The diminutive scrumhalf, Australia’s first Aboriginal and Asian Wallaby, flourished in an age of acute racism and survived a host of traumatic experiences

At the turn of the 20th century the remote Australian town of Mungindi, Gamilaroi for “water hole in the river”, was literally the end of the line. Before cars and aeroplanes shrank the world it was 11 hours by train from Sydney and 12 hours from Brisbane, a frontier town split between “townies” and the landowner farmers the “cockies”. Asian migrants were outsiders with limited social mobility and Aboriginal people lived on the margins in “missions”, dispossessed and subjugated by fear.

As the white Australia boom gates were lowering and a climate of tension settled like a choking mist across the land, an unlikely Mungindi cross-cultural romance produced an elite rugby union player on a trajectory to greatness until fate cruelly intervened.

Cecil Ramalli was born in 1919, the last of six children to an Indian Muslim trader Ali Ram, who changed his name to Ramalli, and Adeline Doyle an Aboriginal woman raised north of Mungindi. When Ramalli and Doyle married in 1907 they must have been a unique and exotic couple for the townsfolk of Mungindi. The tiny moustachioed Ramalli, a dapper Punjabi general store merchant from Lahore, and Doyle, a strong, tall Aboriginal woman.

The family suspects “Ram” was an illegal migrant when he arrived in Sydney in 1898 to ply his trade as a hawker, and made his way to remote Mungindi to begin a new life as the general storekeeper. “Mum always said that her father Ram was a gentleman,” said Carol and Robyn Hughes, Ramalli’s granddaughters, on the phone from Warwick in Queensland. “They were a wonderful couple that worked hard to create success in a tough environment.”

The Ramalli’s retail business thrived and they were able to purchase the latest motor cars from Sydney’s Easter show and finally live the great Australian dream in the form of a 10,000 hectare sheep grazing property, nostalgically named “Bombay”.

Once prickly pear was cleared off the property in “the Great Cactus War”,the Ramalli family did so well as graziers that in 1934 they sent their youngest child Cecil to Hurlstone Agricultural High School in Sydney, a well trodden path for sons off the land.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fourteen-year-old Cecil Ramalli (middle row, second from left) and his Hurlstone Agricultural High School second XV team in 1934. Photograph: The Ramalli Family

Short like his father and the only dark skinned boy in his year, Cecil Ramalli settled in and found his calling in rugby union playing in the second XV in 1934. In 1935 at the age of 15 he had already made the first XV, the Referee newspaper reporting he, “had the finest pass from the scrums seen in many a year, a natural footballer who in his first year showed real brilliance”.

Ramalli was made captain of the Hurlstone first XV for the final two years of high school leading them to the 1936 and 1937 Combined High School championships. Team-mate Vince Dawson said opposing teams would yell “watch Ramalli” but he was so fast he would still score at will.

Tragically his father Ram would miss Cecil’s meteoric rugby career, dying from pneumonia in 1936 after trying to save his store when Mungindi was burnt to the ground.

Ramalli had his first break representing the Combined High Schools team in a curtain raiser before NSW played the touring Springboks. Referee described him as a “youthful wizard” and at age 18 he was rushed directly into first grade for Western Suburbs.

His elite form continued for Western Suburbs, storming into a “makeshift” NSW side that upset the highly fancied Queensland team 11-6 at Parramatta Park. One headline read “Amazing Ramalli”, and a journalist in attendance said, “neither the Queensland forwards nor backs knew what to do about him”.

Described variously as “slight”, “wiry” and “nippy”, Ramalli’s bullet passes and dummies wowed the crowds. He was targeted and sometimes battered by opposition players, incensed by a teenager upsetting the natural order.

Referee reported that the inclusion of Ramalli in the Wallabies would “make a vast difference” to the team that was humbled 24-9 in the first Bledisloe Cup Test by the All Blacks in July 1938. The report noted that in addition to his long, sharp passing, other parts of Ramalli’s game had developed including his try-saving defence.

The Ramalli phenomena took wing with the Sydney Morning Herald stating that selectors would be forced to recognise his claims and that coach Johnny Wallace “holds a high opinion of Ramalli’s ability and considers him a champion in the making”.

His fame reached across the Tasman Sea with the All Blacks’ pre-tour statement revealing they had heard of Ramalli but had experienced “no trouble from Australian halfbacks since Syd Malcolm”.

The selectors relented and selected the teenager, throwing him to the wolves in the second Test against the All Blacks in Brisbane. In an amazing co-incidence Winston Ide, a Queenslander of Japanese descent was also selected to make his debut, together the first Asian Wallabies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Wallabies team for the 1939 tour. Cecil Ramalli is front row, second from the right. Fellow debutant Winston Ide is front row, third from the right. Photograph: The Ramalli Family

“At the start of the season I did not even dream that this might happen to me,” Ramalli told the Telegraph. “I’ve got my chance and I’m going to make the most of it. I won’t let it worry me.”

In a tough encounter in Brisbane the All Blacks won 20-6 but the young debutant was the standout performer for the Wallabies. The Courier Mail reported gushingly: “Ramalli made such a splendid debut, he should become one of the greatest players the game has produced.”

Ramalli had courage, good hands and feet, could think quickly and the plaudits flowed. But his stunning Test debut came at a cost: he played the second half with a broken nose and two black eyes. For a while the All Blacks couldn’t land a glove on him but when they did they made it count.

Ramalli’s nose was Australia’s hottest topic of discussion ahead of the third Test in Sydney due to be played a week after. The newspapers sweated on the doctors’ reports which finally gave Ramalli the nod.

With the power of self belief in his veins, Ramalli played brilliantly at the Sydney Cricket Ground. This time the All Blacks were waiting for him and on their usual mission to bruise and confuse they battered him mercilessly. At 171 cm and 66 kilograms, Cecil was the lightest man on the field and he broke his nose again. At one stage he was so heavily concussed he wandered absently across the field with blood choking his nose, mouth and throat.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A newspaper clipping showing Cecil Ramalli sporting a broken nose and two black eyes from his Test debut for Australia against the All Blacks in Brisbane in August 1938. Photograph: Daily Telegraph/State Library of NSW

After receiving ambulance attention he reportedly said, “I’m going back”, only to be knocked out by a stray All Black elbow and carried off the field by his forwards to a standing ovation and taken straight to hospital for an operation.

His partnership with five-eighth Paul Collins was a feature of the match, the little half back putting his Western Suburbs team-mate through for a try. Despite their heroics, the All Blacks held on to win 14-6 and finished the tour unbeaten. The headline in the Sydney Morning Herald read, “Ramalli a Test hero”, celebrating his inspired play and courage. “After the drubbing he always came back for more.”

The most treasured accolade in sport, though, is an opponent’s compliment and before returning to New Zealand, the manager of the All Blacks, Dr George Adams, said that Ramalli “undoubtedly had the makings of the perfect half back”.

Back in Mungindi, Ramalli’s mother Adeline had been in great distress listening to the match huddled around the radio with her family. When Cecil was carried off the field, they sent off a telegraph for particulars of his injury. In a nice touch, Wallabies officials replied on ABC radio, sending a message back to Adeline with reassurances of her son’s safety.

It was a season to remember for Ramalli. He had played two interstate matches for NSW, two Test matches for Australia and won the best first grader award at Western Suburbs. Tellingly he also won L. Vincent trophy for the best all round club man. To cap it off he was voted top Australian Rugby Union player in 1938 by Referee, judged by the nation’s top sports writers.

In the following 1939 season Ramalli’s strong form continued with Western Suburbs and NSW and 10 days after his 20th birthday he was selected in the 29-man touring party for the third Wallabies tour of the British Isles.

The 10-month, 28-match tour was every schoolboy’s dream, a chance to see the world for free and make lifelong friendships. Ramalli’s siblings travelled 800 kilometres from Mungindi to Brisbane, swelling with pride to farewell their baby brother on the ship Mooltan as it left Brisbane docks.

It was Ramalli’s first time on a boat and he was seasick through the Great Australian Bight on the way to Fremantle “amidst the cheers of the more seasoned passengers”. He was now a popular member of the team, and in the great Australian team nicknaming tradition, now answered to “Gunga Din”.

After eight long weeks, as the Mooltan and its excited Wallabies made the final leg to London, German tanks blitzkrieged into Poland, plunging England and Australia into the second world war. Upon arrival in England, Wallabies team manager Dr Wally Matthews was summoned to Twickenham to hear that England would be declaring war on Germany, immediately cancelling the tour. Matthews noted sombrely in his tour diary: “What a disappointment it will be to the boys.”

On 3 September, 1939 the Wallabies were called to the ballroom of the Grand Hotel in Torquay to hear Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s fateful words over the radio: “This country is at war with Germany.” The players understood that this meant their tour was over, their dreams of playing at Murrayfield and Twickenham shattered.

They assembled for a team shot the next day on the ground in Torquay, with Matthews reporting that the team was “happy and playful despite their great disappointment”. They would return to Australia without playing a tour game and it was a minor consolation when the whole team was presented to King George VI and his wife Elizabeth at a formal reception.

The team began its trip back to Australia, a journey now extended to four months to avoid German U-boat attacks. To give the nine uncapped Wallabies a chance to wear their national colours, the team played a single match in Bombay on the way home.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cecil Ramalli watches the match during a stopover on the return trip after the Wallabies’ 1939 tour had been cancelled. Photograph: The Ramalli Family

Once back in Australia most of the players joined the Australian Imperial Force with Ramalli enlisting in his new platoon – the Signallers 8th Division headquarters. Wallaby #321 became Lance Corporal Signaller Ramalli. Posted to Malaya, Ramalli continued to play rugby in a number of humid “Test matches” against the English forces, winning every game and captaining the Australian Imperial Force side. The Courier Mail and other sources said Ramalli was brilliant and his play had a “magical quality”.

Five days before Pearl Harbour was bombed in December 1941, Ramalli sent a moving letter to his mother requesting she use his allowance to buy Christmas presents for the extended family and hinted of restlessness. “The sooner it starts the better. Everything is still the same with an occasional game of football.”

His boredom was soon replaced by horror and pain as Malaya and Singapore fell to Japanese forces and 100,000 British Empire troops surrendered. Ramalli was sent first to Changi prisoner of war camp and then north to build the 415 kilometre Thai Burma railway that took the lives of more than 2,600 Australian soldiers. The cruelty of the Japanese guards and the gruelling work in the humidity exhausted and broke many of the prisoners who lost their resolve and will to live succumbing to a phalanx of tropical diseases including cholera, malaria, dysentery, typhus and beri beri.

Ramalli was treated by famous POW surgeon, former Wallaby and future knight Sir E.E. Dunlop who described his exhausted patients as “shivering with fierce attacks of malaria, pouring dysentery, tropical ulcers, great raw ulcers on their legs or their feet like raw tomatoes”.

Ramalli survived and in 1944 was sent in a ship convoy to Nagasaki in Japan as slave labor to work in the coal mines. He was supposed to be on the ship Rokyo Maru but just missed what became a roll call of the damned, torpedoed by the USS Sealion, killing 549 Australians including fellow Wallabies team-mate Winston Ide.

Neil Ormiston Macpherson is 93, still fighting fit and was with Ramalli in the Nagasaki mines. He wrote by email that by this stage they had become hardened, their survival of the horrors of the Thai Burma Railway due to “strong comradeship, sharing and helping”.

In a rare shared war story, Ramalli told his son Peter about surviving the Nagasaki atomic bomb that was dropped on 9 August, 1945. “He was down in the mine under Nagasaki Harbour when his 12-hour shift was extended to a 24-hour shift,” explains Peter. “By the time he came up there was no city left.”

On his return to Australia Ramalli weighed a pitiful 38 kilograms and suffered heavily from cerebral malaria and skin diseases. He was offered money to play for Western Suburbs rugby league team but declined after a trial revealed the physical impact of three years of malnutrition.

Sadly he accepted that he could not return to his pre-war fitness and the war had curdled his dream of playing at Twickenham. Ramalli officially retired from the game and disappeared from the public eye to marry his pre-war sweetheart Norma Pearl Robertson and raise his two children Paul and Peter.

He helped to start the West Pymble Rugby Club and rather than linger on what could have been, commenced a role in 1963 with Northern Suburbs Rugby Club managing junior rugby on Sydney’s North Shore and working with thousands of kids until retiring in 1977. He found teaching children a therapeutic outlet – a return by proxy to the optimism he had felt before the war.

Norm Osbourne played with Ramalli’s son Paul at Northern Suburbs and remembers him fondly. “We used to go over Cecil’s house and he would cook great curries,” says Osbourne. “He was terrific to all of us. He was a quiet, humble guy who didn’t suffer fools but was too polite to ever say that.”

Peter Ramalli remembers an incredibly patient father who kept his emotions to himself. The jungles of Burma have a long reach and some former POWs developed mental health issues, became alcoholics or were hostage to their rage. Ramalli walked another path, the peace of humility over the futility of anger and hatred: “He was never angry or resentful about the war,” says Peter. “Even teaching us to drive he was always patient.”

Ramalli was to suffer another of life’s bitter lessons when his son Paul died in a car crash in 1971 triggering an existential crisis. “We were all devastated when my brother died and it really tested my father,” Peter Ramalli said. “He was never the same man again and became quite philosophical, taking each day as it came.”

Cecil Ramalli retired to Budgewoi on the NSW Central Coast and enjoyed his final years in quiet dignity with his wife Norma, passing away in 1998.

“The Cecil Ramalli story cries out for a book or a strong documentary.” That is the view of Professor Colin Tatz, author of Obstacle Race: Aborigines in Sport. “If ever a man overcame obstacles — Aboriginal and Indian descent in an age of acute racism, prisoner of war on the Thai-Burma railway, in Nagasaki when the bomb dropped – it was Cecil. He also survived the All Blacks in two Tests, and post-war he became one of Sydney’s best coaches of juniors.”

When Wallaby scrumhalf Will Genia ran onto the field at majestic Twickenham to face the might of the All Blacks in the recent World Cup final he was living the lost dream of the 1939 Wallabies and their little scrumhalf Cecil Ramalli, a noble pioneer who crossed race and class lines to become Australia’s first Aboriginal and Asian Wallaby.