Laurie Fowler

Heh, the movement to cancel Wills has run out of steam and The Age is trying valiantly to keep it alive by impugning him with faint accusations. It's unclear how the Skipton hotel story is supposed to make Wills "unreliable". The publican declined to put the team up for the night, which is exactly what Wills said. Pointless journalism.

Good post. Suspect the timing has far less to do with Melbourne FC than the game itself, in its most important week of the season.

The I Zingari jacket referred to was acquired while Wills was schooling overseas. It created a minor sensation when he wore it onto the MCG some five years prior to the massacre. And Wills himself was long dead at the time of the letter, without right of reply. There is no accounting for the unknown writer's motives.

It's not an "article" as such but a letter from a reader like you or me, posted anonymously and replete with demonstrable falsehoods, such as that Wills arrived from England three years earlier (he and his father were born in NSW) and that his family's heads were impaled on sticks during the massacre (only his father was present). The writer also seems to be under the illusion that the events happened in Victoria. The dramatic supposed recounting of Wills' return to the property is at odds with a man not given to such introspection, least of all to a stranger. And there is documented evidence that Wills recuperated at a nearby station while the first reprisal raid was carried out. A later, more deadly raid was conducted under the auspices of the fearsome Queensland Native Police. The letter is an interesting discovery after all this time, but in its full context must remain a dubious curiosity.

Reading the letter in full calls the anonymous source into doubt.