This, my first installment, is coming to you from a small hotel in San Francisco. I came for Christmas because I was missing my son and I’ve been here for five days now. I’m an innocent abroad. I’ve never been to the US before. The hotel is on Broadway at North Beach, comfortably nestled between succulent strip joints, on a street lit by lavish neon, and in a neighbourhood served by the abundance of Chinatown. Daytime the streets are typically busy - shoppers, traders, travelers, hustlers and many homeless people, but at the winter sunset around 5pm, emergency sirens begin their eerie, feminine wail, cuing the sense of menace I detect out there in the urban wilds. My 22 year old son and his sweetly chilled friends reassure me that Frisco is a friendly town.

The young people here seem quite proud of the heritage of the Beat Generation - Kerouac, Ginsberg, Howl; Haight Ashbury, the San Francisco sound of the 60s etc. And those that were there at the time enjoy the awe that the young indulge them with. Remnants of the original ‘happening scenes’ are still around, such as the City Lights book store which is across the road from me.

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art yesterday I saw a collection of photographs. They were enlargements of family portraits. the type of photos kept in shoeboxes or in wallets. Small photos of loved ones made special by always being with you. As it turns out, this is how the creators came to make this collection. They asked people who entered the gallery if they could photograph the photos they kept in their wallet. They enlarged them, retaining the original photographic quality, as well as the characteristic crease and wear marks of an old, much loved photo - a husband and wife formally posed, a smiling young woman on her 21st. The gallery space pays homage to the tradition of family photography. The familiarity of the photos is charming, but on this large scale, the mystique of the past is intense and confronting. Personal history is an emotional thing.

In 06 and 07 I looked at the personal photos, many of them miniature Box Brownie snaps, of Australian women who’d married British servicemen during World War II, and migrated to the UK on the Royal Navy aircraft carrier, HMS Victorious. To see the photo of a young woman and look into her face as an eighty year old is quite profound, especially when she’s told you her life story. I traveled in Australia to meet and talk to them about the heady atmosphere of romantic war time love. Their shared history is an unusual story hidden beneath the popular chronicles of the Second World War. Their childhoods were abruptly severed by the pragmatism of war time governance, and the liberating war time culture. They went to the UK believing in romance and, somewhat naively, not expecting the harsh conditions in 1946, post war Britain, and the hostility of the British towards them. It was supposed to be a motherland who cared for her loyal subjects.

I was drawn to this story because I thought it illuminated the uniqueness of war time culture, as well as revealing so much of the backdrop to the lives of our mothers and grandmothers. Mystery still shrouds that generation of women, who are drifting quietly towards the end of their lives. Housewives and mothers - seen and not heard. But the proof is in those miniature photos you’ll find in a shoebox.

To Graeme, thanks for your kind words and, yes, I hope to write another book.

This is my last blog, so I thought I might write a few words about Tom Wills and the origins of Australian Rules football. After all, this seems to have been the selling point or at least publicity point for the Summer Read. I hasten to add that the book on Tom Wills is one that treads well beyond sport. In fact, some of the most pleasing comments  have come from committed non-sporting types who enjoyed it for its narrative and history.

Anyhow, to the origins of football.

There has been heated debate as to the significance of Tom Wills in the origins of the game. Well, for me, it is very clear. He was, without doubt, the most important of all the early influential men who shaped the game. Other men, particularly James Thompson, William Hammersley and James Bryant also had important roles. No one man ‘invented’ the game. There were almost certainly other important individuals but there is a patchiness of evidence that makes further assessment difficult.

The second debate is whether Tom Wills introduced aspects of aboriginal games into the early rules of Australian Rules football.

As I looked at this over a period of 10 years it seemed that there were two main issues to sort out. The first was to try and establish if aboriginal football was played near Mount William in the Grampians where Tom lived as a boy.

The best contemporaneous evidence came from James Dawson, a settler in the Western District.

James Dawson was a man I came to admire. He was an advocate for aboriginal rights and he spoke with prickly fire and single-mindedness. He was also an assiduous collector of aboriginal vocabulary and listened to languages with sensitivity often neglected by other settlers. The name he recorded for aboriginal football played near Mt William was Min’gorm.

We know, from several sources, that Tom played games with aboriginal children in the Mount William district. As I conclude in the book it can be argued that Tom Wills either watched or played Min’gorm or a variant of this game. While there is no proof of this, it remains a reasonable speculation.

The next issue was to examine whether contemporaneous evidence indicated, or even hinted at, a connection between aboriginal games and the beginning of Australian Rules football. I found no suggestion of such a link. This was not for want of trying, as I spent hundreds of hours poring over material and interviewing dozens of descendants of numerous families.

Is it possible that I am wrong? That indeed Tom Wills did incorporate aspects of aboriginal games into early Australian Rules football. Well, of course, there may have been events that were not recorded. No one can say one way or the other. But what was recorded and survives all point to the importance of the games imported to the colony. These games came primarily from England and, of these, the most influential was the game Tom Wills played at Rugby School.

In writing the Tom Wills biography, I knew that many readers would be interested to know my views on these debates. The technical issue in writing the book was to decide at what point to address them. My initial thought was to include a detailed discussion on the possible connections with aboriginal football in the early chapters on football. To do so, would have necessitated stopping the book and inserting a chapter to reflect recent debate. But this would have not reflected the evidence as I found it from the mid-nineteenth century.

So, rather than introduce a chapter of modern speculation, I elected to add an appendix in which I succinctly summarised my views.

The Tom Wills story transcends sport. Two features - his heroic egalitarianism and his links with aboriginal history - are the most important for me. It was unlikely that Tom ever considered the deeper social and political implications of his relationship with aborigines but I think we can read into his story a bigger story - of a nexus between black and white. The football speculation is but one of several strands that pass through Tom Wills linking these different cultures.

As I read about Baz Luhrmann and the film AUSTRALIA I keep thinking that if a film director wanted a story that encapsulated the Australian identity then Tom Wills should have been his man.

Thanks to all my fellow writers and readers.

I wish you peace and happiness in 2009,

Greg

Catherine Dyson is next Summer Read author blogging from 31 December to 5 January.

Her book Swing by Sailor is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

Catherine Dyson is a writer, film director and producer. She worked on the Australians at War Film Archive as an interviewer/editor and co-wrote the documentary, A Wing and a Prayer, nominated for the United Nations Media Peace Award in 2000. Catherine is a graduate of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.

Swing by Sailor tells the true stories from HMS Victorious wartime brides. This book details the fascinating stories of Australia’s war brides – women who had their hearts won over by British soldiers based in Australia during World War II. They boarded the HMS Victorious in 1946 to begin married life in England, and, 62 years later, these women tell the story of the voyage.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Catherine will be appearing at:

• Cheltenham Library, 12 Stanley Avenue, Cheltenham on Wednesday 4 February 2009, 6.30 – 8.00 pm.
 For more information phone 1300 135 668 or book online at  http://summerread8.eventbrite.com

• Ballarat Library, 178 Doveton Street, Ballarat on Thursday 5 February 2009, 2.00 – 3.30 AM
 For more information phone 5332 1211 or book online at  http://summerread11.eventbrite.com

What Catherine says about summer reading

‘The scents of a bush shack. Blinds drawn against the summer radiation. Sand and gum leaves on the shabby couch, and me and my book in sweaty contentment. Probably a thriller or a strange story about the sea. ‘To Have or Have Not’, perhaps.’

Thanks Greg for your posts sharing the trials and joys of writing the biograpghy of Tom Wills, one of the greatest Australian stories ever told.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Greg will be appearing at:

• Melbourne Cricket Ground , Betty Cuthbert Room / Atrium,  Gate 3 on Thursday 5 February 2009, 6.30 pm
 For more information phone 8664 7555 or book online at  http://summerread35.eventbrite.com
 This is a National Sports Museum Public Program in association with the State Library of  Victoria. The event includes a special viewing of interview footage from the SBS Tom Wills documentary to be screened in May 2009 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of first  rules written for Australian Football.

• Rutherglen Football Club, Barkly Park, Reid Street, Rutherglen on Tuesday 24 February 2009, 8pm �
 For more information phone 02 6032 8206 or book online at  http://summerread36.eventbrite.com
 The event includes a special viewing of interview footage from the SBS Tom Wills  documentary to be screened in May 2009 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of first  rules written for Australian Football.

Vote for Tom Wills: His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall or SMS WILLS to 13 46 88

It’s hot. Just made a dash down from the Blue Mountains to drop my mother at the airport for a flight to Melbourne. That got me thinking of how much time I spent on planes in writing the Tom Wills biography. Most of those trips were to Victoria. I stayed at my parents’ home in Merlynston, wedged between Pentridge Gaol and Fawkner Cemetery. I spent weeks at a time in Melbourne taking a train into the city and then sitting myself down in the SLV and working. Typically I was there until the library closed (I think around 10 pm) - usually in the newspaper section meticulously going over every newspaper or periodical I thought might yield information. And as the last lights of the library went out I’d collect my luggage from the locker, walk down the steps past St. George and his Dragon and into the train station. Winter was the worst. But somehow, now, as I ponder those nights there is a certain romance. Or at least a sense that it was worth it.

Nothing could be more different from where I sit now. December in Sydney. I’ve popped back to my hospital to write this before I head back to the Blue Mountains. The room I sit in is long with the adornments of the nineteenth century. Indeed, I sit in the midst of a classic nineteenth century psychiatric asylum - Cumberland Hospital.

This room has writing memories for me.

Looking out the window I see sandstone buildings - some of the first convict constructions in the colony of NSW. Straight ahead is a clock tower and around me the buildings that made up the Old Female Factory.

I spent time here writing the Tom Wills biography. This room was my sanctuary, my asylum. I like writing in rooms that are the size of boardrooms - which is the official function of the room I sit in. On those hot afternoons, writing my drafts, I’d spread my old manuscripts about on this table, and during moments of impasse, flop my head and arms on the long table’s cooling wooden surface.

The other thing I love about this room is its proximity to where Tom’s parents spent time in the 1830s. Within a short walk is the site of the Female Orphan Asylum where Tom’s mother lived for several years of her childhood. You can still walk around the sandstone Orphan Asylum and down to the Parramatta River where the girls on Sunday boarded a boat to attend church. And even closer is Parramatta Park where Tom Wills brought the aboriginal cricket team to play in 1867. I am sure most Sydneysiders have little idea of this marvellous team and even less of Tom Wills.

Before I forget, I was asked a question by Sue which I didn’t answer. Yes, Tom’s exposure to alcohol at Rugby School probably shaped his central nervous system to some extent for his later alcoholism. This, of course, cannot be the entire reason for his alcoholism because every second boy might have developed alcohol abuse. What is not commonly known is that cricketers drank alcohol before, during and after matches. I found a delightful Cambridge Guide for the gentleman cricketer published in the nineteenth century. The Guide gave advice on drinking during a match. The suggested drink of choice was claret which under an Australian sun was iced.

I started blogging early this morning.

Mainly because I have to race across the street and place this blog on to a neighbour’s computer. I know this sounds unbelievable to some, but I don’t actually have the internet at home. Then I’m off to take my children for a swim. This blog is a bit longer than I had planned but no time to shorten.

I also just loved this episode in writing the book.

I spent a great deal of time, travelling around Australia and beyond, looking for family letters from the nineteenth century. Often I was frustrated but there were moments of exhilaration. One of these was in Queensland.

On 17 Oct 1861, aborigines entered the campsite of a party of European settlers and murdered 19 men, women and children. The place: central Queensland. The land: Kairi aboriginal land.

And its relevance to the Tom Wills biography? Tom Wills and his father led this European expedition from Victoria to Queensland.

Did Tom die? No. He was lucky to be away from the campsite at the time of the attack. But his father - Horatio Wills - did die struck across the face and neck. A blow that nearly severed his head.

I had read newspaper reports of the 1861 killings. Indigenous Australians were referred to in many ways including the corrupt spelling of ’savages’ which starts this blog.

Whatever I wrote in the Tom Wills biography, I knew that I had to spend time in Queensland to understand this period. If I was lucky I might even find a few letters in official Queensland archives.

I had been told that there was little likelihood of finding much in the way of family letters, that these had been either destroyed or sent to Victoria and were readily available at the State Library.

But I learned that one should never just accept the advice ‘nothing will be found’. If you write a biography you must go and look for yourself. I am glad I did.

It turned out that some of the Wills family still lived in Queensland, not far from the site of the 1861 killings. I phoned. Within a few months I flew to Rockhampton (I quickly discovered everyone just calls it ‘Rocky’) and in my rent-a-car drove 6-7 hours inland.

I arrived at the family property late in the morning and was met by, coincidentally, Tom Wills. This modern Tom Wills was the owner of a vast cattle property. I knew that, whatever else, the introduction was important. I had been told that Tom was not too keen on city dwellers and that my being a psychiatrist was unlikely to help.

When I met Tom he looked me up and down, making a rapid assessment.

He waved me towards an old Queensland homestead where his mother lived. Tom lived a few hundred metres away from the homestead, in an old wooden hut. There was no one else on the property. As we strolled in the blazing sun (about 11 am) he asked what I’d like to do. Sensing that this was the moment, I took a punt and suggesed a drink would go down well. With the broadest smile you’d ever see, he exclaimed: ‘You’re my kind of a man’ and marched directly to his hut, flinging open the fridge door to reveal its cubic capacity filled with nothing but cans of XXXX beer.

Six hours later I was sitting on the floor of his hut in a less than sober state thinking that this was a hell of a way to build rapport. Then, at about 5 pm, through the smoke haze of roll-your-own cigarettes that my new friend was working through at an alarming rate, Tom suggested: ‘I suppose you might want a look at some of my letters’. The fact that by now I could barely walk seemed no impediment at all to Tom. We made our way across a paddock to another hut. He sat me down at a huge table and stooping forward he hauled out a trunk from beneath the table. In the trunk was a collection of letters from the nineteenth century. Letters written by the family. Letters that discussed the murder of Horatio Wills by ‘the blacks’ and the family’s reaction.

No amount of reading newspapers, or periodicals, or official accounts of the killings could match what was poured on to the table before me. The letters were in a rough state - many ripped, some in scattered parts and others written in that dreadful cross-writing used by pioneers to save paper. In my intoxicated state, in the Queensland bush, I was overwhelmed.

I looked up and asked: ‘Where have these letters been?’ ‘Under the homestead’ was the answer.

Tom left me in my dazed state. I had arrived in Queensland to find, hopefully, one or two items of value. Instead I was flooded.

The following day, Tom took me out around the property and countryside. We walked to the gravesite of the Europeans killed that day in 1861 and talked of the retribution which saw scores of aborigines slaughtered as a consequence.

For a week I remained locked away in the Queensland Outback, oblivious to Sydney, Melbourne or just about anywhere else as I slowly transcribed each letter.

When I got into my car and returned to Rocky I sat in the aiport assailed by everthing modern - public address blasts, television screens, radio, computers, mobile phones. For a moment I sat still thinking hard, trying to cling to the purity and simplicity of the last week, knowing that despite my attempts, it would vanish in moments.

I remain on the best of terms with the Wills family and, at this time of Christmas, have just received a card from the cattle property. Each year this card reminds me of a wonderful week of discovery.

Thanks to Sue and Genevieve. Yes, to answer your query, Tom Wills almost certainly did drink beer as a schoolboy at Rugby School. The alternative was tea or water. The latter was often infected and cholera regularly swept through the school. The boys lived in School Houses and each House had a family brewery attached. The boast of the brewery attached to Tom’s House was that no boy would get cholera because the ingredients were so thoroughly boiled before the beer was made!

I am fascinated by the comments of my fellow writers and readers.

You see, I don’t  come from a writing background at all.

As a boy, I played cricket, footy, ran fast and loved maths. I read, but in the manner of a lot of boys - it was very specific and repetitive. I loved reptiles - and spent hours wandering up and down the Merri Creek in search of creatures to bring home - and what little I read concentrated on animals. My mother took me to the Natural History Museum of Victoria every school holidays and I still remember my favourite exhibit in the McCoy Hall - the skeletons of two reticulated pythons entwined about one another in a kind of macabre embrace. My love of words and of writing is a recent development.

Indeed, although I briefly met two of the Summer Read authors at the launch in November, prior to that I had only met one writer - ever. That was just a week or two earlier while I sat waiting for a radio interview about the Tom Wills biography. As I waited to be interviewed, one of Australia’s best known writers of fiction came into the same room. He was to be interviewed after me. We chatted for 10 minutes before our respective interviews. After my interview, and as I was leaving the studio, my recently met writing colleague leaned over and said: ‘I guess biographers have it pretty easy. It’s a matter of just laying out the facts.’

My first impulse was to stretch over his publicist and throttle him by the neck unitl his eyes hung out to dry in the Sydney sun. This, of course, would have been poor form and deprived Australia of one of its best writers. What struck me in that moment of homicidal haste was that, while I was writing the Wills biography, I had reached the opposite conclusion. I thought fiction might be easier and had decided: ‘Right, my next book will be a novel.’

I can pinpoint the exact time this thought occurred to me - about 12 months into the research for the biography. The first 12 months, or so, of biography research is the easiest. It is a bit like the first gold miners wandering around Eaglehawk and Bendigo, nonchalantly finding clumps of gold poking through the soil. No difficulty at all. But I knew that to dig out the remaining information about my biographical subject might take years. And there was no guarantee of locating surviving archival information. I might be wasting time - better to write fiction to make up the gaps. This was the voice that kept at me.

Surely all biographers must experience this temptation. To some extent we must all succumb because there are moments in the biographical reconstruction that require a little guesswork. I would dearly love to meet biographers to hear their tales and their moments of ‘guesswork’ and reconstruction. This is the secret work of the biographer. For the Tom Wills biography I expunged anything that could not be traced back to archival evidence. To some biographers this may seem too severe. But I had my reasons. The story of Tom Wills has been laden with mythology and distortion. And so I endeavoured not to embellish a single sentence.

Lisa, Lyne and Genevieve :  thank you all so much for responding to me so charmingly.  I do agree with you, Lisa.  Melba’s talent and determination were such that  whatever path her life had taken, she would have been a brilliant success - or so I believe.

A Happy New Year to all my readers.

Ann Blainey

Merry Christmas to all the writers, readers and drifters who come across this site.

This blog is from Blackheath - in the Blue Mountains - about a 1000 km from Melbourne.

I reckon the best blogs are those where not too much care is taken; where mistakes might be made and the writer just shoots off whatever comes first into his or her mind. I find that hard to do but when I come across someone who has done that, I know I enjoy it all the more.

Some years ago I chanced upon a short article on the life of Tom Wills. Sadly, Tom Wills took his own life - he stabbed himself in the heart in the autumn of 1880. It was my wife who suggested that we trek to the Mitchell Library in Sydney to find his obituary. The obituary noted that Tom Wills had been admitted to the Royal Melbourne Hospital the day before his death. The Royal Melbourne Hospital also happens to be my old medical school.

I was curious about Tom Wills but, thought, I had more responsible things to do - like continuing to work as a doctor. That curiosity never did leave me, and so, self-consciously, I rang the Royal Melbourne Hospital to ask if they had doctors’ notes from 1880. They did, in a large room at the back of the hospital, but no one, it was explained, had ever really wanted to look at them.

I flew to Melbourne - the pretext was a medical conference where I gave a paper - and then immediately caught a tram along Royal Parade to the hospital. There, a bemused archivist showed me a room filled with unopened cardboard boxes. In each box were about a dozen leatherbound medical records from the 1800s. There was no order to the notes. I sat down for about 5-6 hours until I came across the notes that recorded the final hours of the life of Tom Wills. I could hardly believe what I saw. Tom Wills, it turned out, was an alcoholic and was in the DTs when he took his life. In the midst of DTs and tormented by paranoid delusions he absconded from hospital on the evening of 1 May 1880. The next day he was dead.

Bloody Hell! … was my first reaction. My second was to care for this archive.

I shot outside the room and kissed the archivist, asking her to keep the notes safe. I then ran on to Royal Parade and raced to my favourite pub from my days as a medical student - Naughton’s Hotel. The first pot of beer disappeared in a moment, the second lingered. It was just as I finished that second beer, looking at the falling leaves from the elms, with the noise of the trams intruding upon the most fantastic phase of sweet intoxication, that I thought I might try to find out more about this Tom Wills.

That’s how I started the book.

Greg de Moore is next Summer Read author blogging from 26 – 30 December.

His book, Tom Wills: His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

Greg de Moore is a consultant psychiatrist at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital and his study of Wills’ life stems from his interest in male suicide. His ten years of research has unearthed original medical records, letters, text books and notes, previously believed to have been lost or destroyed.

Tom Wills: His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall is the definitive biography of Tom Wills – flawed genius, sporting libertine, fearless leader and agitator, and the man most often credited with creating the game we now know as Australian Rules football. His contribution to Australian history has endured for more than 150 years and is perhaps the greatest Australian sports story of all.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Greg will be appearing at:

• Melbourne Cricket Ground , Betty Cuthbert Room / Atrium,  Gate 3 on Thursday 5 February 2009, 6.30 pm
 For more information phone 8664 7555 or book online at  http://summerread35.eventbrite.com
 This is a National Sports Museum Public Program in association with the State Library of  Victoria. The event includes a special viewing of interview footage from the SBS Tom  Wills documentary to be screened in May 2009 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of first  rules written for Australian Football.

• Rutherglen Football Club, Barkly Park, Reid Street, Rutherglen on Tuesday 24 February 2009, 8pm �
 For more information phone 02 6032 8206 or book online at  http://summerread36.eventbrite.com
 The event includes a special viewing of interview footage from the SBS Tom  Wills  documentary to be screened in May 2009 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of first  rules written for Australian Football.

What Greg says about summer reading

‘My first Summer Read was Black Beauty. I was about 7. Dad was batting
in a cricket match; I sat on the boundary reading. A missed bumper saw
Dad unconscious and carried back to the pavilion. I walked over, book
held open, to see Dad as he was carried off. He recovered in the
pavilion; I returned to reading on the boundary line. Summer in
Melbourne.’