ANOTHER LOCAL HERO: ALBERT ‘POMPEY’ AUSTIN, A MAN OF MANY TALENTS

ANOTHER LOCAL HERO: ALBERT ‘POMPEY’ AUSTIN, A MAN OF MANY TALENTS.

Albert ‘Pompey’ Austin was born in the mid-1840s to Charlie and Alice of the Djab wurrung clan and may have been educated at the Buntingdale Mission near Birregurra.² His Aboriginal education is a closed book as the society in which he was born was disrupted and destroyed by the incomers from abroad. From the outset he was a man between two worlds but he showed an amazing adaptability becoming an athlete (pedestrian as they were called), cricketer, footballer, race horse owner and rider, horse thief, artist, musician, savant, explorer and a thorn in the side of those who wished to confine him and the survivors of his generation to remote ghettos on the fringe of the colony.³

It was as a hurdler, high jumper and runner on the flat that he came to notice in meetings in the Western District. He took part in the Warrnambool Cricket Club’s Annual Sports on the Prince of Wales’ birthday in November 1869, winning the high jump, the pole vault and the 220 yards hurdles, but fell at the last hurdle in the steeplechase.⁴ The next year he won the running high leap and a handicap hurdle race at the Caledonian Society’s Gathering in Warrnambool. The Examiner noted, ‘Pompey, an Aboriginal, gained much applause by his famous leaping, and the hurdle and flat races were well contested‘. He won £3 for his two victories.⁵

The year 1872 saw Pompey’s breakthrough athletic and football season. It was at the Geelong Friendly Societies Easter Gift races on Easter Monday in 1872 that Pompey Austin had one of his greatest triumphs winning flat races at 100, 300 and 400 yards and the hurdles over 300 yards against some of the best local runners. Later that year he performed less well at the Corio Cricket Club sports but was selected to play football for Geelong in the opening match of the season against Carlton, the best team of the previous year. He is the only indigenous player who has certainly been found playing for a top senior football club in in a competitive match in Victoria in the nineteenth century.⁶ Tom Wills was supposed to have captained the Geelong team but turned up late and played alongside two of his brothers, Horace and Edgar. Pompey did not impress the Geelong Advertiser reporter. Probably the violence of the first tackle showed Pompey that his speed and skill were no match for the weight and power of the opposition. It was in 1872 that the rules of the game were changed to allow the umpires to throw the ball up to end the interminable low level scrummages which dominated the way the sport had evolved. Pompey later played successfully with Framlingham, Cobden and Ballarat Albion Imperial, being regularly noticed among the top players in these clubs.

He was also a cricketer playing alongside Johnny Couzens and Bullocky who toured England with the Aboriginal team in 1868. It has been asserted that he was a boxer, and in this photograph he is said to have adopted a boxer’s stance, but I can find no direct contemporary evidence that he was a pugilist.⁷

Pompey Austin collected £43 in one day by winning the handicap hurdle, the steeplechase and the Christmas handicap over 880 yards at the Belfast Athletic Sports in December 1873.⁹ That was an extraordinary sum for someone who, as far as we know, had no regular income. Given that average weekly earnings for white males were around £4 a week, and less for labourers, and much less for Aboriginal workers, it was significant.¹⁰ He may have spent some of his winnings at this and other events buying a racehorse Stranger with which he won the hurdle race at Charlton in November 1874.¹¹

Two of the superstars of mid-nineteenth century pedestrianism in Australia, Frank Hewitt and Arthur Lynch, reminisced about him in international correspondence published in 1916:

“Pompey Austin, father of Chris Austin, who died about three years ago as the result of an accident, was a full-blooded black and was a great all-round athlete. His prowess at sports gatherings were at one time a household word. In the hurdle race he had few equals and won many events throughout the district“.¹²

Pompey Austin brought one of his drawings to the Warrnambool Standard office, though it was damned with faint praise:

“Pompey Austin, the Aboriginal hero of hundreds of pedestrian matches and jumping events in the Warrnambool district, has been exhibiting (says the Warrnambool Standard) his talent in quite another direction. Pompey has brought a picture to our contemporary’s office, which he has drawn with crayons. It is evidently copied from a design for a chair ornament, such as accompanies the needlework journals. It is not exactly a work of art, but interest attaches to it from the fact that it is the drawing of an Aboriginal“.¹³

It seems clear that Pompey travelled all over south and central Victoria playing football, running, entertaining and ‘borrowing‘ horses and saddles as he needed them to assist his journeyings. But he also travelled further afield. He was part of a group of men who left Camperdown for the Kimberley gold fields in 1886:

“Pompey Austin, well known to all Camperdonians, is here, and has made a couple of trips to the supposed fields (so he says) with O’Donnell’s party. He also says there is no gold, and it is not worth going up, but he would willingly conduct a party should sufficient grog be forthcoming.”¹⁴

There is a brief reference to Mary Durack’s father “welcoming Billy O’Donnell and the prodigious native Pompey who sang popular songs hot from the London music halls’ in her account of the Kimberleys in 1886“.¹⁵

There is yet another element to Pompey Austin’s story that has never been fully appreciated. He became a well-known public figure in Ararat, Ballarat, Geelong and Melbourne. “An Aboriginal black named Pompey afforded some amusement in Barkley Street [Ararat] on Saturday evening by playing a number of musical selections on a concertina. Pompey’s musical proficiency was a surprise to a great many, as he discoursed several lively airs, principally consisting of breakdowns, jigs and reels in excellent time and in a manner that would have done credit to many an amateur who essays the manipulation of an instrument so questionably musical in most hands as a concertina“.¹⁶

Earlier that year he had been entertaining people at ‘The Corner‘, Ballarat’s equivalent of Hyde Park Corner in London, where speakers gathered to entertain and inform the crowds. On this occasion, he engaged his audience:

“… with disquisitions on the present European situation and the probabilities of war. Finding this did not ‘fetch’ the audience, and that coins were coming in slowly, ‘Pompey’ commenced a monologue concert. Amongst his hearers were several hard-headed Scotchmen, who at first showed no inclination to contribute to the entertainer’s funds. A verse in praise of Scottish valor and the beauties of the scenery in Scotland, however, caused them to unbend, and ‘Pompey’ reaped a good harvest as the result of his cunning. In the evening he had round him a crowd of admirers listening to his manipulation of a concertina. It is to be hoped the unfortunate fellow will not, as the result of his good fortune, fall into the hands of the police through over-indulgence in intoxicants”.¹⁷

Where did Pompey learn about Scotland and its scenery? From the Manifolds or the Murrays or the Austins? Or from drinking with Scottish mates in hostelries around the colony? Where did he pick up information on the international situation? Where did he learn to play the squeezebox? This is a man of multiple talents.

His memory lingered on long after he died in 1889. At the Branxholme ANA sports in 1910, he was mentioned alongside John Davidson, a champion all-round athlete, and William J. Millard who won the first Stawell Gift in 1878.¹⁸ Private W. Dolan in a letter from Belgium during the First World War in 1916 wrote:

“Then at a given time the artillery fire lifted on to the German second line. Then we lifted on to our feet and made a sudden though silent rush for his trench, taking the remnants of his wire entanglements in our stride (like Pompey Austin used to take his hurdles)“.¹⁹

Sergeant J. W. Kerr from Cobden writing to his mother from France in 1917 about the massive five-day long divisional sports meeting during a lull in the fighting mentioned:

“The hurdle was won by an Australian darkey who triumphed in Pompey Austin’s best style“.²⁰

After he died, horses and greyhounds were named after him. They celebrated his speed and reflected the esteem in which he was held by people who knew of him. So the folk memory was still alive and flourishing in the middle of the twentieth century in the Western District. A horse named Pompey Austin ran in the open St Leger at Camperdown in 1940.²¹ The greyhounds with the best prospects in a coursing meeting also in Camperdown included a Pompey Austin in 1939.

Pompey Austin straddled two very different worlds as they collided in the mid-nineteenth century western Victoria, where the impact on Indigenous people was devastating. His response was to take on the white men, quite literally at their own games and at their own cultural activities and demonstrate by his prowess that he could match them in both. Yet apart from a few who have studied the history of football and athletics, Pompey’s name does not resonate with people today.

Tommy Wills was a lovable rascal and has been lionised in the twenty-first century. He was a decade older than Albert Austin and died ten years before him, but their lives and careers overlapped. Poor Pompey was treated as a criminal and hounded for trying to make a living by his wits and his talent in the nineteenth. He was no lesser man; he just had the misfortune to be born black in a society that did not appreciate him. In that he was not alone. Perhaps in 2018 we can recover his story and grant him some recognition at last. As we demonise groups in Australia today, the notion of us having made progress in understanding those who do not fit a particularly privileged mould is very dubious.