnny Mullagh would be awarded to the best player of the Boxing Day Test, from 2020. Mullagh was the Aboriginal cricketer, a Jardwadjali man from Harrow in the Wimmera region of Victoria, who led the team in England in 1868.

The Aboriginal team at Melbourne Cricket Club in 1867.

Two good omens brightened the very first meeting between Atherden and Enoch to discuss the play. First, a white cockatoo perched at Enoch’s window while they talked. “Birds bring messages to people,” Enoch says. It’s a neat segue from the devout ­religious upbringing he’d had — hence his first name, Wesley — to the indigenous part of him.

Later he found out that the white cockatoo is the skin of the people that black cockatoo people can marry in the Wimmera where Mullagh came from.

Traditional Aboriginal societies are divided into two separate ritual groups, and that governs who people may marry: they must marry outside their moiety. “It was a lovely little discovery, that the black bird marries the white bird,” Enoch says. “There’s a whole reconciliation story just there.”

The second omen came when Enoch told Atherden that if he directed the play, he would want an all-indigenous cast. (The original director of the workshops wasn’t available.) Instead of having palpitations at someone tampering with his baby, Atherden ­merely asked why.

“Because I want to weave the Aboriginal experience more thoroughly through it,” Enoch told him. “There’s often overt, or even covert, racism in some of the things the white characters say. You put that into the mouth of a black actor and suddenly you feel all the tensions and the ironies of it.”

Cricket player Johnny Mullagh.

Atherden’s original script was a straight-up history of the tour. After talking it over with Enoch, he went away and wrote a whole modern strand into it that would allow the political discussion that Enoch wanted. In the play, a group of activists break into the Harrow Discovery Centre, which Enoch calls a “beautiful museum”. “What they want to do is ‘unleash’ the story of Johnny Mullagh,” Enoch explains. Mullagh’s real name, by the way, was Unarrimin.

“So there’s a whole lot of unpacking the historical issues by ­Aboriginal actors in the contemporary storyline. And then those same actors take us back in time to the English ladies and so on, which is a lot of fun to watch. It’s quite comic at times.”

Harrow has long celebrated that first team’s story. An annual cricket match, played at the Johnny Mullagh Oval, commemorates it. While local people know the story, however, it has had ­little national recognition until now.

Ben Muir, a Wotjobaluk Jardwadjali man from Horsham, also in the Wimmera, had an ancestor who played in England in 1868. “You get told about Don Bradman, you get told about Captain Cook, but you never get told about our warriors, and that’s what these men were,” he told the ABC when the Johnny Mullagh Medal was announced. “We know about Johnny Mullagh now, but the stories of the others who toured have largely been lost and that’s what we want to find out. They probably don’t even know about this in England. They know about the little urn, but they don’t know about our history and our mob that went over there and had a really good tour.”

Four men and two women make up the cast of the play, with Aaron McGrath, who played the title role in Rachel Perkins’s film adaptation of Jasper Jones, starring as Mullagh. Some of the women double as the male cricketers. No gender issues permeate the performance, however. Enoch has quite enough on his plate with issues of race.

He is ambivalent about the white man, Lawrence, who organised the tour. It was obviously an entrepreneurial venture, but Lawrence also had enough respect for the Aboriginal men to negotiate the terms of their participation.

“It’s hard to unpack the motivation,” Enoch says. “I personally think of Charles Lawrence as a flawed human being who was caught between his own opportunism and his belief in the men.

“In the play, he guarantees them money, he guarantees to teach them to read and write, and he guarantees to look after their health. And he falls down on all three of those things. One of the cricketers died in England. He couldn’t deliver on the things he promised.”

Enoch is also ambivalent about the question of exploitation here. “Without knowing enough of the details, the personalities and the circumstances, there’s not a fixed position I can take on it,” he says. Again it’s about unpacking foundational Australian narratives: “What was motivating them? It’s hard to know.”

Theatre, he reiterates, does not provide answers. Its strength is investigation and interrogation.

We started this conversation, sitting comfortably on sofas in a festival office meeting room, talking about religion, Enoch’s other preoccupation. And it returns in our discussion of the purpose of the arts.

He points out that we can read the words of a Shakespeare play, or listen to a Bach mass through our headphones alone on a Sunday morning, but something happens when people get together, be it in a theatre or in a church. There is an “amplification of feeling”.

“The congregation, the idea of coming together, the collective experience, I think is a very human need. In many ways, the divine is amongst us when we gather.” He paraphrases the words of Christ: “When two or three of my followers are together, there shall I be.”

“What I love about religion is that it binds communities,” he continues. The biggest problem he has seen in the last 20 years has been the depletion of social capital. “(Social commentator) Eva Cox used to talk about this,” he says. “We don’t even have the same relationship with Australia Post any more.”

On the Aboriginal side of his family, his grandmother was very devout. She went through a number of denominations to find her place, he says, which in the end was Pentecostal. His influences were more traditional.

“I grew up with (Italian philosopher) Thomas Aquinas’s idea of asking questions, or investigating, and that that is God in action as well,” he says. “And my family, I don’t think just because of religion but because of the way we grew up, is very much about service.”

His sister is a politician, one brother a policeman, and his youngest brother has worked in palliative care.

His job in the arts, he says, is to bring those values in to play. “People can agree or disagree, they can engage or disengage, but at least they know what’s what up front. For me, the Sydney Festival program has been about expressing values.”

He hopes Black Cockatoo achieves two things. First, he draws on the discussion around an indigenous voice to parliament. “I think that indigenous theatre is the voice of the people. What we do in our film and theatre is explore narratives so the wider population can grow in their understanding of indigenous Australia.

“And so putting on a play like this, if you’re a cricket fanatic, or if you’re a theatre fanatic, or if you’re a follower of the First ­Nations story, you can all come together in the same room — which is one of the goals of the reconciliation movement, getting people in the same room to talk.”

Second, he hopes the play will show the versatility of indigenous actors’ skills. They are typecast in Australian film and television especially. In Black Cockatoo, they will segue between the 21st century and the 19th, indigenous characters and English.

“Some of these changes are beautiful to see,” Enoch says. “To see an Aboriginal actor whack on a hat and suddenly become an English gentleman. So they go from hard interrogative politics to the celebration of some cricket games in England.”

The sublime to the ridiculous perhaps, he admits, but he hopes the play as he envisions it sets them free from racial typecasting.

Black Cockatoo is showing at the Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, until February 8.