Not long afterwards the family migrated to New South Wales, Australia, where he joined the Warwick Cricket Club in Sydney.

[2] At the club he was trained by William Caffyn, a former Surrey cricketer who was then a representative of New South Wales.

Bannerman started playing professional cricket in 1871, before making his first-class debut for New South Wales.

Bannerman opened the Australian innings and is thus retrospectively deemed to have had the honour of facing the first ball ever bowled in Test cricket (the bowler being England's Alfred Shaw) and scoring the first ever run in Test cricket.

Charles Bannerman and Nat Thomson were the first ever international batting partnership (the first ever international opening batting partnership) and they made 2 runs together before Nat Thomson was bowled by Allen Hill for 1.

He did not represent Australia again, officially because of ill-health, but it was suggested that he could not cope with celebrity status, and that gambling debts and alcohol left him impoverished.

His first match was between Australia and England at the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) from 28 to 31 January 1887.

[5] Bannerman's last match, at Melbourne in the 1901–02 season, was also a close low-scoring affair with Australia winning by 32 runs.

[citation needed] In the fifth Test of the 1897–98 series, Bannerman turned down a confident lbw appeal against Australian batsman Joe Darling when the match was in a tense situation.

The lbw was reportedly "obvious"[citation needed] but the bowler had run in front of the umpire who was unsighted and had to reject the appeal.

After the game Bannerman lodged an official complaint against the English wicket-keeper who had accused him of cheating, and the player was rebuked.

[7] His last matches were the two played by the Australian touring team against New Zealand in Christchurch and Wellington in March 1905.