There's a lot to be said about the legacy of the 1868 Aboriginal touring party who were the first cricketers to leave Australian shores.

Combined Australian XIs of the colonies had previously played English teams named the XI of their captain's surname throughout 1861-62 and 1863-64 tours of Australia, but it wasn't until a unique group of Aboriginal players journeyed on a reciprocal tour which lead to the status of international Test matches recognised soon after in 1877.

The 1868 tourists who had only been taught the game about five years earlier took seven matches to capture their first victory in England, but the Aboriginal Australians still finished the tour with a respectable record of 14 wins, 14 losses and 19 draws.

Nine of the 47 first-class matches across 148 days were against County clubs, excluding the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), who unofficially represented the best of English cricketers at the time.

Recent revelations have demonstrated the connections – separated by 157 years – like a proverbial boomerang with Indigenous pacemen Jason Gillespie and Scott Boland both making an impact in the Test arena.

That includes the fourth Test of the recent series against India, where in traditionally the most conservative format of the game, new Australian opener Sam Konstas, of Greek diaspora, emulated one of the First Nations heroes of 1868.

Konstas pulled off a couple of the modern game's audacious ramp shots that have only come into vogue, slowly and gradually, over the past 20 years of Twenty20 cricket.

The 19-year-old tried and failed a couple of times before successfully connecting a short time later against Jasprit Bumrah, the form fast bowler in the world, stunning the MCG crowd.

Late archaeology historian, DJ Mulvaney, who passed away in 2016, wrote years earlier in one of his editions of Cricket Walkabout that Johnny Mullagh, the iconic Aboriginal allrounder who is also known by his Indigenous skin name, Unaarimin, was ramping bowlers in the 1860s, including on the fateful tour to England.

"Dropping on one knee to a fast rising ball, (Mullagh) would hold his bat over his shoulder and parallel to the ground," Mulvaney wrote of the man, whose name adorns the medal for the player of the match at every Boxing Day Test.

"The ball would touch the blade and shoot high over the wicketkeeper's head to the boundary."

To mark the occasion of innovative feats like that of Mullagh on the field or teammates off it like Dick-a-Dick, where his star act was to avoid being hit from throws of just 15 paces away – even with four separate balls thrown at one time – from Englishmen accepting his challenge, Indigenous players of a different generation toured the UK 150 years later.

In a touching tribute, players on the 2018 tour wore shirts with the names of the 13 Aboriginal men from the 1868 team.

Boland, then a rising Victorian Sheffield Shield player, wore the name of Johnny Cuzens (Yellanach), another talented player in his own right of the 1868 tour, who tragically died of dysentery just a year after arriving home.

Australia's most recent men's Indigenous Test hero had been presented his shirt by Ashley Couzens, a descendant of the Gunditjmara brothers, which extended to Nick Boland wearing Yellanach's brother's name Mosquito on his back.

Boland, who also wrote a foreword for the most recent edition of Cricket Walkabout, backed calls at the launch inside one of the exclusive rooms of the MCG from Couzens, a Deakin University health lecturer, to repatriate artefacts that have always remained in England since the tour ended.

"I know there's a belt buckle, there's original photos of them as a team, there's a big wooden nulla, and there's also things like original scoresheets, some of the publications about their arrival and they are the things that we know of," Couzens said.

No formal approach to Cricket Australia has been made in an attempt to raise the sensitive dialogue with Lord's over the whereabouts of many missing Aboriginal items.

"This story has a lot of cultural sensitivities, as well – and it's not just us direct descendants, the Couzens' mob; there's also other families connected to this," Couzens said.

Couzens believed a greater understanding and recognition of what treatment the players of the 1868 tour went through, along with what repatriation would mean to descendants should ensure "we're at a time and place in this country where we're mature enough to start this conversation".

Along with Boland, Couzens was invited to speak at the book's launch in November of last year about a story which has inspired the second-ever men's Indigenous Test player to reach for the stars.

The opportunity was too good not to raise the topic in front of "a lot of those dignitaries".

"I think if the artefacts came home, it will have more impact on our kids that carry the blood of our descendants that they can see them, feel them, empower them and connect more to their identity," Couzens said.

"So from an Aboriginal perspective, it is more of a cultural impact for us that all of us that are connected to this story.

"I just said (at the launch) I don't think there is much harm to potentially talking about replicas to be replaced and all sorts of things, but I did also say that maybe they could tour, come over and they be on display at the 'G as well."