INDIGENE - PART THREE

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INDIGENE - PART THREE by Whispering Jack

The life of Thomas Wentworth Wills (1835 - 1880), one of the Australian football's founding fathers and the country's indigenous people are closely intertwined. Their narratives are steeped in tragedy and despair and, in a way, it appears that fate conspired to bring them together in a dance of hopelessness and death.

Edward Wills, convicted at Kingston-on-Thames Surrey of highway robbery was spared the death penalty and arrived in the colonies on the notorious convict death ship Hillsborough. He died before his son Horatio Spencer Howe Wills was born in the fledging colony of New South Wales. Horatio's son Tom Wills was born on a sheep run at Molonglo Plains, but he grew up near the town of Moyston in the Western District of Victoria among shepherds and tribal Aborigines where he learnt to speak their language.

Tom Wills became a celebrated sportsman in colonial Victoria but this did not please his father, a leading pastoralist and parliamentarian, who made what appears to have been a concerted effort to remove his son from the Melbourne sporting world by taking him to Cullin-La-Ringo, Central Queensland.

This proved disastrous because, once there, Wills Senior was soon killed by Aboriginals at an encampment with 18 other settlers in the biggest massacre of Europeans in a single battle with Aboriginals in Australian history. Twenty-six year old Tom was lucky enough to be absent from the camp at the time buying supplies. The Europeans together with some black policemen sought retribution and retaliated by indiscriminately killing hundreds of Aboriginals, the innocent and the guilty.

Wills remained for a time at Cullin-La-Ringo and despite the tragedy of his father's death which hurt him deeply, he went on to captain a team of Aboriginal cricketers from Western Victoria. They played together in a game played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Boxing Day 1866 before 10,000 spectators and the team created great excitement. This was the forerunner of the first Australian cricket team to tour England but by that time Wills had fallen out of favour with the organisers and consequently, he did not accompany the team.

Although once called "the Grace of Australia" and "a model of muscular Christianity", Wills succumbed to an indulgence in alcohol and finally drowned in the illness of depression when on 2 May 1880 at his Heidelberg home he stabbed himself to death with a pair of scissors. The inquest returned a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind caused by excessive drinking.

Educated in Melbourne until 1852, Tom Wills went to Rugby School where he played football and captained the cricket team. He was in the Cambridge XI against Oxford in 1856 before returning to play for Victoria which he later captained. His cricketing career spanned almost two decades of inter-colonial matches against New South Wales, scoring 319 runs at an average of 21.27 and taking 72 wickets at 10.23. He also played for several local teams including Richmond and the Melbourne Cricket Club, of which he was secretary in 1857-58.

On 10 July, 1858 Wills wrote a letter to Bell's Life in Victoria in which he called for cricketers to take up a winter sport for fitness' sake. This correspondence led to the first game of Australian football between Melbourne Grammar School and Scotch College in August 1858 at Richmond Park. Wills was one of the umpires. With his brother-in-law H. C. A. Harrison and others, they codified the first rules of the game and the Melbourne Football Club was born. Wills played over 210 games mostly for Geelong, the second club formed, until he retired in 1876.

There has been conjecture as to whether the rules of the game stemmed from Wills' association as a child with Aboriginals in Western Districts of Victoria.

Most historians say the rules of the game were based on those played at Rugby and other English public schools but this view is not accepted by all.

Indigenous Australians played what is called "marngrook" which literally means "game ball" and is the name given to a number of traditional Indigenous Australian recreational pastimes believed to have been played at gatherings and celebrations.

Although not enough known by anthropologists about the prehistoric customs of Aboriginal people to determine how long the game had been played in Victoria or elsewhere in Australia, there is evidence of games featuring punt kicking and catching a stuffed "ball" by the Djabwurrung and Jardwadjali people and other tribes in the Wimmera, Mallee and Millewa regions of western Victoria.

There are suggestions that such games also extended to the Wurundjeri in the Yarra Valley, the Gunai people of Gippsland region in Victoria and the Riverina in south western New South Wales.

The Walpiri tribe of Central Australia, of which current Melbourne player Liam Jurrah is a member, played a similar kicking and catching game with possum skins known as Pultja.

Despite the views of the historians, there are still those who believe that marngrook had a significant role in the origins of Australian football. Dual Brownlow Medallist Adam Goodes of the Sydney Swans wrote on the AFL site in 2008:

"I do know we were playing a similar game for the joy and excitement of it, before the said founders of the game, Tom Wills and James Thompson and William Hammersley and Thomas Smith (or James Cook, for that matter) came along. People argue that we didn't have goals, but we did: kick it higher or longer; goals in and of themselves."

The debate on the game's origins continues but these goals have become so important culturally to our Indigenous Australians both inside and outside a game that forms a link with their past and co-incidentally with the tragic life of the man who founded the modern game.

For another look at Wills, his early home town of Moyston and the football club that grew from his inspiration see WATCH THEM GROW

TO BE CONTINUED

This series is written in honour of the late Matthew Wonaeamirri, father of current Melbourne player Austin. Our hearts go out to all of the family.