Australian Aboriginal cricket team in England in 1868

In May to October 1868, a cricket team composed of Aboriginal Australians toured England, becoming the first organised group of Australian sportspeople to travel overseas.^[1] It would be another ten years before an Australian cricket team classed as representative left the country.

The concept of an Aboriginal cricket team can be traced to pastoral stations in the Western District of Victoria, where, in the mid-1860s, the European owners introduced Aboriginal station hands to the sport. An Aboriginal XI was created with the assistance of Tom Wills, the captain of the Victorian cricket team and founder of Australian rules football, who acted as the side's captain-coach in the lead-up to and during an 1866–67 tour of Victoria and New South Wales. Several members of the team joined what became the Aboriginal XI that toured England under the captaincy of Englishman Charles Lawrence.

International sporting contact was rare in that era. Previously, only three cricket teams had travelled abroad, all English, to the United States and Canada in 1859, and to Australia in 1861–62 and 1863–64.