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The first cricketers from India to travel abroad in 1886, the Parsis were in fact also slated to tour Australia in the 1890s. This was revealed to this writer by Brisbane-based cricket follower Saumil Kapadia who passed on contemporary reports from the Australian media during the visit of Parsi cricketer M. D. Kanga in July 1893.
According to a report in The Australian Star dated July 27, 1893, Kanga met Harry Boyle, the former Test cricketer in Melbourne and discussed with him the prospect of bringing a team of Parsis to tour Australia in 1893-94 as Lord Sheffield, a benefactor of Australian cricket who had sponsored the English tour of 1891-92 under W. G. Grace, "had abandoned the idea of bringing a team of English cricketers to Australia in 1893-94.”   

 

 

 

Boyle had been appointed agent for the proposed tour by Kanga and the report further states that though time is short, "Mr Kanga thinks that there is every possibility of the tour being satisfactorily arranged.”
An earlier report in the Evening Journal  of Adelaide dated July 17 also discusses the proposed tour and mentions that Lord Hawke, who brought a "fairly strong amateur 11 out to India” in 1892-93 lost just two out of their 23 matches on the tour and one was to the Parsis at Bombay by 109 runs. It should be noted here that this was the second English team to tour India. The first, G. F. Vernon’s XI toured in 1889-90 and they too were beaten by the Parsis — captained by Framjee Patel — at Bombay in January 1890, their only defeat on tour. The victory by four wickets was the first time an Indian team had beaten the British in a major sporting contest and preceded by 21 years the more celebrated win of the Mohun Bagan football team over the Ghaziabad-based East Yorkshire Regiment in the Indian Football Association Shield final at Calcutta.
The victory spawned massive celebrations across Bombay and was a bitter blow to the pride of the British Raj. The star for the Parsis was Mehllasha Edulji Pavri, the first great Indian fast bowler who was also the leading bowler when the second Parsi team visited England in 1888 and took 170 wickets at an average of 11. Pavri was also the star in the victory over Hawke’s team.    
The Evening Journal quotes Kanga as saying that J. M. Framjee Patel who was instrumental in organizing the first Parsi tour to England would also help in organizing the Australian tour. M. D. Kanga was the elder brother of Dr H. D. Kanga after whom the famed Kanga League cricket tournament in Bombay, founded in 1948, is named.
However,  just six months later, the proposed visit was cancelled, a report in The Capricornian of  January 13, 1894 stating: "The Australasian Cricket Council decided not to grant their patronage to a Parsee cricket team’s visit pending the probable visit of an English team.”     
As for the 1894-95 England tour of Australia, it not only went ahead but also resulted in the first great Test series in cricket history. England, captained by A. E. Stoddart, won the first two Tests, Australia the next two with England winning the fifth and final and the series 3-2. After Lord Sheffield’s invitation fell through, the Melbourne and Sydney cricket authorities came forward to sponsor the tour which proved to be a tremendous success financially with crowds flocking to every match and the media giving it coverage like no series before.
The Parsi plan to tour Australia was scuttled. But Test cricket and the mythical Ashes — symbol of cricket supremacy between England and Australia — which till then were low-key affairs, received a huge boost and international cricket was never the same again. And it would not be till 1935-36 when former Test captain Jack Ryder brought his unofficial Australian team to India that Indo-Australian cricket ties were finally established. That tour was sponsored by the Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh. The first-ever official Test series between the two nations was when India first toured Australia in 1947-48 under Lala Amarnath, the first series for independent India. 
Today the tradition lives on in the form of the (Allan) Border-(Sunil) Gavaskar Trophy established in 1996, fought for by the two nations, in which India beat Australia 2-1 in February 2023.