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Jack Kennedy: descendant of Dick-a-Dick

June 30 2003
By Martin Flanagan

The Aboriginal cricket team of 1866 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The players' identities are subject to some dispute but Dick-a-Dick is said to be the man on the right, front row. However, Jack Kennedy believes Dick-a-Dick is seated at left in the front row, next to the man with his foot on the chair.

Jack Kennedy is like a koala in a Collingwood beanie, bent and round. But, at 84, he can read without glasses, hear without an aid and his memory goes "all the way back". He's also the great-grandson of Dick-a-Dick, a member of the first Australian cricket team to tour England in 1867-68.

The First XI, a documentary about the team produced by Christina Hindhaugh and James McCaughey, screens at the State Library on July 8. The film quotes former Test cricketer Ashley Mallett saying that, by the end of its English tour, the Aboriginal team was as good as any around at the time.


When Jack was a boy, his uncles told him Dick-a-Dick was a good shot with the waddy and never drank or smoked. During the team's tour of eastern Australia in 1866-67, a Melbourne journalist wrote that Dick-a-Dick had a horror of drunkenness and physically punished team members who indulged.

On that tour, the team was captained by Tom Wills, the founder of Australian football. Heavy drinking was reported among the players, four of whom died. I asked Jack what he'd heard about Tom Wills. "He died an alcoholic," he said. Wills dropped from white memory altogether after he committed suicide in 1880.

Jack was born at Antwerp, not far from the Ebenezer mission. When he was three or four, his uncles took him out into the Little Desert and left him. He found them by following their tracks, which was the point of the lesson. He said Aboriginal culture was "all up here", pointing to his head.

He left school at 13 to work on a farm. During World War II, he joined the artillery, because he thought it would mean less walking, saw action in Syria and was later posted to Darwin. Churchill wanted Jack's battalion deployed to defend Singapore. Australian prime minister John Curtin insisted on them returning to defend Australia. After the war Jack worked on the railway. He has two children but has been a widower for 35 years.

A few years ago, he wrote to Lord's asking for Dick-a-Dick's shield and waddy back. In return, they sent him a brochure about the ground and its museum. Jack said: "If we'd become a republic, I would have gone over and got them."

As we drive out to the old Ebenezer mission on the Jeparit road, Jack tells me that you don't see scarred trees that are white gums. He said his uncles told him that when man was first put on Earth, he couldn't swim. That's why he built canoes, but the canoes built from the white gum wouldn't float.

He gets me to slow down and points to an old red gum hiding in some grey scrub away from the road.

It is sliced open as neatly as a piece of fruit. The missing piece of bark is in the shape of a canoe three or four metres long.

During his lifetime, Dick-a-Dick was probably more famous for finding three children lost in the bush for several days in 1864. Jack said that when Dick-a-Dick and the father returned to their camp there were immediate celebrations. Jack said Dick-a-Dick told the father: "You leave now and take those children home to their mother. She still doesn't know they've been found."

Dick-a-Dick was called King Richard after that. I asked Jack what his traditional name was. He said: "Djungadjinganook." When I asked him how to spell it, he grinned and shrugged.

It appears that Djungadjinganook was the Aboriginal leader of the cricket team. He died at the Ebenezer mission two years after they returned from England. On his death bed, he converted to Christianity and was given the name of Paul. Jack has scoured the records but can't find out where Paul is buried.

The mission closed in 1904. Jack visited here as a boy with his mother, who used to tend her mother's grave. He showed me where his people's houses were, the old gate into the churchyard where the German missionary's house stood and the mulberry tree.

The church has recently come back into the hands of the Wotjobaluk people. It's being rebuilt, a new floor put in. Jack took me inside. Someone's defecated on the new floor where the altar would have been. "Dirty bastards," said Jack. Outside he sees tyre tracks. Someone has been driving a car about. Once, a car got in and did wheelies over the unmarked Aboriginal graves in the churchyard.

He showed me the mission kitchen. Jack said that if the people didn't go to church on Sundays, they didn't get food. He showed me the girls' dormitory, pointing to a small barred window. The Aboriginal girls were locked in at night to keep them apart, but Jack said people still came and talked to them. Before leaving, we paused by the Aboriginal graves, his great-grandfather's among them.

Jack said the Aboriginal cricketers were badly treated. "They were never paid and they had to make their own way home from Sydney."

As we drove off, a magpie flew past. As Jack's been barracking for the Magpies all his life, I asked him what he called magpies in his language. He said a word I write down as "guruk". Back in Dimboola, I thanked him for taking me to Ebenezer and he said it was a good way to spend some time.

Getting out of the car, this small round man with a curious glint in his eyes turned and said: "See you round, then."




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