Academic rejects footy’s indigenous start
AS the AFL acknowledged the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander influence on Australian rules with its Sir Douglas Nicholls rounds, a Deakin academic has again dismissed the notion that the game grew out of an earlier indigenous counterpart.
Roy Hay concedes he is ready to be “pilloried and abused and criticised” for refuting claims that the fledgling game evolved from indigenous games such as marngrook (“game ball”, which usually refers to a traditional game played with a possum-skin ball).
But the economics historian and Honorary Fellow at Deakin goes further, downplaying the influence that Thomas Wills had on the development of the game.
Wills has long been considered a founding father of Australian rules and a major player — in every sense of the word — in the development of sport in the fledgling colony of Victoria in the middle stages of the 19th century.
He played rugby and cricket in England in the 1850s and later trained the Aboriginal cricket team that in 1868 became the first team from Australia to tour England.
He was named Champion of the Colony five times between 1856 and 1872.
It is the letter that Wills wrote to Bell’s Life in Victoria in July 1858, in which he calls for cricketers to take up a winter sport in order to keep fit, that is regarded as leading to the adoption of the first set of rules for Australian rules.
The long-held belief by some is that Wills was exposed to marngrook as a child growing up in the Western District, which later fashioned his views on rules for a new game.
In his new book They Did Not Come From Nowhere: Aboriginal People and Australian Football in the Nineteenth Century, Hay does not deny that Aboriginal players were around in Australian rules’ formative years.
But his contention is that they came to the sport after observing the white man’s game, not that Wills and others borrowed from the indigenous versions when inventing the game.
And he says he believes that Wills was “the single conduit through which we get the game is gilding the lily”.
“I would love to believe that story to be true. I’ve searched everywhere for evidence in support of it and can find nothing of real substance,” Hay said.
“We’ve got this popular fixation that somehow there is a single point of origin for the game. Led by a charismatic individual, the game sprang fully formed into being and something like the modern game was in existence from the beginning.
“I’m a boring British empiricist historian, I want to see the evidence. Otherwise your story is interesting, fascinating. I love it, I enjoy it, romantically I think ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it was true?’
“It’s not that the Aborigines provided a template for the game, but they saw the white men playing their stupid game and said ‘We could do that’ and forced their way into it.”
Hay argues that one-time Geelong Advertiser editor George Ripon was as important as Wills. Ripon became president of the Geelong club, played with Wills in cricket and football and then moved on to the Hamilton Spectator, where he wrote glowingly of some of the Aboriginal cricketers and footballers he came across there.
Hay knows his book will anger those who hold Wills up as the founder of the game. But he is not the first person to argue against the indigenous influence.
The Australian Game of Football since 1858, produced by the AFL to mark the 150th anniversary of Australian rules, includes an essay by Melbourne historian Gillian Hibbins which describes the indigenous link to Australian rules as a “seductive myth”.
“Understandably, the appealing idea that Australian football is a truly Australian native game recognising the indigenous people, rather than deriving solely from a colonial dependence upon the British background, has been uncritically embraced and accepted in some places,” Hibbins wrote.
“Sadly, this emotional belief lacks any intellectual credibility.”
Not surprisingly, this is a view that has angered those who say the link is unequivocal.
Among those taking exception with Hay is Jenny Hocking, an emeritus professor at Monash University who says recent history shows “very clearly” that there is a connection between indigenous games and the formative years of Australian rules.
One of the sticking points has been that it is impossible to make the direct connection because there was no evidence indigenous football was played in the region where Wills grew up. However, Hocking said she and Nell Reidy found material in the State Library archives that completely refuted that contention.
She is referring to this eyewitness account of an indigenous game of football by Mukjarrawaint man Johnny Connolly, found among the personal papers of 19th century ethnographer AW Howitt, which Hocking and Reidy published in the Australian literary journal Meanjin in 2016:
“In playing a game at ball which they kicked about[,] the different totems present two different sides and there were men and women in each side … Johnny remembers that he, his mother, and her mother all played on the same side at ball. His cousin George played with the Wurant in the other side.”
The Meanjin article says that in the search for the marngrook and its links to Australian rules, Howitt’s record of Johnny Connolly’s first-hand account “changes everything”:
Hocking points out that Johnny Connolly played it in the Grampians region of western Victoria, precisely where Wills lived.
“Tom Wills spoke the language of the people he grew up with in the Grampians, he played all their games, he was a part of their community. Are we really to believe that he was exceptional at football and yet whenever the indigenous people played football he didn’t play it? It makes no sense,” she said.
“There’s absolutely no doubt that that is a formative part of Tom Wills’ sportsmanship.
“At the very least you have to accept and acknowledge — as we should — that aspects of that game informed Tom Wills’ development of Australian rules.”
Hocking also takes exception to the lack of written “evidence” being proof that marngrook had no influence on Australian rules.
She points out that comparing the vast quantity of early settlers’ letters, journals and contemporary newspaper accounts with a culture whose traditions and histories are passed on in song, dance, oral stories and art is comparing apples with oranges.
Hocking said that even the High Court acknowledged in its landmark 1992 Mabo decision the limits of relying on text-based documentary evidence alone in indigenous communities that had no such written tradition.
Hocking says marngrook was not a competitive game but a “set of cultural practices” around learning and social development, part of a way of teaching young people which groups they could intermarry with, as well as skills and precision.
But it also bears certain similarities with the start of the modern game, as seen in this 19th century account quoted in the Meanjin article:
“When all is in order, a Lyoore [woman] starts off with the ball in her hand. She walks a little way out from her own side, and towards that of her opponents, drops the ball with seeming carelessness, but ’ere it has time to reach the ground, she gives it a dexterous, and by no means gentle kick, which being correctly aimed, sends the ball spinning high into the air.”
“If you close your eyes and imagine it you will see the beginnings of an Australian rules game,” Hocking said.
Hay agrees with Hocking that marngrook was not a game — he describes it as “training for manhood”, even though accounts mention women playing it with men — however, he says that it is the very free-spirited nature of marngrook that demonstrate no link to the early days of Australian rules.
For that, he says, you have the Victorian gold rush to thank.
Victoria’s population boomed by some 300,000 people in the 1850s, and it is likely that many of those arriving from the UK brought with them the games they’d played in their youth in British public