Life on the West Island - The Marngrook debate

For around a century, there has been debate on the West Island about the origins of the game now known as Australian Rules Football. The AFL (Australian Football League) has staunchly defended its claim that the game was invented by Tom Wills in 1858. His entry into the Australian Sports Hall of Fame states:

A frequent and cantankerous letter-writer to the sporting press, Wills’ most famous letter was in ‘Bell’s Life in Victoria’, July 10, 1858, calling for cricketers to take up a winter sport for fitness’ sake. The response to this letter enabled him, his brother-in-law H. C. A. Harrison, and others to meet and draw up rules for a football game later known as Victorian or Australian rules. Wills played over 210 games, mainly for Geelong, until he retired in 1876. Regarded as a brilliant ruck player, he was able to execute excellent drop kicks and place kicks as far as 60m. His stamina and speed were exceptional, his organisational skills were well recognised, and he pioneered the concept of position play.

There is little doubt that Wills became a key player in organising a league of teams and codifying the rules of the sport. But did he invent it? That is hotly contested by a wide range of sports historians and academics, who contend that the game had existed for a very long time and was known as “marngrook” in the Indigenous nations of what we now call Western Victoria. A similar game was reported in other parts of the country, especially in South Australia and regional Victoria.

Historians Jenny Hocking and Nell Reidy investigated and concluded that accounts of Indigenous football reveal a striking similarity with key features of the Australian game.

Many of those accounts came from other areas, but one in particular related to the Western District, where the young Tom Wills participated in the Indigenous game of marngrook with dozens of Aboriginal players. The historians uncovered a personal account in the records of ethnographer A.W. Howitt in the State Library of Victoria, who recorded the firsthand experiences of Mukjarrawaint man Johnny Connolly:

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 game was played by large groups of Indigenous people, sometimes numbering over 100, using a “ball” made of possum skins which was known as a marngrook. Unlike existing football codes such as soccer or rugby, the main object of the game was apparently to keep the ball in the air. If it touched the ground, the game was over.

Hocking and Reidy quote numerous reports of the Indigenous game, such as that from the Assistant Protector of Aborigines, William Thomas, in 1858:

The Marngrook (or the Ball) is a favourite game with boys and men - the ball is kicked into the air not along the ground, there is a general scramble at the ball, the tall black fellows stand the best chance. When caught it is again kicked up in the air with great force and ascends as straight up and as high as when thrown by the hand. It is a game in which fifty, or as many as one hundred players engage at a time.

At the end of a game, the marngrook ball was often presented by the originating totem group to its opponents as a token of friendship. Settler reports of this game date back to the early 1840s, when artist W A Cawthorne produced a well-known painting of a marngrook game being played. He also described the manner of play: The players stand together in a ring or a line. One of them kicks the ball in the air, sometimes to the height of fifty feet. The merit of the game is to kick the ball perpendicularly and to keep it in the air as long as possible.

Cawthorne also reported that the game was played as participants between men and women, old and young.

A few years later, settler William Blandowski recorded a native game in northern Victoria in which the ball is not thrown or hit with a bat, but it is kicked in the air with the foot. The aim of the game: never let the ball touch the ground.

Many of the settler observations noted the athleticism and skills of players in marngrook, which were later incorporated into Australian football, including long and high kicking of the ball and players leaping high into the air to catch it.

Hocking and Reidy conclude that Tom Wills did not invent Australian football but rather adapted the Indigenous game to create a settler football code in which a rugby-style ball was used, sides were chosen and scores kept.

Despite this, some devotees of Australian football still cling to the version that Tom Wills was a sporting genius who invented the “great Australian game” independent of his experience of playing marngrook in his youth.

But this cry has diminished since research published in 2021 revealed that Tom Wills was an active participant in the mass murder of Indigenous people in Queensland. Academics Jess Coyle and Barry Judd concluded that the discovery challenges popular understandings of Tom Wills as a peaceful friend of all Aboriginal people. It will be interesting to see how the Australian Football League responds now this information has finally been made public.

Hocking and Reidy make a telling conclusion about the marngrook debate:

The intense debate over marngrook and Australian football reflects something beyond just football. At the heart of any connection between marngrook and Australian football is the acknowledgement of relations between two cultures, the recognition of a shared history within this single field of life. Australian football has an Indigenous history.