Football was never supposed to matter so much. But now the rules of the Australian version of the game, as they were first written down in May 1859, are listed on the Heritage Register of Victoria, along with the Royal Exhibition Building, the original Eureka Flag, and what remains of Ned Kelly’s papers.[1]
In February, the Heritage Council of Victoria accepted a recommendation from its executive director, Steven Avery, to list a fragile set of pages headed, in elegant script, ‘The Rules of the Melbourne Football Club’. [2]
The listing brings up, again, the troubled question of Tom Wills and his place in footballing and Australian history. Wills’ role as a literal author of Australian Rules Football is entangled with further questions about the origins of the game: whether or not it was influenced by existing Indigenous practices such as marngrook, a game that featured kicking and catching a stuffed ball, which Wills may well have seen played as a child growing up in what is now the Western District region of Victoria.
Coloured studio portrait of 19th-century Australian sportsman Tom Wills. (Wikimedia Commons)
The heat of the debate surrounding these questions reminds us that in settler Australia, nothing is settled when it comes to Indigenous matters. Even if you don’t care about sport, the way the question of Indigenous influence on our national game has itself become a political football is illustrative of deeper fractures.
Tom Wills, the grandson of a convict, was born in 1835. When he was four years old, his father moved the family to a 50,000-hectare property in the Grampians (a mountain range in western Victoria known as Gariwerd by the local tribes). Wills spent the next 10 years living alongside the Mukjarrawaint people. He was the only non-Indigenous child for miles around, and his playmates were Indigenous.
Wills was sent to school in England at age 14, where his athletic prowess was given full rein in cricket and an early variant of football while he attended Rugby School and Cambridge University. Wills returned to Australia in 1856, and his highly-skilled and creative style of play soon made him a hero in cricket-mad Victoria.
In the late 1850s, in a letter to the newspaper Bells Life Victoria, Wills suggested that football would be a good way for cricketers to stay fit over winter.[3] Drawing on the rules of variants of the game played at several English schools, Wills and several other members of the newly