Tom Wills

Tom Wills
Wills, c. 1857
Born	Thomas Wentworth Wills (1835-08-19)19 August 1835 Molonglo Plain, New South Wales, Australia
Died	2 May 1880(1880-05-02) (aged 44) Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia
Known for	One of the key inventors of Australian rules football

Thomas Wentworth "Tom" Wills (19 August 1835 – 2 May 1880) was a 19th-century sportsman who is credited with being Australia's first cricketer of significance and a pioneer of the sport of Australian rules football.

Born in the British colony of New South Wales, Wills grew up on properties owned by his father, the pastoralist and nationalist Horatio Wills, in what is now the Australian state of Victoria. He befriended local aborigines, learning many aspects of their culture. At the age of 14, Wills was sent to England to attend Rugby School, where he became captain of Rugby's cricket team, and played an early version of rugby football. After Rugby, Wills represented the Cambridge University Cricket Club in the annual match against Oxford, and played in first-class cricket matches for Kent and the Marylebone Cricket Club. An athletic all-rounder with devastating bowling analyses, he was regarded as one of the finest young cricketers in England.

Wills returned to Victoria in 1856, where he captained the Victorian cricket team to repeated victories in intercolonial matches against New South Wales and Tasmania, and was made secretary of the Melbourne Cricket Club. In 1858 he called for the development of a football code to keep cricketers fit during the off-season. After founding the Melbourne Football Club the following year, Wills and three other club members codified the first laws of Australian rules football. He and his cousin H. C. A. Harrison were among the dominant players during the game's early years.

In 1861, Wills was summoned by his father to Central Queensland to establish a family property. Two weeks after their arrival, Wills' father and 18 others were murdered in the Cullin-La-Ringo massacre, the largest massacre of European settlers by aborigines in Australian history. Wills survived and returned to Melbourne in 1864. He continued to play football and cricket, and, in 1866–67, coached and captained the first Aboriginal cricket team. In a career marked by controversy, Wills straddled the class divide between amateur and professional cricketers, and became the first cricketer in 1872 to be no balled for throwing in a major Australian match. He played his last first-class match in 1876, at the age of 40. Psychological trauma from the massacre was worsened by his alcoholism. Wills was admitted to the Melbourne Hospital in May 1880, suffering from delirium tremens, but shortly afterwards escaped and returned to his home in Heidelberg, where he committed suicide by stabbing a pair of scissors through his heart.

Wills' role in early Australian sporting life, particularly in regard to the establishment of Australian rules football, was generally not recognised until the latter half of the 20th century. A statue of Wills was erected outside of the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 2001, and he was an inaugural inductee into the Australian Football Hall of Fame. Wills has been characterised in modern times as an archetype of the fallen sportsman, and as a symbol of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. According to biographer Greg de Moore, Wills "stands alone in all his absurdity, his cracked egalitarian heroism and his fatal self-destructiveness—the finest cricketer and footballer of the age."^[4]

Family and early years

Tom Wills' middle name, Wentworth, comes from William Charles Wentworth, the famous statesman, explorer and "fighter for the rights of the Australian born". He served as an exemplar for Tom while growing up.^[1]

Tom Wills was born on 19 August 1835 on the Molonglo Plains^[a] near modern-day Canberra, in what was the British colony of New South Wales, as the elder child of Horatio and Elizabeth (née McGuire) Wills.^[5] Tom was a third-generation Australian descended from convicts: his mother was born to convicts transported from Ireland, and his paternal grandfather was Surrey labourer Edward Wills, whose death sentence for highway robbery was commuted to transportation, arriving in Botany Bay aboard the "hell ship" Hillsborough in 1799.^[6] Edward received a conditional pardon in 1803 and amassed considerable wealth through mercantile activity in Sydney with his free wife Sarah (née Harding).^[7] Horatio was born the youngest of six children in 1811, five months after his father's death, and Sarah remarried to George Howe, emancipist owner of the Sydney Gazette.^[8] During his tenure as the newspaper's editor, Horatio met Elizabeth, an orphan from Parramatta. They married in December 1833.^[9] Seventeen months after his birth, Tom was baptised Thomas Wentworth Wills in the parish of St Andrew's, Sydney, after statesman William Charles Wentworth.^[1] Wentworth and the emancipist cause fostered in Horatio a strident nationalism which he set forth in his 1832–33 journal The Currency Lad, the first publication to call for an Australian republic.^[10]

The Wills family were among the first European settlers in the Mount William area of the Grampians, depicted in this 1857 painting by Eugene von Guérard.

In the late 1830s, Horatio took up pastoral pursuits and the family moved to the sheep run Burra Burra on the Molonglo River.^[1] Although athletic from an early age, Tom was prone to illness and at one stage in 1839 his parents "almost despaired of his recovery".^[11] In November 1840, encouraged by Thomas Mitchell's description of "Australia Felix", they overlanded south to the Grampians in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales (now the state of Victoria).^[12] At the end of 1842 they left their run on Mount William and settled a few miles north in the foothills of Mount Ararat, named so by Horatio "for, like the Ark, we rested there".^[13] Horatio went through a period of intense religiosity while in the Grampians; despite his struggle with scepticism, he implored himself and Tom to base their lives upon the New Testament.^[14]

Horatio built a homestead on a 120,000-acre (490 km²) property named Lexington (near present-day Moyston) in an area that served as a meeting place for clans of the Djab wurrung language group.^[15] Tom, as an only child, "was thrown much into the companionship of aborigines", and "became a thorough linguist in the native dialects".^[16] In an account of corroborees from childhood, H. C. A. Harrison^[b] remembered his cousin Tom's ability to learn aboriginal songs, mimic their voice and gestures, and "speak their language as fluently as they did themselves, much to their delight."^[17] It is speculated that Tom may have also played Aboriginal sports.^[18] Horatio wrote fondly of his son's kinship with aborigines, and allowed local clans to have "free range" on Lexington.^[19] However, like many frontiersmen in the area, he was implicated in deadly conflict with the Djab wurrung.^[20]

Tom's first sibling, Emily, was born on Christmas Day 1842.^[21] In 1846 Wills began attendance at William Brickwood's School in Melbourne. There he was looked after by Horatio's brother Thomas (Tom's namesake^[1]), a campaigner for Victoria's independence from New South Wales and son-in-law of Sarah Howe's partner in the shipping trade, convict Mary Reibey.^[22] Tom played in his first cricket matches at school, and he came in contact with the Melbourne Cricket Club through Brickwood, the club's vice-president.^[23] Wills returned to Lexington in 1849 where the family had grown to include siblings Cedric, Horace and Egbert.^[24] Mainly self-educated, Horatio had ambitious plans for the education of his children, especially Tom:^[14]

I now deeply vainly deplore my want of a mathematical and classical education. Vain regret! ... But my son! May he prove worthy of my experience! May I be spared for him—that he may be useful to his country—I never knew a father's care.

England

Rugby School

Daguerreotype of Wills, taken during his time at Rugby School

Football at Rugby School, 1850s. Wills received national press attention for his prowess on the field in an era when school match reports rarely named individuals among the swarming mass of players.^[2]

In February 1850, aged fourteen, Wills was sent to England to attend Rugby School, the most prestigious school in the country. He arrived in London after a five month voyage. There, during school holidays, he stayed with his paternal aunt Sarah Alexander, who left Sydney after the death of her first husband, the emancipated convict William Redfern.^[25]

At school he played rugby football and cricket, excelling at both sports. In 1852 he graced Lord's for the first time, taking a match-high twelve wickets for the Rugby School XI against the Marylebone Cricket Club.^[26] His cricketing feats gained him fame and saw him play for the MCC, Kent and the Gentlemen of Kent, for whom in his first-class debut in 1854 against the Gentlemen of England, he built a partnership with the "Lion of Kent", Alfred Mynn. He was noted as an attacking football player who would dodge and weave opponents, and his reputation for theatrics endeared him to the viewing public: "Wills, to the admiration of the spectators ... displayed an eel-like agility which baffled all the efforts of his opponents to retain him in their grasp."^[27] Another journalist hinted that Wills tested the strict interpretation of rugby rules using "slimy tricks".^[28] He was also the team's dedicated kicker, noted for his long and accurate shots at goal.

Wills decorated his study with objects to remind him of home, including rocks, native birds from Lexington, and Australian Aboriginal artifacts.^[29] In 1853, Horatio wrote to Tom that a Djab wurrung male visiting from Mount William asked of his whereabouts. Horatio showed the boy Tom's daguerreotype: "He gazed upon it a long time. The old blacks, your friends, were fond of seeing it. They told me to send you up to them as soon as you came back."^[30]

Wills was a dashing youth with "impossibly wavy" hair and blue, almond-shaped eyes that "[burnt] with a pale light".^[31] He grew quickly and by age 16 at 5'8" was already taller than his father.^[32] A few years later his height was recorded in Lillywhite's Guide as 5'10" and it was written that "few athletes can boast of a more muscular and well-developed frame".^[33]

Libertine cricketer

Wills was listed in Bell's Sporting Life as one of the most promising young cricketers in England. He was offered a spot on William Clarke's touring cricket team, the All-England Eleven, but remained at Rugby for a further year.^[34]

After Rugby, Wills attended Cambridge University in 1855,^[35] where he played cricket, notably in the Cambridge XI in the Varsity Match. In June 1856, Wills played cricket at Rugby School for the last time, representing the MCC alongside Lord Guernsey, the Earl of Winterton, and Charles du Cane, future Governor of Tasmania.^[36] Wills spent a month playing for various clubs in Ireland, where he was remembered for his prankish behaviour as much as his cricketing ability. He returned to England in early September to prepare for his journey home to Australia.^[37]

Colonial hero

Wills returned to Australia^[c] aboard the Oneida steamship, arriving in Melbourne on 23 December 1856.^[38] The once fledgling port city had risen to world renown as the booming financial centre of the Victorian gold rush.^[d] Horatio, now a member of the Legislative Assembly in the Victorian Parliament, was living near Geelong at a property named Belle Vue, the Wills' family home since 1853.^[39] In his first summer back in Melbourne, Wills stayed with his extended family, the Harrisons, at their home on Victoria Parade, and entered a Collins Street law firm to appease his father, but he seems never to have practised. Indeed the few comments he made about law suggest it was of little consequence to him.^[40] "Tom was no dunce," writes Greg de Moore. "He was simply negotiating a path to greatness."^[41]

The Australian colonies were described as "cricket mad" in the 1850s, and Victorians, in particular, were said to "live, move, and have their being in an atmosphere of cricket".^[42] With his reputation preceding him, Wills participated in a trial match at the end of 1856 to select players for Victoria's second intercolonial cricket match against New South Wales. Victorian captain William Hammersley recalled Wills taking to the field of the Melbourne Cricket Ground for the trial:^[33]

... the observed of all observers, with his Zingari stripe and somewhat flashy get up, fresh from Rugby and college, with the polish of the old country upon him. He was then a model of muscular Christianity.

Intercolonial cricket match between Victoria and New South Wales, Melbourne Cricket Ground, 1858. Wills is shown preparing to bowl. Victoria won the match and Wills was "an instant colonial hero".^[3]

Wills made the top score of 13 wickets and 57 not out, winning the match for his team.^[33] He went on to captain Victoria in matches against New South Wales and Tasmania. After Wills led Victoria to its first victory over New South Wales in 1858, The Argus proclaimed that "the Victorian eleven has passed the Rubicon".^[43]

In February 1858, Wills led the Victorian team to Tasmania where they defeated the Launceston Cricket Club. Launceston protested Victoria's inclusion of three professionals—Jerry Bryant, George Marshall and Gid Elliot—and, unable to distinguish amateur from professional, refused to shake the Victorians' hands.^[44] "We have been in a strange land, and forsaken" a furious Wills wrote to the press.^[45] One week later, during a match in Hobart, Wills earned the ire of locals as he "jumped about exultantly" after striking and injuring one of the Tasmanian batsmen with three fast roundarm bowls. Their treatment of professionals was a slight that Wills would not forget.^[46]

Wills regularly commuted between his father's property in Geelong and Melbourne between 1856 to 1859.

During the 1857–58 season, Wills succeeded Hammersley as secretary of the Melbourne Cricket Club, a role in which he proved to be utterly chaotic and disorganised. It is perhaps a measure of his poor administrative skills that the only minute book that cannot be found within the MCC is from his time as secretary.^[47] Wills subsequently had a falling out with the club and joined Richmond, serving as a vice president and raising the standard of its play to make it the premier Victorian club. He was also elected as president of the Collingwood Cricket Club.^[48] The result was a lasting tension between both parties. The ill-feeling was heightened by an incident in which Wills became involved in fist fights with some MCC members.

"A game of our own"

On 10 July 1858, the Melbourne-based Bell's Life in Victoria and Sporting Chronicle published a letter by Wills that is regarded as a catalyst for a new style of football, now known as Australian rules football.^[50] It begins:^[51]

Now that cricket has been put aside for some few months to come, and cricketers have assumed somewhat of the chrysalis nature (for a time only 'tis true), but at length will again burst forth in all their varied hues, rather than allow this state of torpor to creep over them, and stifle their new supple limbs, why can they not, I say, form a foot-ball club, and form a committee of three or more to draw up a code of laws?

Wills was bringing the Rugby School template of cricket in summer and football in winter to the colonies.^[52] While the letter drew no immediate response, it was alluded to three weeks later in an advertisement for a "scratch match" held adjacent to the MCG at the Richmond Paddock.^[53] Wills' friend, the professional cricketer and publican Jerry Bryant, made available a leather football. It was suggested that the players would draw up "a short code of rules" after the match,^[54] however this didn't occur until the following year.

Soon after Wills' return to Australia, author Thomas Hughes released the highly influential novel Tom Brown's School Days^[e] (1857), an account of life at Rugby School under the headship of Thomas Arnold. The book extolled Aronld's creed of muscular Christianity and possibly did as much as Wills to popularise football in Melbourne.^[55]

The Victorian XI, 1859. In May of that year, Tom Wills (seated, far left), William Hammersley (standing, third from left), J. B. Thompson (seated, second from left) and Thomas H. Smith (not pictured) met at the Parade Hotel, run by Jerry Bryant (standing, second from right), where they wrote the first laws of Australian football.

On 7 August 1858, Wills and medical teacher John Macadam co-umpired a football match between Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar at the Richmond Paddock. It is possible that Tom's thirteen-year-old brother Cedric, a pupil at Scotch College, played in the match.^[56] The 40 per side contest had no fixed rules, and continued on two subsequent Saturdays, ending in a draw.^[57] Wills organised several more informal matches in Melbourne's parklands during the winter of 1858.^[58] The last recorded match of 1858 is the subject of the first known Australian football poem.^[59] Wills, the only player mentioned by name, is reified as "the Melbourne chief", leading a phalanx of his men to kick the winning goal.^[60]

On 17 May 1859, Wills, William Hammersley, J. B. Thompson and Thomas H. Smith met at Jerry Bryant's Parade Hotel in East Melbourne to write down the Melbourne Football Club's rules (later the laws of Australian football) for the first time. Wills' signature headed the list of rulemakers.^[61] They consulted the rules of Rugby and three other English schools before outlawing common features such as "hacking" (shin-kicking) and tripping as unsuited to grown men and Australian conditions.^[62] Even Wills, who favoured Rugby School football, saw the need for compromise. He wrote to his brother Horace: "Rugby was not a game for us, we wanted a winter pastime but men could be harmed if thrown on the ground so we thought differently."^[61] The club's ten simple rules were the first to be codified outside the English public-school system.^[63] J. B. Thompson used his journalistic position at The Argus to promote the Melbourne rules, and by 1860, new clubs had formed in Melbourne and in the major provincial centres of Geelong, Ballarat and Castlemaine.

Victoria reigns and football evolves

Football in the Richmond Paddock (Yarra Park), 1860s. The field's hard playing surface influenced Wills' approach to codifying Australian football.

The January 1859 intercolonial match was played on the Domain in Sydney. Wills was elected captain and, despite dislocating his right middle finger on the first day while attempting a catch, top scored in the first innings with 15 not out and took 5/24 and 6/25, carrying Victoria to an upset win.^[64]

In January 1860, Wills resigned from the intercolonial match committee in protest after he was assailed by J. B. Thompson for not turning up to practice ahead of the next match against New South Wales.^[65] During a follow-up practice match, players struggled in the day's heat, and ignoring calls to retire, Wills suffered from a near-fatal sunstroke. Hammersley wrote that Wills felt obliged to perform for the large crowd that had gathered to watch him.^[66] Over 25,000 people attended the Victoria and New South Wales match, held at the MCG in February. Wills captained Victoria and bowled unchanged in both innings, taking 6/23 and 3/16, and the top score of the match with 20 not out in the second innings. Victoria won by 69 runs.^[67] These successive victories over New South Wales won Wills the sobriquet "Great Gun of the Colony".^[68] The 1859–60 Victorian Cricketers' Guide described Wills thus:

Take him for all in all, the best cricketer in Australia. Is a good deceptive bowler, both fast and medium, round-arm and slow under-hand. Very soon finds a man's weak points and acts accordingly. Is a beautiful field anywhere, more especially at long slip, and throws unerringly at the top of the wicket. Hits hard and gets runs fast in all sorts of ways.

The laws of football underwent further revisions in the early 1860s, mostly to set limits on running and ball handling.^[69] In April 1860, Wills was the inaugural captain and secretary of the Richmond Football Club (no connection with the present AFL club), and advised the team on their colours: white with a red sash.^[70] The following month, a debate over the ball's shape came to a head when Wills, captaining Richmond against Melbourne, maintained his right to play with an oval ball. J. B. Thompson called it a "geometrical monstrosity" that flew further than the round ball to the detriment of accurate kicking.^[71] Wills continued to demand their use and, by the 1870s, the oval ball was customary in the sport.^[72]

Early matches were organised with little formality. After an 1860 match between University and Richmond was abandoned, University secretary G. C. Purcell accused the Richmond team of not showing. Wills retorted that University's men "must have been dodging behind the gum trees, for they were not visible."^[74]

By 1860, Wills' cousin H. C. A. Harrison had become a champion footballer in Melbourne. He looked up to Wills, once calling him "the beau-ideal of an athlete", a high compliment given that Harrison was the fastest runner in the colony.^[75]

Of the early footballers, Wills was regarded as the most brilliant captain and tactician.^[76] In July 1860 he foreshadowed modern position play when he instructed his Richmond players to abandon the constant scrummages and instead form a line from defence to attack, and, by a series of short kicks to one another towards goal, "succeeded in getting the ball safely landed between the posts."^[77] In another match, captaining Melbourne, he told his men to dart with the ball in open spaces, eschewing the congested style of play typical of the era.^[76] Historian Geoffrey Blainey writes: "How many of the tricks and stratagems of the early years came from this clever tactician we will never know."^[78]

Queensland

Horatio Wills

With plans underway for the England cricket team's first tour of Australia, Wills announced his retirement from cricket. At the beckoning of his father, Wills was preparing to leave Victoria to establish another family property, Cullin-La-Ringo, on the pastoral frontier in Central Queensland.^[79] He spent six months in rural Victoria learning the station crafts of a squatter, including shearing and horseshoeing.^[80]

At the end of January 1861, Tom, Horatio and a party of Victorian settlers commenced their journey north to Queensland where they reached the port of Rockhampton. The trek inland to Cullin-la-Ringo took eight months. They passed through Toowoomba, where one of Horatio's men drowned, and collected over 10,000 sheep in the Darling Downs.^[81] Tom shot and ate pademelons to fend off starvation.^[82]

Cullin-la-Ringo massacre

The Wills Tragedy, 1861, showing the aftermath of the Cullin-La-Ringo massacre

Horatio Wills' gravesite

They had only been on the property for two weeks when, on the afternoon of 17 October, Horatio and eighteen of his party were murdered in the Cullin-La-Ringo massacre, the deadliest massacre of Europeans by aborigines in Australian history.^[83] Tom was away from the property at the time, having been sent to Albinia Downs with two stockmen to collect supplies left en route to Cullin-la-Ringo. He returned several days later to a scene of carnage. Despairing and in shock, Wills immediately wrote to H. C. A. Harrison in Melbourne: "... all our party except I have been slaughtered by the black's on the 17th. I am in a great fix no men."^[84] In the swift retribution that followed, police, native police and vigilante groups from neighbouring stations tracked down and killed at least 70 aborigines; the total may have been 300.^[85] Wills took refuge near Cullin-la-Ringo and did not take part in the reprisal raids.^[86]

Prior to leaving the camp, Tom offered his revolver to Horatio, saying "You may have cause to use it". Horatio dismissed the warning: "It is only your boyish fears; there is no danger".^[87] William Hammersley recalled Horatio's lack of vigilance in conversation with Tom many years later: "Tom Wills has frequently told me that he never trusted the natives, ... and often warned [Horatio] ... but the old man prided himself on being able to manage the blacks from his experience of them gained in Victoria, and said they would never harm him."^[88] Nonetheless on a preliminary expedition to Cullin-la-Ringo, Horatio was wary of danger and described the region's frontier war as "perpetual".^[89]

For many years after the massacre, Wills experienced flashbacks, night terrors and an irritable heart—features of what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. As a consequence, he increased his already heavy drinking in an attempt to blot out memories and alleviate sleep disturbance.^[90]

Struggle on the station

Tom Wills, c. 1863

Tom Wills stayed on at Cullin-la-Ringo and began to rebuild the station. Vigilant, he slept only three hours a night with a rifle beside his bed and looked for signs of another attack.^[91]

He returned to Melbourne in January 1863 to captain Victoria against New South Wales on the Domain in Sydney. The match turned into a riot when the crowd invaded the field after a dispute over the Victorian umpire's dismissal of a New South Wales batsman: Wills, leading his men from the Domain, was struck in the face by a stone, and Victorian professionals George Marshall and William Greaves fled Sydney for Melbourne, reducing Wills' team to nine players. Wills took eight wickets and was the top run scorer in both innings (25* and 17*), but Victoria lost by 84 runs. The Melbourne media castigated Wills for allowing the game to continue and called him a turncoat when evidence surfaced that he agreed to play for New South Wales in the weeks leading up to the match.^[92] He denied all accusations and wrote in an angry letter to The Sydney Morning Herald: "I for one do not think that Victoria will ever send an Eleven up here again."^[93]

Tom Wills voiced his fear of dying in the Queensland outback. In 1863 he reported at least three murders of settlers to the press, including that of a shepherd on Cullin-la-Ringo.^[94] After a series of verbal confrontations with the Attorney-General in Brisbane, Wills was sworn in as a Justice of the Peace in May 1863.^[95] He went blind in his left eye for weeks after contracting "sandy blight". Cedric, Tom's brother, lived on the holding after Tom's departure in early 1864. Cedric believed that the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre was an act of revenge for an attack made on local aborigines by Jesse Gregson, owner of Rainworth Station (30 km south of Cullin-la-Ringo). Years later, he quoted Tom as saying, "If the truth is ever known, you will find that it was through Gregson shooting those blacks; that was the cause of the murder."^[96] Cedric was forced to retract the statement under threat of legal action.^[97]

Return to Melbourne

Football match between Geelong and Melbourne. The two clubs fought over which team "owned" Wills.

Wills returned to Melbourne and to the familiar routine of cricket in summer and football in winter.

When the laws of football were reviewed by the Melbourne Football Club in May 1865, Wills seconded a failed proposal to add a crossbar similar to that used in Rugby School football to the goal posts.^[98] For the rest of the season Wills played for and often captained Melbourne and Geelong, two of the game's dominant clubs. At the end of a winter beset with public brawls over which team "owned" him, Wills moved to Geelong for the remainder of his career, prompting Bell's Life in Victoria to report that Melbourne had lost "the finest leader of men on the football field".^[99] On 8 May 1866, the rules of football were updated at a meeting of club delegates under the chairmanship of H. C. A. Harrison. The newly christened "Victorian Rules" formalised the running bounce to slow down players in possession of the ball.^[100] Wills was not present at the meeting; his move to Geelong had rendered him peripheral to the process of rule-making in Melbourne.^[101]

Intercolonial cricket contests between Victoria and New South Wales resumed at the MCG on Boxing Day 1865, nearly three years since the Sydney riot of 1863. Victoria lost some of its best players when Sam Cosstick, All-England star William Caffyn, and other professionals defected to New South Wales due to pay disputes with the MCC. Bristling with imported talent and captained by Englishman Charles Lawrence, New South Wales was tipped to win. The weakened Victorian team, led by Wills, made an unprecedented 285 runs and won in an innings, Wills taking 6 wickets and top-scoring with 58, the first half century in Australian first-class cricket.^[102]

In the popular imagination, Wills was a folk hero and "a source of eternal hope" for his colony.^[103] Adam Lindsay Gordon wrote of Wills' daring in his 1866 poem "Ye Wearie Wayfarer". Rhyming "Wills" with "spills", he goes on to say:

No game was ever yet worth a rap,
For a rational man to play,
Into which no accident, no mishap,
Could possibly find its way.^[1]

Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Aboriginal cricket team

Wills with the Aboriginal team outside the MCC pavilion of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, December 1866

In May 1866, the minute book of the Melbourne Cricket Club featured an unusual request: Roland Newbury, the club's pavilion keeper, wanted "use of the ground for two days ... for purpose of a match with the native black eleven".^[104] It was the first intimation of a cricket match between an Aboriginal team from Victoria's Western District and the MCC.^[101] The motive behind Newbury's vision went unrecorded, though it was likely a financial one.^[105] The match was scheduled for late December, and in August, Wills agreed to coach the team. This was to mark the beginning of his transition from amateur to professional sportsman.^[106]

Wills travelled inland in November 1866 to Edenhope and Harrow to convene the team from local pastoral properties. Most of them were Jardwadjali men; they shared common vocabulary with the neighbouring Djab wurrung people, which enabled Wills to coach the team in the Aboriginal language he learnt as a child.^[107] Wills captained the team against the MCC at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Boxing Day 1866, in front of 10,000 spectators. It is unknown if Wills reflected on the broader social impact of his action. Many of his contemporaries were shocked that he would associate with Aborigines in the shadow of his father's death. Some viewed him as a villain, while others called him a hero.^[108] One onlooker wrote in a public letter to Wills:^[109]

Although you may not be fully aware of the fact, allow me to tell you that you have rendered a greater service to the aboriginal races of this country and to humanity, than any man who has hitherto attempted to uphold the title of the blacks to rank amongst men.

The team, called the Australian Native XI, played throughout Victoria and New South Wales. Wills' status as a 'native' (an Australian-born European) was at times allied with his team of Aboriginal natives.^[110] This blurred distinction between Wills and the team was emphasised through their shared "lingo". In Bendigo, "the team jester" Jellico asked a gentleman "to teach him to read and write English". When referred to Wills as a good teacher, Jellico replied, "Whats usy Wills. He too much along of us. He speak nothing now but blackfellow talk."^[111]

During the tour of Sydney, Wills was arrested and gaoled after walking on to the Albert Ground in Redfern with the Aboriginal team. He was accused of financial mismanagement. Disillusioned, Wills had left the Native XI by April 1867, and Charles Lawrence usurped him as captain. Several members of the side were later included in the Aboriginal team which toured England in 1868, ten years before the first Australian cricket team classed as representative went to England. Wills' exclusion from the second incarnation of the Aboriginal team has been called the tragedy of his sporting career.^[112] After the tour, Mullagh and Cuzens joined Wills as paid bowlers with the MCC.^[113]

No-ball plot and downfall

Portrait of Wills by William Handcock, 1870

Played on the MCG, the December 1867 intercolonial cricket match between Victoria and New South Wales was interrupted by a dust storm and rain of "biblical force". In the end, Wills claimed a nine-wicket haul and Richard Wardill scored the first century in intercolonial cricket to seal another win for Victoria, this time by 7 wickets.^[114] The Victorian cricket team had elected Wills as captain for over a decade. Writing in his sports column, Hammersley claimed that, as a paid servant of the MCC, Wills lacked "moral ascendancy" over amateur players.^[115] When he lost the captaincy to Wardill, an amateur, on the eve of the March 1869 match against New South Wales, he initially refused to play under Wardill, or, indeed, anyone else. The Victorians resolved to play without Wills, after which he retracted his impulsive decision. This was the last intercolonial match played on the Domain in Sydney and Victoria won by 78 runs despite losing Wardill to the first ball of the match; Wills achieved his best first-class bowling analysis with 7/44 in the second innings.^[116]

Wills, though living in Geelong, remained in Melbourne during the 1869–70 cricket season as a tutor with the MCC. In view of his residential status, the MCC barred the Corio Cricket Club from having Wills in matches against the two teams. In February, Wills captained Victoria to a 265-run win over New South Wales at the MCG. The match was chiefly remembered for accusations of throwing against Wills and Twopenny, an Aboriginal bowler who was said to have been recruited by New South Wales captain Charles Lawrence as a counter to Wills' "chucks".^[117] Comparing the two, the Melbourne press hypocritically defended Wills: "Undoubtedly Wills throws sometimes, but there is some decency about it, some disguise."^[118] In March, under Wills' leadership, the Victorian team trounced a Tasmanian XVI in Launceston, though not without criticism of Wills' bowling action.^[119] With characteristic recklessness he admitted to throwing in his 1870–71 Australian Cricketers' Guide, and in so doing taunted his enemies to stop him.^[120]

For the March 1871 intercolonial match at the Albert Ground in Sydney, Wills was unanimously elected Victorian captain. He made a first innings top score of 39* and Victoria defeated New South Wales by 48 runs.^[121] Accusations of throwing had shadowed Wills for the last decade, and calls to have him no-balled grew more insistent. On 30 March 1872, Wills became the first cricketer to be called for throwing in a major Australian match.^[122] He was again no-balled when Victoria played a combined XIII from New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia late in 1872.^[123]

Hammersley was merciless in his criticism of Wills' bowling which led to a bitter feud played out in an exchange of public letters, ending their relationship.^[125] Hammersley wrote:^[126]

You are played out now, the cricketing machine is rusty and useless, all respect for it is gone. You will never be captain of a Victorian Eleven again, ... Settle down, quietly at Geelong, dear Geelong. Eschew colonial beer, and take the pledge, and in time your failings may be forgotten, and only your talents as a cricketer remembered. Farewell, Tommy Wills.

Later life

An 1873 caricature of Grace

In 1874, at the age of 39, Wills travelled to the South Australian mining town of Kadina to coach the locals in preparation for a cricket match against W. G. Grace's touring English team. Wills scored a duck in both innings and Grace later wrote derisively of the "old Rugbeian" as a has-been. Grace neglected to mention that Wills bowled him in the second innings, taking 6/28. Wills played his last first-class cricket match in 1876. By this stage, Wills' cricket "had become a series of petty disputes in petty games" of "ever-deteriorating standards."^[127]

Wills kept an interest in the development of the rules of football, suggesting at one stage that "all pushing from behind be abolished" to curb injuries.^[128] In a match between Geelong and Ballarat, Wills pioneered the Australian football tactic of flooding. Goalless and kicking against the gale, Wills and his players flooded the backline to prevent Ballarat from scoring. He then ordered his men to waste time and deliberately kick the ball out of bounds amid riotous cries from Ballarat locals.^[129] Four years later, in a rare act of diplomacy, Wills quelled on-field fighting after a rival club used his "unchivalrous tactics" against Geelong.^[130]

Wills played his last game of football in 1874.^[131] He developed a reputation for not paying debts, though he continued to financially support local cricket and football teams. He donated a silver Challenge Cup for a football competiton between Geelong, Ballarat and clubs of the Western District.^[132] From 1873 to 1876 he served as Geelong's vice president, and was appointed as one of three Geelong delegates after the formation of the Victorian Football Association (VFA) in 1877, but was dropped the following week for reasons unstated.^[133] During the 1878 VFA season, Wills acted as central umpire. He defended his umpiring of a match between Carlton and Albert Park in what would be his last public letter.^[134] By the time Geelong won their first premiership in 1878, Wills had moved to Emerald Hill (South Melbourne) with his de facto Sarah Theresa Barbor, and his role at the club was diminished.^[135]

In the late 1870s, he convinced the South Melbourne Football Club to use the suburb's cricket ground for football.^[136] Geelong did likewise at the same time.^[137] The idea of playing both sports on one ground was well-known at Rugby School,^[137] and expounded by Wills in his famous 1858 letter to Bell's Life in Victoria: "... it would be of a vast benefit to any cricket-ground to be trampled upon, and would make the turf quite firm and durable".^[51] The gradual adoption of cricket grounds for football led to the oval-shaped Australian rules football playing field.^[137]

By 1880, the football game that Wills co-created in Melbourne's parklands had spread throughout the Australian colonies. As many as 15,000 spectators attended important matches of the season in Melbourne, the world's largest football crowds hitherto recorded.^[138]

Death

Wills fled the Melbourne Hospital within hours of his admission.

In his final year living with Sarah Barbor in Heidelberg on the outskirts of Melbourne, Wills' alcoholism worsened. The last surviving letters of Wills, dated 15 March 1880, were written to Cedric and Horace on Cullin-la-Ringo, which was now stricken by drought. He asked for money, just "to pay off a few debts here", and fantasised about escaping to Tasmania.^[139]

Isolated and disowned by most of his family, Wills had become, in the words of cricket historian David Frith, "a complete and dangerous and apparently incurable alcoholic".^[140] Wills was admitted to the Melbourne Hospital at the age of 44 suffering from delirium tremens, the most severe form of alcohol withdrawal. Paranoid and delusional, Wills absconded from the hospital's psychiatric ward on 1 May 1880, returned home and the next day committed suicide by stabbing a pair of scissors into his heart three times. The inquest, on 3 May, presided over by the city coroner Richard Youl, found that Wills "killed himself when of unsound mind from excessive drinking".^[141] Wills was buried the following day in an unmarked grave in Heidelberg Cemetery at a private funeral attended by only six people: his brother Egbert, sister Emily and cousin H. C. A. Harrison; Harrison's sister Adela and her son Amos; and MCC cricketer Vernon Cameron.^[142] His death certificate declared that his parents were "Unknown". When asked by a journalist about her son's death, Elizabeth Wills is reported to have denied that such a person existed.^[f]

Personality

Academic Barry Judd wrote in 2007:^[143]

Tom Wills exists as a spectral figure, a ghost inhabiting the margins of written history; ... [his] transient appearance in historical memory indicates little of whom he was, what he thought or why he did the things he did.

Wills struck his contemporaries as peculiar, laconic and at times narcissistic, with a prickly temperament, but also kind, charismatic and companionable.^[144] He was a natural born leader who emboldened the less gifted on his team with his supreme confidence.^[145] Always embroiled in controversy, he seemed to lack an understanding of how his words and behaviour could repeatedly get him into trouble.^[146] Through his research, journalist Martin Flanagan concluded that Wills was "utterly bereft of insight into himself",^[147] and football historian Gillian Hibbins described Wills as "an overbearing and undisciplined young man who tended to blame others for his troubles and was more interested in winning a game than in respecting sporting rules." While he created enemies amongst many fellow sportsmen, they generally didn't maintain their anger towards him.^[148] He was innately egalitarian and never sought to gain an administrative or monetary advantage over others. The affection felt for Wills, coupled with an understanding of his waywardness, was summed up in the public motto: "Despite all thy faults I love thee still, Tommy Wills".^[149]

In the years immediately after Rugby School, Wills developed a peculiar stream of consciousness style of writing that sometimes defied syntax and grammar.^[150] His letters are laced with pun associations, oblique classical and Shakespearean allusions, and droll asides, such as this one about Melbourne in a letter to his brother Cedric: "Everything is dull here, but people are kept alive by people getting shot at in the streets".^[151] Biographer Greg de Moore summarised Wills' letters from this period:^[151]

He could be dismissive, triumphant and brazen all within a single sentence. Whatever his inner world was, he rarely let it be known. Lines of argument or considered opinion were not developed. His stream of thought was in rapid flux and a string of defiant jabs. To give emphasis he underlined his words with a flourish. His punctuation was idiosyncratic. Language was breathless and explosive and he revelled in presenting himself and his motives as mysterious.

The language of extremes exhibited in his writing reflected aspects of his "pithy" speaking manner.^[152] In one of his borderline "thought disordered" letters, it is evident that at times he experienced degrees of depersonalisation: "I do not know what I am standing on – & when anyone speaks to me I cannot for the life of me make out what they are talking about – everything seems so curious."^[153] In 1884, William Hammersley compared Wills' incipient madness and fiery glare to that of Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon.^[154] Wills' mental instability is a source for medical speculation. Epilepsy has been suggested as a possible cause of his perplexed mental state, and a variant of bipolar illness may account for his disjointed thinking and elevated mood.^[155]

In 1923, Wills' old cricket cap was found by the Melbourne Cricket Club and put on display in the Block Arcade, causing Horace to reflect on his brother: "[Tom] was the nicest man I ever met. Though his nature was care-free, amounting almost to wildness, he had the sweetest temper I have seen in a man, and was essentially a sportsman."^[16]

Legacy

Statue outside the MCG of Wills umpiring the 1858 game between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College. The two schools have since played annually in the Cordner–Eggleston Cup, the world's oldest football competition.

Wills fell into obscurity after his death, but his profile has gradually risen since the late 20th century, with some predicting that his place in Australian culture will eventually be commensurate with that of Ned Kelly and "Waltzing Matilda".^[157] His anonymous gravesite was restored in 1980 with a headstone erected by the Melbourne Cricket Club and by public subscription. The epitaph recognises Wills as the "Founder of Australian football and champion cricketer of his time".^[158] In 1998, a monument to Wills was erected in Moyston. It features a pavilion and storyboards with information supplied by historian Col Hutchison.

The Tom Wills Room in the Great Southern Stand of the MCG serves as a venue for corporate functions.^[159] A statue outside the MCG, sculptued by Louis Laumen and erected in 2001, depicts Wills umpiring the famous 1858 football match between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College. The plaque reads that Wills:^[160]

... did more than any other person – as a footballer and umpire, co-writer of the rules and promoter of the game – to develop Australian football during its first decade.

Round 19 of the 2008 AFL Season was named Tom Wills Round to mark the 150th anniversary of the Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College match. The two schools played in a curtain raiser at the MCG ahead of the round's opening game between Melbourne and Geelong.^[161] That same year, Victoria's busiest freeway interchange, the Monash-EastLink interchange in Dandenong North, was named the Tom Wills Interchange.^[162] Tom Wills Oval, inaugurated in 2013 at Sydney Olympic Park, serves as the training base for the Greater Western Sydney Football Club of the AFL.^[163]

Wills has inspired numerous works in Australian popular culture. Martin Flanagan's 1998 novel The Call has been described as a "historical imagining into the life of Wills".^[164] It was adapted into a stage play by Bruce Myles in 2004.^[165] Flanagan's portrayal of Wills has also inspired songs including "Tom Wills" (2001) by Mick Thomas and "Tom Wills Would" (2003) by Neil Murray.^[166] Henry F. Skerritt, frontman of The Holy Sea, assumes the role of Wills in "The Ten Rules", released on the band's 2010 album Ghosts of the Horizon.^[167] In 2011, Shane Howard wrote and performed "Tom Wills" exclusively for The Marngrook Footy Show.

Marngrook theory

Detail of an 1850s etching that shows aborigines kicking a ball made from Typha roots. It has been suggested that Wills incorporated elements of an aboriginal game, Marngrook, into Australian football.

There is no evidence that Wills played Marngrook, an Aboriginal game alleged to have similarities with Australian rules football; however, the connection may have had some influence. Due to his positive childhood relations with aborigines, it is assumed that he would have at the very least seen the game being played and some believe this may have had an influence on his rules for Australian football. Lawton Wills Cooke, the grandson of Tom's brother Horace, reported that "Tom played some form of football with Aboriginal kids. We have no documents to prove this, but there is a family story that they kicked a possum skin sewn up in the shape of a ball."^[168] This claim was disputed by Wills family descendent T. S. Wills Cooke in his published history of the Wills family.^[169] The theory has been called a "postmodern and postcolonial reconstruction of Australian sporting history",^[170] and the debate surrounding it "football's history wars", with Wills at its centre.^[171]

Flanagan addresses Wills in a 2008 essay about the controversy, arguing that he must have known Aboriginal games as it was in his nature to play: "There's two things about you everybody seems to have agreed on—you'd drink with anyone and you'd play with anyone."^[172]

See also

• List of Australian rules football and cricket players
• List of cricketers called for throwing in major cricket matches in Australia

Footnotes

References

Bibliography

Books

Journals

Theses

Webpages

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tom Wills.

• Biographer Greg De Moore discusses Tom Wills on "Conversations" with Richard Fidler, ABC Local Radio
• Transcript of Martin Flanagan's 2011 John Button Oration, "On why Tom Wills is an Australian legend no less than Ned Kelly and Burke & Wills"
• Tom Wills documentary at YouTube.com