“I’m not playing cricket with someone who won’t eat lunch with me,” says Unaarramin, known as Johnny Mullagh. We meet Mullagh in York, England, having walked off the field after being denied entry to a luncheon tent organised by the city’s gentlefolk.

Aaron McGrath and Luke Carroll in Black Cockatoo. Photo © Prudence Upton 

A Jardwadjali man from western Victoria born around 1841, Mullagh is the fascinating subject of Black Cockatoo, a new play by Geoffrey Atherden. The star player of a team of Aboriginal cricketers, they made history in 1868 when they became the first team from anywhere in the world to play the English on their home ground. Directed by Wesley Enoch and playing at the Ensemble Theatre as part of Sydney Festival (of which Enoch is the Artistic Director), it’s a warm-hearted but not unsearching look at Mullagh’s little-known life and legacy, tracing its reverberations in the present.

This is neatly accomplished by a framing device in which a group of modern-day Indigenous activists have snuck into a museum after hours in the hope of unearthing and exposing the story of Mullagh and his fellow cricketers. Captained by Englishman Charles...