War of CricketEddie Gilbert
Eddie Gilbert: The True Story of an Aboriginal Cricketing Legend (2002), by journalist Mike Colman and researcher Ken Edwards, is the biography of Eddie Gilbert (1905-1978), the Kaanju fast bowler who dismissed Don Bradman for a duck in 1931 and was, by Bradman's own account, the fastest bowler he ever faced — and who spent his final decades confined to a psychiatric hospital after cricket discarded him.
Who Eddie Gilbert was
Gilbert was removed from his family near Woodford, Queensland, at the age of three, part of what is now recognised as the Stolen Generations, and raised at the Barambah Aboriginal Reserve (now Cherbourg) north of Brisbane. As a ward of the state under Queensland's Aboriginals Protection Act, virtually every part of his adult life — his wages, his movements, ultimately his freedom — remained under official control even at the height of his fame, a tension the book treats as central to his story rather than as background detail.
A ferocious, brief first-class career
Gilbert played for Queensland in the Sheffield Shield from 1930 to 1936. He was probably only the fifth Aboriginal Australian to play first-class cricket in the country, following Twopenny in 1870, Johnny Mullagh in 1879, Jack Marsh in 1900 and Albert Henry in 1902 — not, as sometimes claimed, the first. Off an extremely short run-up, he generated genuine express pace through a flexible wrist action that some attributed to years spent throwing a boomerang; the action drew constant suspicion, though he was called for throwing only once in his career, at the MCG in 1931, and umpires otherwise never contradicted the straightness of his arm.
Bowling out the Don
On 6 November 1931, at Brisbane's newly opened Cricket Ground, Gilbert removed NSW opener Wendell Bill for a duck with his very first ball of the match. The next batsman in was Don Bradman, who lasted five deliveries: the fifth, a rising ball too fast to control, looped off the top edge of his bat to the wicketkeeper for a duck. Bradman said afterwards that those five balls were faster than anything he faced from England's Harold Larwood, the spearhead of Bodyline, "or anyone else" — while noting in his own autobiography that he considered Gilbert's action "decidedly suspect," a verdict the book reads as inseparable from the racial politics of the era rather than as neutral technical judgement.
The book, and the tragedy it tells
Colman and Edwards trace Gilbert's rapid rise from district cricket at Barambah to the Sheffield Shield, and then his decline: unofficially labelled a thrower and forced out of the game, he was later admitted to Wolston Park psychiatric hospital near Brisbane, where he remained until his death on 9 January 1978 at the age of 72, following years of alcoholism and mental illness. The book is explicit that this was not simply personal misfortune but the predictable result of the system that had controlled him from childhood. In 2015, his son Barney unveiled a memorial at the Eddie Gilbert Memorial Field near the hospital where his father died.
| Book | Detail |
|---|---|
| Title | Eddie Gilbert: The True Story of an Aboriginal Cricketing Legend |
| Authors | Mike Colman and Ken Edwards |
| Publisher | ABC Books |
| Published | 2002 |
| Subject born-died | 1 August 1905 - 9 January 1978 |
It is not, ultimately, a book about cricket statistics at all. It is the story of a man who was, for a few seasons, as famous in Australia as Bradman himself, and whose life afterward shows exactly what that fame was worth to the institutions that controlled it. Colman and Edwards frame Gilbert's career as one data point in a much longer, largely undocumented history of Aboriginal cricketers — Twopenny, Mullagh, Marsh and Henry among them — whose first-class careers were shaped and often cut short by the same racial politics that shaped Gilbert's, decades before Australian cricket kept any consistent record of Indigenous players at all.
Folk singer Dermot Dorgan later wrote a tribute song simply titled "Eddie Gilbert" about his life and struggles, and the book itself remains the fullest account of a player whose name, for much of the late 20th century, survived mainly as a single anecdote about the day he got Bradman out — rather than as the story, now much better documented, of an exceptional fast bowler failed by the system that briefly celebrated him.