11/02/00
Aborigines In Cricket & Harness Racing
Summary:
Why have so few Aboriginal Australians played top level cricket? The very first Australian sports team to tour overseas was the Aboriginal XI, in 1868. But according to BERNARD WHIMPRESS, author of "Passport to Nowhere", a history of Aborigines in cricket, of the three and a half thousand Australians to play frst class cricket over the past 150 years, just 7 have been Aboriginal players.
GEOFF CLARKE, recently elected Chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, is promoting the idea of an annual match to be played between an Aboriginal team and a Prime Minister's XI - as a symbol of reconcilation and a means of developing Aboriginal participation in cricket.
plus, HARNESS RACING. Once known as the "red hots", trotting and pacing has been riddled with accusations of corruption as well as declining attendances in recent years. But this year's Inter Domininion Championship, which culminates on Saturday, is offering world record prize money in an attempt to re-establish the sport.
Details or Transcript:
THEME
Amanda Smith: This week on The Sports Factor, why have so few Aboriginal Australians made a name for themselves in cricket? Especially when Aboriginal athletes are prominent in lots of other sports.
Also coming up, a trip to the trots. Harness racing’s biggest annual event, the Inter Dominion, culminates this weekend. And from the way that horses are bred for trotting and pacing, through to the culture at the track, harness racing is a very different scene to thoroughbred racing, although equally fascinating.
Before that though, to Aboriginal participation in cricket.
TV ADVERTISMENT FOR CENTENARY OF FEDERATION
Boy: Hey Mum, what was the first Australian cricket team?
Mum: Well, that’s an interesting question.
Man: What kind of country would have a national cricket team before it had a national parliament? The first Australian team to draw England was an Aboriginal team from the Western District in Victoria. Nine years later, we had our first Test Team.
Australians have always been united in their passion for sport.
Amanda Smith: That’s an ad running on TV at the moment, to draw attention to next year’s centenary of Federation. And while the first Australian cricket team was made up of Aboriginal players, it’s fair to say that since that team of 1868 to the present time, very few Aborigines have enjoyed prominence in this sport. Well recently, two proposals have come forward to try to change this. Senator Aden Ridgeway has proposed an Aboriginal cricket tour of England to coincide with the Prime Minister’s Federation trip, and harking back to that original 1868 tour. And one of the first things that Geoff Clarke did, when he was elected Chairman of ATSIC, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, was to talk cricket. He’s written to Mr Howard proposing an annual match between an ATSIC team and a Prime Minister’s Eleven. Geoff Clarke’s hoping that the first of these matches will be next year, both as part of the centenary of Federation, and as a symbol of reconciliation.
Geoff Clarke: Look, we’ve used sport as a passport I suppose, to enter into mainstream society. Aboriginal people were rounded up and put on reserves. Framlingham, one of the places I live, is a former reserve. Cricket emanates from there, with the first tour of England. So I thought it was a great vehicle. We need to do more, in terms of creating opportunity.
Amanda Smith: And in terms of this potential ATSIC/Prime Minister XI match, I mean have you made a kind of strategic judgement that perhaps the way to the Prime Minister’s heart is through his love of cricket?
Geoff Clarke: Yes, certainly it would create the opportunity for us to sit down and relax over a common interest, and I think those sorts of activities lead to reconciliation or the spirit of reconciliation, and hopefully would help the Prime Minister on his personal journey. You know, the entertainment value of any quality sport, and cricket is one of those quality sports I think, certainly appeals to the Australian sporting public, and I think that cricket could be, as well as other sports like AFL, Rugby League, Soccer etc. is the way to people’s inner consciousness. And I think if we can raise the consciousness of a fair go for all, whatever medium that is, and let’s use sport as that medium, I’m sure that cricket, if that’s the passion of the Prime Minister, will be the passion of mine.
Amanda Smith: And of course in terms of your own interest in cricket, you grew up in the Western District of Victoria where the Aboriginal team that toured England back in 1868 was formed, in fact I understand that two members of that team are buried close to some of your ancestors in the district.
Geoff Clarke: Yes, they share the same burial ground and Johnny Cuzens and I think Dick-a-Dick, a couple of those players, and the fact is that I as a young person, listened to my grandmother about some of the sporting heroes, and I was always fascinated about some of the cricketers who travelled England to be able to shield off balls with just a shield and not be harmed by anybody throwing balls at high speeds etc. So the skill level, the courage that these sportsmen display is something that I certainly warm to.
Amanda Smith: Is there a danger though, both with the idea you’re proposing, the match you’re proposing, and Senator Ridgeway’s idea that like that 1868 Aboriginal team, that these will just be one-offs, that in reality it will make really little difference to strengthening indigenous participation in Australian cricket?
Geoff Clarke: I think that people thought when Polly Farmer and Barry Cable came to the AFL, or the VFL at the time, that they would be one-off players. Have a look at the situation now. The fact is that the enormous amount of Aboriginal talent coming through that particular sport and that system, is only because I think that the accessibility to the game, and I think it only needs the opportunity and the promotion and the tools of trade in terms of cricket, for us to also to develop in that sport as well.
Amanda Smith: In trying to look though at why so few Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have made a name for themselves in cricket relative to success in other sports, as you mention in the football codes, do you think that cricket is perceived by indigenous Australians as a ‘white’ game, in a way that football codes perhaps aren’t?
Geoff Clarke: Yes, well you know I think we have to take some credit for the concept of Aussie Rules football, and certainly the concept of cricket is a new concept for us, something we have to adapt to, I think. And the fact that the hand/eye co-ordination and the skills required to do that only need to be, I think, developed, and the interest is certainly there, and it’s just a question of being able to visit the Long Room on occasions, for some of the kids to create that atmosphere of interest, if you like, will create the same outcomes, there’s no doubt about that.
Amanda Smith: Chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Geoff Clarke.
And Geoff Clarke spoke there about sport being a passport for Aboriginal people. That ‘passport’ idea is one that cricket scholar Bernard Whimpress has also picked up on in a new book he’s written on Aborigines in cricket; except he’s called his book ‘Passport to Nowhere’. It’s a history of indigenous players from 1850 to 1939, the ‘protection era’ of colonial and Federal policy towards Aborigines. And the starting point for the study, says Bernard Whimpress, was the statistic that of the 3-1/2-thousand or so Australians who’ve played first class cricket over the past 150 years, just seven of them have been Aborigines.
Bernard Whimpress: I suppose in reflection, I mean my own interest in cricket as a whole, came from a statistical bent at about the age of 12, and that’s often the sort of thing where you put down roots. Then say, 30 years later or so, approaching the subject as a historian, it was still a statistical starting point. And I think certainly the interesting fact was that seven out of that very large figure is a very minute proportion. As I went on with the study of course, I also threw up the alternative question: Well why this particular seven? And initially the study of course, started off as just a look at individuals, but later on I went into mission studies and pastoral cricket as well.
Amanda Smith: Well I guess the best known colonial involvement of Aborigines in cricket is the Aboriginal XI that toured to England in 1868, the first Australian sporting team to tour overseas. And there’s that ad that’s running on television at the moment for the centenary of Federation that draws attention to that Aboriginal side. But how was that team established, what are its origins, why was it formed?
Bernard Whimpress: It was established by the pastoralists down in the Western District, Edenhope in Victoria. And I think the Aboriginal players there, I sort of look at and think of them as probably being the first generation of those who were starting to live on the stations, and so pick up a lot of the settlers’ ways and adapt to their recreations and so on. And there being a shortage of people to play cricket with etc., they originally it seems, became involved in playing station against station. Of course this is a time when there are no formal associations in cricket. You know, you have a lot of scratch matches or novelty games, you know, you have Smokers and Non-Smokers, Married and Unmarried, and all this sort of thing, so it became I think originally, a novelty idea.
Amanda Smith: What, to have whites play blacks?
Bernard Whimpress: When they could see that there were a number obviously in the district, who had picked up some skills. So in this first phase it was a sort of a novelty thing, but within a very short time, it picked up the idea of being a mark of civilisation. If we can have a team that plays well and performs, this shows a civilising mechanism in place. Then it goes through I think a couple of other phases, perhaps a socialising phase for the players themselves, and then a commercial phase, which becomes evident when they come down to Melbourne and play against the MCC, and on the first day get 8,000 people. And I think then it’s part of take this overseas and of course this is happening a lot in the 19th century Europe with people from other colonies and islands and countries being taken back and exhibited.
Amanda Smith: Well in terms of forging an Aboriginal presence and participation in cricket, what was the impact and the legacy of that 1868 touring Aboriginal side?
Bernard Whimpress: Well unfortunately there wasn’t a legacy, because what occurred here, and there was already opposition to this prior to the tour, but there were those who were feeling that the cricketers themselves and other Aboriginal people were being exploited, so there was that sense of protection. There was also the feeling very much of the dying race, that was the famous editorial, you know ‘Smooth the dying pillow’, so there were conflicting areas of concern here, really one that the race would die out so they would have to look after them. One means of doing this was protection, and so the idea then was to actually put them on reserves. And with the reserve system, this meant the sort of break-up of that original party.
Amanda Smith: Well one of the most interesting, I think aspects of your study, is that of the small number of Aboriginal players who achieved some prominence in cricket during the period you’ve looked at, a number of them were fast bowlers who were no-balled for throwing, for throwing rather than correctly bowling the ball from Twopenny, who played in that 1868 original touring team, to Jack Marsh who played for New South Wales at the turn of the century, Albert Henry, who played for Queensland around the same time, to Eddie Gilbert, in the 1930s who bowled Don Bradman for a duck the first time they met at the wicket. But how do you account for this, that this number of those players, and there were so few of them playing at that level, were called for chucking?
Bernard Whimpress: The throwing law is always a very, very difficult one, but I believe that in these cases it probably hasn’t been applied evenly. I could say that. Because if you look at the number of those who’ve been called for throwing in Australian cricket history, it’s only something like about 25, and yet as you’ve just said, nearly all of those Aboriginal players had been called at one time or other. Certainly a number of major white bowlers, major Test figures in fact, of whom there was considerable doubt about their actions, were never called. In general I’ve looked at these bowlers and seen that the calling actually occurs at crucial times in their careers and stops them at critical moments, when perhaps they might have moved up to the next level. So I’m suggesting, in some respects it’s an instrument of the game perhaps being used at a critical time to limit progress. You know, we’re thinking that only this handful of course comes through to the first class level, but the idea of them actually going any further to the Test level, is stopped.
Amanda Smith: Bernard Whimpress, author of ‘Passport to Nowhere’, a history of Aborigines in Australian cricket from 1850 to 1939. And Bernard’s also the curator of the Cricket Museum at the Adelaide Oval.
Now this weekend, the Inter Dominion harness racing championship winds up with the pacer’s Grand Final, this year worth a record prize money of a million dollars.
SOUND OF HARNESS RACE CALL
Amanda Smith: Harness racing, pacing and trotting, is raced by standard-bred horses as opposed to thoroughbreds, who do the galloping. And not only is the type of horse different for these two types of racing. There are big differences in the cultures and economics of the two. Mark Lawrence is a standard-bred breeder, something he does around his day job as an accountant, on a 40 acre property near Wallan, in Victoria. And when it comes to the differences between the racing codes, Mark Lawrence says that there’s a lot of snob value attached to breeding thoroughbreds, as opposed to standard-breds.
Mark Lawrence: It’s a funny one, because you often hear things like an award ceremony, it’ll be Horse of the Year, but it’s never Thoroughbred Horse of the Year, it’s always assumed that oh, it’s Horse of the Year, it must be a thoroughbred. Why it is I’m not quite sure. You can relate some of these things back to stake money and say, well the Melbourne Cup’s a $3-million race, the Cox Plate’s, I don’t know what that is, a couple of million dollars, whatever it is, and it’s all to do with that sort of money. And perhaps that’s partly true. I tend to think it’s more clever marketing than anything else.
Amanda Smith: But is it a class thing? Is it that the trots is a traditional working-class sport, or seen that way, regarded now that way as opposed to thoroughbred racing?
Mark Lawrence: It is seen that way, and to a certain extent that’s true.
Amanda Smith: Because it sort of seems to relate to the horse and cart, the tradesperson.
Mark Lawrence: Well I’m not sure about that so much, but it is certainly more affordable. I mean you could even write it back to greyhounds I suppose and say that everybody could afford to own a greyhound and train one, therefore every bloke who was interested in racing might have started off with that. With standard-breds, it’s more expensive than a greyhound, but far, far cheaper than a thoroughbred. So you will have people, and farmers particularly for example, who’ll have a track round one of their paddocks, and they’ll have a couple of horses, and their hobby will be racing standard-breds. It’s a bit harder to do that with thoroughbreds, although I know there are plenty of country trainers, part-timers out there, with one or two horses that do that. But socially for some reason, thoroughbreds have become acceptable much more so than the standard-breds. People are happy to be at the Melbourne Cup or Oaks Day or whatever, and you get massive television coverage, so it builds on itself, it’s sort of one thing leads to another and all of a sudden it’s all right and it’s OK, and it’s a lot of fun and we don’t mention gambling, or we don’t mention it too much. With standard-breeds it just doesn’t seem to have broken that barrier.
Amanda Smith: Now Mark, tell me what the difference is between a standard-bred and a thoroughbred.
Mark Lawrence: Standard-breds are thoroughbred in origin. That’s where they came from, and in fact all the genetic things that make a standard-bred fast at trotting and pacing, really do exist in the thoroughbred gene pool I guess, but of course it’s been selectively bred for, well, 150-200 years, and that means that they’re a lot quicker at that than a thoroughbred is. If you watch a thoroughbred trot, to a standard-bred owner, he’s sort of shuffling along. So the origins are much the same, but just selective breeding has improved the gait. There is a mixture of other breeds in there if you go back far enough, but even those other breeds (and I’m thinking of things like Norfolk trotters), their origins are actually thoroughbred as well. So there’s not that much difference if you like, in the original genetics of the things, but we’ve just taken particular characteristics, selected for them and improved them.
Amanda Smith: What’s the difference between trotting and pacing, which you mentioned, in harness racing?
Mark Lawrence: Two different gaits: trotters work diagonally, that is, they’ll lift a front leg and a back leg at the same time, but on opposite sides of the body. When those two legs come down and go through, then they pick up the other two and they will come down and go through. With a pacer, they work the legs that are on the same side of the body, so the left hand legs will go together and the right hand legs will go together. That gives a pacer a type of rocking action, and it looks at times a little stiff-legged, a bit like a train in motion. It’s a natural gait; some people think that it’s forced, but it’s not, it was something that naturally occurs in horses, in fact it can occur in many animals, dogs have been known to pace. But it was something that perhaps wasn’t as common originally, and so it was only really the selective breeding that increased the number of pacers to the extent where we actually have more pacers running around now than we do trotters.
Amanda Smith: Well what’s the difference between breeding standard-breds and breeding thoroughbreds?
Mark Lawrence: Well the mechanics of it are much the same, in the sense that a horse is a horse is a horse. The real difference I suppose is in the attitude that standard-bred breeders have taken to the way that they will go about their commercial business. With standard-breds, there’s virtually nothing that’s outlawed, if you like. Most mares are inseminated artificially, we do things like embryo transfers for mares that are perhaps having trouble carrying a foal; there are unlimited books, so that a stallion can breed as many mares as it likes, or as many mares as the market is demanding. Whereas in the thoroughbred world, there’s still unnatural service, and there are I think restricted books in lots of situations. There are often talks of restricting books in standard-breds as well, but commercial reality is that if you’ve paid a lot of money for a stallion, you need to get that investment back and you need to do that by breeding as many mares as you can.
Amanda Smith: All right. Well let’s maybe go and have a look at some of your horses.
FOOTSTEPS ON GRAVEL
Amanda Smith: How old’s this foal?
Mark Lawrence: He’d be seven to eight weeks old now. He’s a really nice foal, this one. Not because he’s so pretty, but because he’s very powerful in the back end, very strong looking horse. He’s by one of the best sires we’ve got in Victoria at the moment, Safely Kept, done a very good job. And he’s probably not going to fetch huge money, because this mare is now 20 years old. Older mares, for whatever reason, people tend to drop off them. She’s had one very good winner who went 157 (times, I was talking times, shouldn’t do that) and won 29 races, which is a huge number.
Amanda Smith: So was this foal born through AI, artificial insemination?
Mark Lawrence: Yes, all the foals here are AI, all the mares will be AI. We’re breeding six or seven mares here this season, they’ll all be AI by transported semen, which means that they don’t leave the property, I don’t have to transport mares in floats off to stud, which is something I guess the thoroughbred people have to contend with. The semen will arrive here by courier and the vet will just drop by and take it out of the package and do the job. In actual fact it’s something that you don’t need a vet for. At some stage I need to do an AI certificate, which will be down at Glen Ormiston College, and part of the process is to try and eliminate the vet wherever possible and get rid of one of your major expenses.
Amanda Smith: So Mark, once you’ve got the foals, what do you do with them up until they’re put up for auction at the yearling sale? How much handling or training are you doing with them?
Mark Lawrence: Well this guy’s just started, he’s handling. At six weeks old. I mean you can do it at any time, and everybody does it differently. We’ll start him off just by putting a head-stall on him and just starting to lead him around on the end of a rope, and he’ll get taught to pick up his feet and those sorts of things, and stand whilst people are handling him. There won’t be a lot of that done at the moment, just some sort of beginning work, and making sure he feels comfortable with people being around him. Until they get to about two months short of auction day, then we get them inside and start an intensive period of preparation. A lot of people will put them on a jogger or something like that, to give them exercise.
Amanda Smith: Put them on a jogger?
Mark Lawrence: Basically a contraption hooked on the back of a tractor, and their lead rope tied to that, and taken for a bit of a walk, bit of a jog. Not hugely intensive, they might walk for 15 minutes or jog for 15, maybe do 45 minutes all up, just to give them a bit of muscle tone. (NEIGH) That mare’s in season, which is what that squeal was. And that just helps and gives them some muscle definition when they walk into the ring.
Amanda Smith: But of course the ultimate reward for a breeder is to see one of those foals eventually make it at the track. Last Saturday night, I met up with Mark Lawrence again at Moonee Valley racecourse, where the Inter Dominion is being held this year. The Inter Dominion was first run in Perth in 1936, and since then , it’s been held each year at a different track around Australia and New Zealand. As far as prestige goes, the Inter Dominion is the Melbourne Cup of harness racing.
SOUND OF THE BETTING RING AT MOONEE VALLEY
Mark Lawrence: Well it is, but it’s a slightly different formula in that it’s not a one-off race held to decide a champion on just one night, because the Inter Dominion format is that you race over a series of heats, over a series of weeks. And you’ve got two things, it’s not only the best horse, but it’s also the best horse that can stand up to it. There’s been many a champion that’s collapsed after the second heat or third heat, and hasn’t made it to the final. So it does test two things: it’s the superiority of the horse, but also their constitution as well, if you like.
Amanda Smith: Well now there’s a pretty big crowd in here tonight for this meeting, Mark, but who comes to the harness races these days? Because I must say that my impression is that like greyhound racing, harness racing has been in decline for some years.
Mark Lawrence: It depends I suppose on how you measure these things. As with most of these sorts of events, I mean thoroughbreds perhaps as much as any others, that the on-track attendances have declined. If we just talk harness racing: Inter Dominion finals at one stage would have attracted 40,000 people hanging from the rafters of the showgrounds. Now for the Inter Dominion Pacers Final next week, we might anticipate say 15,000 people, so certainly the numbers are tremendously different, but everything’s tremendously different. You know, the basketball stadiums and those events weren’t on, and whether it’s cinemas or theatres or concerts, or whatever the alternatives are, there’s a lot more alternatives out there now than there used to be. So there’s a little bit of a problem in comparing eras. No doubt that there is less on-track attendance, but if you look at where the money’s coming from, which is TAB turnover, and you measure that, you might say that it’s gone up considerably. People obviously have cable TV, they can sit at home and watch the trots, and for a lot of people that’s going to be a lot more comfortable and convenient than going. So it’s a bit difficult to measure it and say it’s in decline, it’s just different I think.
Amanda Smith: Well now in popular parlance, the trots has often been referred to in the past as the Red Hots, because it’s had a reputation for things like race fixing and corruption, there’s been all sorts of scandals and inquiries with the trots over the years. And I suppose that has meant in general reputation that the sport has at times been held in quite low regard. How clean or otherwise is harness racing these days, Mark?
Mark Lawrence: I can answer that in two ways: as a stand-alone sport how clean is it; and how clean is it in comparison to every other sport. And if I take the second first, in comparison to say other racing codes, thoroughbreds and greyhounds and so on, it is as clean, if not cleaner than all of those. The stewards and the organisations themselves are very, very tough on anybody they catch cheating. They scrutinise all of these sorts of things; they drug test, do the swabs, whatever. So they’re hard on it, and there’s a real, real push to try and stamp those things out. And certainly if you compare it to that era of the Red Hots, it’s just a vastly different game. However, in any sport, especially where there’s a lot of money involved, you will never eliminate the people who try and cut corners and who try and cheat. That happens; I’d love to say it doesn’t, but I’m sure that it still does, to some extent. To what extent I don’t know, I’d say it’s fairly low, but it’s there. And I would say that the thoroughbreds have got the same problem, if not worse, because there’s actually a lot more money involved with some of their events than there is for harness racing.
Amanda Smith: But do you have every confidence that these championships are fair dinkum?
Mark Lawrence: Oh yes. Look, there are things they could have done better; they haven’t got a detention barn operating here.
Amanda Smith: What does that mean?
Mark Lawrence: Well that means that the horses are isolated with security guards, nobody gets to a horse so that nothing can be administered, and that sort of thing. And that certainly happens in the States. They have 24-hour detention barns before any major race. I think they should have done that here, but they haven’t. But it certainly doesn’t happen with the thoroughbreds either. But there’s no doubt that everybody here’s trying their hardest. The thing you worry about is that somebody given something to a horse to enhance performance, but we hope that those sort of things don’t happen, certainly everything gets swabbed. For everything that can be detected, we certainly test for it. That’s not to say that people aren’t ahead of the game in some of those areas.
Amanda Smith: Well one thing I’ve noticed with harness racing is that the trainer and the driver of horses often tend to be one and the same person, which is something that you don’t get in thoroughbred racing, the jockey and the trainer I think pretty well are always different people. Why that difference?
Mark Lawrence: Well the first reason for it, if you look at the thoroughbreds, is that most of the trainers just weigh too much. They simply wouldn’t be able to do it. It can the same in harness racing, because the driver’s weight actually isn’t that critical. In fact people often look at a 6’6" guy in a sulky and compare him to say, a girl who’s 4’5", and think it must make a difference. In actual fact it doesn’t, because of the way the sulkie’s are engineered. Without getting too technical, the driver’s weight sits behind the axle; that actually gives you lift on the shafts that are attached to the horse. So for the weight of the driver to actually make a difference, you’d have to double his weight to make a 1% increase, and it just doesn’t really matter. So since you’re not restricted physically, it’s simply a matter of whether you want to, and whether you’ve got the skills.
Now I’d have to say that there are some trainers that aren’t that brilliant as driver, and really would be better off putting a professional driver in and sitting on the sidelines. But it’s a bit of a pay-off, you know, driving in a race and winning a race is a fantastic thrill, they love it. So given the opportunity to do it and given that they’re competent at it, even if not brilliant, most will take the opportunity. And in fact I guess I’d say that I’m in the same boat, I mean if I had the opportunity and I could do it, I’d love to drive in a race. And at least with harness racing there actually is a chance of that; there’s no way I’d ever be a jockey, because I’m over 6-foot and weigh too much, but I actually could drive in a sulky and drive in a race.
Amanda Smith: Have you ever had a go?
Mark Lawrence: No, I’ve been around in a sulky a couple of times, but no, I’ve never actually driven a horse, I think I’d be terrified to begin with. But of course the great plan, the master plan for the property is to one day lay down a track, to harness up a horse, and start jogging one up and learn to drive.
Amanda Smith: And be a complete renaissance harness racing man, Mark?
Mark Lawrence: That’s right. Give away the day job and do what I really want to do …..
I wish.
FINAL STAGES OF A HARNESS RACE CALL & CROWD ATMOS
Amanda Smith: Everyone’s a dreamer at the racetrack, it seems to me. And that was standard-bred breeder, Mark Lawrence at Moonee Valley in Melbourne, where the Inter Dominion championships finishes up tomorrow night (12/2).
And that’s The Sports Factor for this week. Michael Shirrefs is the producer, and I’m Amanda Smith.
I hope you’ll join me again for the Sports Factor next week. Talk to you then.
Guests on this program:
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Geoff Clarke Chairman of the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) |
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Bernard Whimpress Historian & author of 'Passport to Nowhere: A History of Aborigines in Australian Cricket 1850-1939' |
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Mark Lawrence Standard-bred horse breeder |
Publications:
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Passport to Nowhere: A History of Aborigines in Australian Cricket 1850-1939 Author: Bernard Whimpress Price: $30 AUS Publisher: Walla Walla Press, Sydney http://www.asc.zipworld.com.au |
Presenter:
Amanda Smith
Producer:
Michael Shirrefs
©1999 Australian Broadcasting Corporation