TOM WILLS AND THE ORIGINS OF AUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL

The AFL's official 150th history begins with an essay by Melbourne historian Gillian Hibbins on the game's "founders" - that is, those involved in the framing of the first rules. Her view is not mine - that is, we see the politics and personalities different ways - but her essay is significant and valuable.

I think it's fair to say she doesn't like Tom Wills, around whose mysterious life I wrote a novel, "The Call". She writes: "He was in fact an overbearing and undisciplined young man who tended to blame others for his troubles and was more interested in winning a game that in respecting sporting rules".  I don't blame her for not liking him. The figures she admires in the story - two Englishmen on the original Melbourne Football Club committee, JB Thompson and William Hammersley - made it clear they didn't like him at times. Thompson and Hammersley were also leading journalists of the day.

For comedy, read Thompson's apoplectic account in "The Argus" of the day Wills turned up to play football with an oval ball instead of a round one. "Next year we may expect to have patent octagonal or parallelopipedal cricket balls, or some geometrical monstrosity equally inapplicable to the required purposes'.  To make himself heard, Wills had to use the letters to the editor column.

Curiously, on what most people would regard as the crucial moment in footy's evolution, the framing of the first rules in 1859, Hibbins and I are not in disagreement, or not yet. I know of no evidence that the Aboriginal game played any part in the discussions surrounding that event. There is no scene in "The Call", either the novel or the play, which suggests such a discussion took place.  

I mention this because in The Weekend Australian of March 22 "The Call" was named in an article about the AFL's official 150th history beneath a headline reading : "AFL's Native Roots "A Seductive Myth" ". I was the only person named in relation to the creation of the "seductive myth", as it is also labelled in the official history.

I have a number of objections to the "Australian" article, not the smallest being that it didn't represent my actual position. My view on the origins of the game, as stated in "The Call", appear on the second-last page:  "Whose game is it, you ask. The blackfellas say it's theirs . The Irish claim they invented it and poor old HCA Harrison went to the grave swearing it was British. If you want my opinion, it's a bastard of a game - swift, bold and beautiful - for a bastard of a people".  I stand by that view.

The AFL's official 150th history, titled "The Australian Game of Football", has been described by chief executive Andrew Demetriou as the "definitive" history of the game. My primary objection to the history arises from Hibbins' second essay which is also the second of the book. Having listed various places where Aboriginal football was seen being played in Victoria in colonial times by white observers, she solemnly declares: "These places are not near the Grampians" (where Wills grew up). She then advises the reader as follows: "The Aborigines, at the time the white man arrived, lived within quite clearly defined tribal areas, speaking a language different from those of other tribal areas. Aboriginal tribal strangers were regarded with suspicion and did not trespass without being killed. Bearing this in mind, were there any reports of Aboriginal football in the Western Districts where Wills lived?"
 

This is as crude as arguing that because Australia has borders and arrests illegal immigrants it has no traffic in culture or ideas with other nations. Englishman Bruce Chatwin became internationally famous for his book "Songlines". There are continuing controversies to do with that book, but no-one seems to challenge its central tenet that lines of cultural exchange ran the length and breadth of Aboriginal Australia. Clan gatherings were observed in colonial Victoria of the sort that still happen in northern Australia (at which, incidentally, games of football are played).

It's recorded that games of Aboriginal football, commonly called marn-grook, were played at the Victorian gatherings and that one of the groups which attended the meetings, or corroborees, were the Tjapwurrung.  Tom Wills grew up in Tjapwurrung country, his father being the first white settler in the Ararat area, arriving in 1838 when Tom was three. It's recorded that one of the big rivalries in Aboriginal football in western Victoria was between the black cockatoos and the white cockatoos. The Tjapwurrung around Moyston, where Wills lived, had as their two totems the black and white cockatoo.   

In 1989, I attended the clan gathering on the Warlpiri tribal lands known as the Yuendumu Football Weekend. Six tribal communities didn't turn up because the Pitjantjatjara were out initiating their young men and where the dreaming paths crossed road, the roads closed. The Pitjantjatjara had the kadaitja man with them. That was the year the footy was left sitting on the sand during the grand final because word went through the crowd that the kadaitja man had arrived and everyone - players and crowd - vacated the place.  I had my eyes opened in a dozen different ways in one weekend at Yuendumu, but Tom Wills knew a lot more than me about Aboriginal culture. He spoke Tjapwurrung. He knew an unspecified number of their songs.

He was ten when he went to boarding school in Melbourne. When he was 15, he was sent to the Rugby school in England. What influence did Rugby have on him? There's a novel in that subject alone. He was the grandson of a convict. Did the other boys know that? How much did Wills swallow the school creed of "muscular Christianity"? Rugby football was then, transparently, a war game. There was no Rugby First XV (nobody else played the game but the Rugby school). However, in 1855, the year after three Rugby old boys were in the Charge of the Light Brigade, TW Wills was the captain of the Rugby First XI.

He returned home in December 1856 with a reputation as one of the best young cricketers in England. One week later, he took the field at the MCG in a trial match for the Victorian XI. In the words of journalist William Hammersley, Wills was "the observed of all observers, with his Zingari stripe and somewhat flashy get up, fresh from Rugby and college, with the polish of the old country upon him. He was then a model of muscular Christianity". It was around this time that Wills, according to his cousin HCA Harrison, declared in relation to football that we should have "a game of our own".

There is conflict about this and other aspects of the story, but I give weight to Harrison's testimony because he gives a good reason for it. Wills saw football as a training game for cricketers and thought Rugby football played on hard grounds would lead to injuries. We are speaking of the time before the Ashes existed. The ultimate cricketing glory was then for Victoria, the new colony, to knock off New South Wales, the old convict colony, for the first time.

With Wills as captain, they did and a position was found for him as the secretary of the Melbourne Cricket Club. Lack of confidence was not his problem, although drink and gambling were soon enough. He lasted less than a year as secretary of the MCC and, within two years, was in a fist fight with members of the Melbourne club when playing for an opposition team.

This followed an earlier dispute when Wills was playing cricket for Collingwood against Melbourne. As Wills bowled, a number of the Melbourne club's members were booing from the boundary and basically calling him a cheat from the boundary. These were the days of round-arm bowling. Wills was accused of bowling "high".  Wills was castigated in "The Argus", but the following week Tommy was back with an angry letter to the editor arguing that the matter of whether or not bowling was "high" was between the bowler and the umpire, and attacking The Argus correspondent, presumably JB Thompson, for having different standards on crowd behaviour for the club of the working man and the club of the toff. Tommy had an argument in his defence. Tommy always had an argument in his defence.  

The Wills family believe they are an illegitimate branch of the Churchills and Tommy's father, Horatio, was a man of great vision and energy. He was also the son of a convict. His family, wealthy emancipists, helped run the show in New South Wales but in the new colony of Victoria, suddenly virtuous as well as wealthy following the discovery of gold, the descendants of convicts were "tainted". Horatio's political career went nowhere. In 1861, having formally threatened to disinherit Tom for his continued failures outside the sports arena, Horatio took Tom and a party of twenty others north to Queensland to re-live the pioneer dream.

Several facts about Tom Wills and Aborigines deserve special attention. One is that he sought to warn his father that the blacks were not friendly after their arrival at their new station, Cullin-la-ringo. Horatio was glibly confident of his ability to handle them. Tom was more knowing of their culture. The massacre that followed is the biggest by blacks of whites in Australian history. It was followed by killing raids in which it is said three times as many blacks died. What is highly significant is that Tom Wills never accepted the white version of the massacre - that it was an example of the blacks' inherently treacherous nature and their "cupidity". Tom Wills said it was caused by a squatter having shot and killed members of the local tribe shortly before the arrival of his father's party.

Five years after his father's murder, Wills travelled to Edenhope to coach the Aboriginal cricket team that became the first Australian cricket team to tour England. Wills, by then a hopeless alcoholic, did not go on the tour of England.  He died, aged 44, having stabbed himself in the heart and was buried in an unmarked grave at Heidelberg where he lay forgotten for the best part of a century.

In the AFL's official history, Hibbins says that the notion that Wills was influenced "by a knowledge of, or at the very least, an appreciation of indigenous football games" is an "emotional belief" that "lacks any intellectual credibility". She goes so far as to say: "To conclude that Wills, either consciously or unconsciously, would give Aboriginal football any countenance in his approach to a football code in Victoria is hardly plausible".  The key words here are "either consciously or unconsciously".

As an example of what is possible when a footballer walks between cultures I would cite the example of Nathan Buckley. As Buckley told me the story of his career, one of the important periods was in his teens when he was playing  with Port Adelaide in the winter and Darwin footy in the summer. Darwin footy was heavily influenced by Aboriginal players.

Buckley told me if you could read the game in Darwin, you could read it anywhere. Indeed, when he went back to the SANFL - that is, footy based on whitefeller systems of thought - he found that he frequently knew what was going to happen before it did. Buckley gave me probably the best image I've ever heard to explain what's special about Aboriginal footballers. He likened the game to a tune. "Indigenous players never forget the tune. The rest of us struggle sometimes to remember it".

Fremantle's former coach Gerard Neesham reminds me somewhat of Tom Wills. Neesham has vision, an ocean of self-belief and the ability to relate easily to Aboriginal people. In addition to supplying the AFL with a steady flow of draft picks, the Clontarf program which he devised is also the most successful educational program for young men in Aboriginal Australia.

After Neesham read "The Call", I told him certain people could not accept what I take to be the book's fundamental assumption - that a white man can be influenced by Aboriginal culture. "What?" he boomed. "Are they myopic or something?"  At the time of our conversation Australia had a Prime Minister, John Howard, who made a political virtue of myopia, and I see his shadow in this book.

As stated earlier, "The Call" was a novel. The Author's Note at the front of "The Call" begins: "This book is an imagining of real events". I believe Gillian Hibbins' view, as expressed over her two essays, also amounts to "an imagining of real events". One question she is likely to receive, particularly from Aboriginal people, is which members of the western Victorian Aboriginal community did she speak to in arriving at her view of them? As it is, we have to travel to page 185 of the official history to discover that dual Brownlow medallist Adam Goodes, who comes from western Victoria, has strong feelings about the Aboriginal connection to the game.

I once saw it written of the history of baseball that the game has "no single point of origin". There is a grace in that phrase which is utterly absent from this account of the early history of Australian football.