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- Custom Article Title: Bernard Whimpress reviews 'The Invincibles: New Norcia’s Aboriginal cricketers 1879–1906' by Bob Reece
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Emeritus Professor Bob Reece has published widely on Aboriginal history and on New Norcia history in particular. In a brief preface he notes that his paternal grandfather and father were fine cricketers and that he (a poor player) has followed the game from the time of Don Bradman’s Invincibles in the late 1940s. When he learned of the Benedictine Mission’s Aboriginal cricketers who played between 1879 and 1906, the story demanded to be told. Without doubt Reece is the best person to tell it.
- Book 1 Title: The Invincibles
- Book 1 Subtitle: New Norcia’s Aboriginal cricketers 1879–1906
- Book 1 Biblio: Histrionics Publishing, $29.95 pb, 171 pp
The main research question posed is how an isolated Spanish Catholic community in the Western Australian bush could produce a team which, on tours to Perth up to the mid-1880s, not only defeated but frequently annihilated the best of the colony’s white cricketers. The book’s title makes for a compelling argument. That the cricketers were held in high esteem in religious circles is also reflected in the fact that New Norcia founder Bishop Rosendo Salvado presented a photograph of the second team to Pope Pius IX on his visit to the Vatican in 1882. Sadly in 1886 the withdrawal of establishment figure, Norcian captain and coach Henry Lefroy, meant the loss of their main fixtures organiser and financial supporter, while the establishment of an Aborigines Protection Board confined cricket to the mission for the next twenty years.
The Invincibles is a wonderfully layered scholarly history. Richly illustrated throughout, it provides an exciting narrative of key matches and settler responses to the Norcian cricket teams, setting them within the context of Christianising and civilising mission experience, and against a background of changing racial theories, government policies, and the wider development of cricket in Western Australia.
As former Test cricketer John Inverarity writes in his foreword, Reece has provided a ‘stirring reminder’ of New Norcia’s ‘astonishing achievements’ which he hopes will ‘bring about a new generation of Aboriginal cricketers’.
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