The Origins of Australian Rules football

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