Horatio Spencer Howe Wills (5 October 1811 – 17 October 1861), or Horace Wills, was an Australian pastoralist and politician. Born in Sydney, the son of a convict sent to Australia for highway robbery, Wills is notable as being involved in several events in Australian history. He was also the father of Thomas Wills, the inventor of Australian rules football.
'The Argus newspaper dated Saturday 12 March 1921 page 4 records the Horatio Wills family being at Burra Burra Gundagai till around 1840.[1] Thomas Wills, Horatio's son, was born in 1836 near Gundagai, New South Wales.[2]
Wills was one of the first settlers of the Ararat district in western Victoria, Australia, at a 125,000-acre (510 km2) property named Lexington near Moyston. Wills intended to build a house on the property which was finally completed in 1845. While at Lexington he is credited as having named nearby Mount Ararat. He hired aborigines as station hands and harvesters on his property.
In 1852, Wills sold Lexington and moved to Belle Vue in Geelong and was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1855.
"A correspondent (Mr. H. S. Wills) of the Sydney Herald, writes : - A writer in your journal of a late date has treated on the ravages committed by the wild dog of the colony in her northern provinces, and advocates some legislatorial measure for their extermination. Permit me to observe that these sanguinary pests of the sheep-fold are to be extirpated with the greatest ease, and at very little cost, much more speedily than any act of the kind alluded to would be likely to pass our chambers. One ounce of strychnia in chrystals, it being less subject to adulteration in that state, will clear any station in the colony. This remedy may, or ought to be, purchasable in Sydney for thirty or thirty-five shillings. So that whilst my old friends north of Murrumbidgee talk of wild dogs, they might get rid of them. Strychnia has been tried in this district with astonishing success. A 'brush' is a thing now to be wondered at. The result to myself alone, has been a saving of at least £350 a-year, not to speak of the annoyance and torture I am relieved from. The bait for a dog is a piece of fresh meat of about eight ounces, into which a small quantity of the poison is inserted. This, suspended from an overhanging branch, beyond the reach of wild cats, by a thin piece of twine, under a " nosable " piece of carrion, is almost sure to secure any particular dog. But to 'smash the breed' without mercy, attach a dead sheep, or kangaroo, or emu, or bullock's paunch, or any carrion to be obtained readily, to the axle of a light cart, and at sundown (to cheat the crows) take a road, or a cattle track, through the parts principally infested, and as you go along leave a bait, in some such manner as I have described, at intervals of a mile or thereabouts. We generally drop a few pieces of unpoisoned meat around the bait, to arrest the dog in his rapid career on scent. It will be necessary to take up the baits which remain untouched at daylight, if you wish to economise. This is a simple way of effectually ridding a station of a most outrageous pest. I may observe, also, that strychnia is found to be an admirable specific in attacks of the eagle-hawk during the lambing season. No later in fact than this morning, I destroyed two in about ten minutes, which I observed hovering over the lambs of some imported ewes. Touch the heart and liver of a dead lamb with a pinch of the poison, and your success is certain. The extermination of the wild dog instead of being a matter for the interference of the legislature, is in fact simply a question between the settler and his merchant, or apothecary.” [3]
In 1861, Horatio moved north to Queensland, at Cullin-La-Ringo in the Nogoa region near Rockhampton. Just three weeks later, Horatio was murdered by aborigines, along with 18 others at the Cullin-La-Ringo massacre, 17 October 1861; the biggest massacre on whites by Aboriginal people in Australian history.