By rights, there should have been a fifth. An attempted tour of Australia in 1867, (which was intended to go on to the UK,) in 1867 had proven to be a disaster both financially and personally, with four players dying either on the tour or shortly afterwards. It did not take long for speculators to realise that there was potential profit from the novelty of an Aboriginal cricket team. Moreover, many Aborigines seemed to have a natural aptitude for the game, for they were quick, agile and strong. While he had offered little with bat or ball, Dick-a-Dick had his own segment following the match in which Surrey players and officials were given the opportunity to pay a shilling and, from no more than 10 paces, throw a cricket ball at him Cricket, with its strong reliance on fair play and sense of hierarchy, could be used as a valuable teaching tool in the ways of the English. Jane Lydon argues in Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission that the missions “were intended to be environments in which the twin goals of conversion and ‘civilisation’ could be pursued”. During the 1860s, some Aborigines had begun playing cricket in the missions and on the sheep stations. The trackers feature more prominently in both the narrative and the illustrations, albeit with Duff senior giving the orders:įour years later, another extraordinary chapter was to unfold in Dick-a-Dick’s story. Two years later the story of the Duff children was turned into The Australian Babes in the Wood, an illustrated rhyme book for British schools. Many pictures of the scene omit the trackers entirely, showing the children being rescued by white men. However, they were largely airbrushed out of the reports in the local papers, which instead chose to focus on the selfless efforts of Jane Duff to keep her brothers alive (in spite of the cold she had given some of her clothes to Frank in an attempt to keep him warm), and their father’s role in the search. Miraculously they were alive and well, though it seems unlikely they would have survived a further night of the freezing cold.ĭick-a-Dick and the other trackers did supposedly receive some remuneration for their efforts. Later that day, the trackers found the children. Where others had seen only muddy paths and desolate ground, however, the Aborigines saw vital clues in tiny deviations and splintered twigs which led them to a clearing in which the Duff children must have spent their first night. They began what seemed certain to be a futile search in the early hours of Saturday August 22, over a week since the children’s disappearance. As a last resort, their father enlisted the help of three Aboriginal trackers, one of whom was Dick-a-Dick. Search parties proved unable to locate the children, not helped by torrential rain which had seemingly removed any evidence of where the Duffs might have gone. On Friday Augthree young siblings – Isaac (9), Jane (7) and Frank Duff (3) – went missing in the harsh terrain of The Wimmera, a region in western Victoria. What is certain is that in August 1864 he played a central role in an incident which was to become part of Australian and indeed British folklore. Though records are sketchy of births and deaths in the Australian Aboriginal communities of the 19th century, it is believed that Dick-a-Dick was born at some point between 18 in Victoria.
SHOULDER OF ARTFUL DODGING FULL
But then not many people have lived a life so full of incident for such an event to seem like just another day.
Not many cricketers have managed to provoke such a reaction from the usually placid Lord’s crowd, let alone one who evidently wasn’t actually very good at cricket. He had scored a grand total of eight runs – which was admittedly better than his tour average of 5.26 – and had not taken a single wicket or catch. On June 13, 1868, Dick-a-Dick was carried from the Lord’s pitch into the dressing rooms on the shoulders of a throng of spectators who had adopted him as their new hero. 150 years on from the 1868 Australian Aboriginal cricket tour of the UK, Olly Ricketts looks back on the life and times of the team’s hero, Dick-a-Dick.
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