The talented black cricketers who toured England in 1868 have become one of Australia's enduring sporting legends. Aboriginal sporting heroes are found in many sports today, from football to tennis, boxing and athletics, but it was very different in the nineteenth century when the pastoral frontier was still bitterly disputed by whites and blacks. Aboriginal workers on the Wimmera sheep stations began to develop and organise their cricketing skills during the 1860s and were recruited into a team by station owner and former Test cricketer Tom Wills. On Boxing Day 1866 they played before 8000 people at the MCG, followed by a disastrous Sydney tour which lead to the deaths of some players. Former test player Ashley Mallet has dramatically reconstructed this important pioneering tour of England and has also included the careers of later black players, including the famous fast bowler Eddie Gilbert who died tragically without fulfilling his potential.

Sounding 7 begins with Echo 107 titled CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN EYES ON THE OZ CULTURE-CLASH FRONTIER followed by echoes on BUCKLEY REVISITED, AFTER THE PROTECTORATE CRUMBLED and WHAT OF PROTECTOR ROBINSON? Echoes follow on salvaging tribal ways, the Merri Creek black orphanage, ‘going round the bend’ at the Asylum and Echo 114: THE CELESTIALS OF VICTORIA, being the resented Chinese gold miners. Exploring the contrasting fate of Batman, La Trobe and Derrimut, leads into echoes on fringe-dwelling, cultural resistance and Oz racism, in particular the mass psychology of racist ideology that culminated with World War 2. After the gold rush era, life and right behaviour at the Healesville Coranderrk mission station and re-thinking William Thomas the Aboriginal Guardian lead to the pleasant notion of civilizing British colonies through sport. The life and exploits of Tom Wills is celebrated in Echo 122: THE MAKING & BREAKING OF VICTORIA’S FIRST SPORTING HERO. Turning to political history, Oz class struggles – convicts, capitalism and nation-building asks the question with Echo 124: WHITHER MARXISM [?] and then BRITISH EMPIRE POLICY REFORMS IN THE 1840s to contain a Chartist-led revolution. Facets of Victorian ‘quality of life’ since the land grab are followed by echoes on the astrology of the 1802 Port Phillip Crown possession claim and an echo titled TOWARDS AN ASTROLOGY OF CIVILIZATION. The Sounding concludes with approaches to researching Aboriginal society, an undergraduate essay on the Dreamtime and finally with Echo 130: A RAINBOW SERPENT BRIDGE. Today in the 21s century, I wonder how differently Oz would have developed if the then ruling British government in Sydney and London had not used censorship to delay the gold rush for almost 40 years! Sounding 8 begins with Echo 131: HISTORY DISTORTION & CENSORSHIP and is backed up with a critique of Britannia’s pirate empire that together spawn two more echoes of doubtful but controversial polemics in 1421 – THE YEAR CHINA DISCOVERED THE WORLD suggesting they were here in Oz many centuries before Captain Cook. Echo 135: THE KADAITCHA SUNG MEETS THE DRUID INHERITANCE pits Palm Islander Sam Watson’s 1990s fiction The Kadaitcha Sung [the ‘clever’ occult Oz Dreamtime] in occult war with the equally ancient European / Celtic / Druid magic in the psyche of the Aryan ‘race’, so to speak. Going even further out on a limb, the focus shifts to recent light shed on ‘dark ages barbarians’ now considered by some historians to have been more culturally refined than the modern city individual. Back in Oz with Echo 137: WHITE MAN’S LAW – BLACKFELLOW LAW and Echo 138: McLEOD’S BUCKET FROM SKULL CREEK brings Western Australia after WW2 into wider awareness with the Pilbara pastoral workers strike of 1946-49 that won half-decent wage rights for Aboriginal stockmen. Moving further north, Echo 141: RECENT ARNHEMLAND CONNECTIONS Part 1: Taming the NT is the stuff of White Australia’s race-based patriotism as depicted in Ion Idriess’s once-mainstream fascist fictions counterpointed by Part 2: James Gaykamangus’s Striving to bridge the chasm: my cultural learning journey. The final echo 142 talks treaty.

Reproduction of the original: One Irish Summer by William Eleroy Curtis