for Ruth Brain
This edition published by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay 2018
ETT IMPRINT
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Royal Exchange NSW 1225
Australia
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.
Copyright © Martin Flanagan 2018
ISBN 9781925416046 (paper)
ISBN 9781925706628 (ebook)
Design by Hanna Gottlieb
FOREWORD
In 1998, I wrote “The Call”, a book recreating the life of Tom Wills. The cover said it was a novel but it wasn’t really – if a novel is a bubble of adult make-believe, I kept bursting the bubble. I made an assumption about Tom Wills – that, like myself, he was a whitefeller influenced by blackfellers – but thereafter bent my imagining of him to every fact as I encountered it.
My book threatened some people because they jumped to the conclusion that I was portraying Tom Wills as a moral hero. I don’t think Tom Wills was a moral hero any more than I think Ian Botham was a moral hero when he walked out on Somerset County Cricket Club after his black West Indian team-mates, Joel Garner and Viv Richards, got sacked in 1985. I don’t think Botham saw himself as a champion of race politics. I think he was a great cricketer who knew two other great cricketers when he encountered them and revelling in their talents also meant embracing them as human beings. No matter how corrupt sport becomes, there is within it a radical innocence: when people play together so many barriers – cultural, racial, political – become superfluous.
Tom Wills’ father Horatio was the first white settler in the Ararat region of western Victoria, arriving in the late 1830s. In 2008, however, when the AFL celebrated its 150th year, an official history was produced and an eminent place within it was given to an essay by Gillian Hibbins titled “A Seductive Myth” and sub-titled “Wills and the Aboriginal Game”. Basically, her argument boiled down to the assertion that as there was no written evidence of Aboriginal football being played at Moyston, it could not be assumed that it was. For a long time it was assumed that Australian football was a colonial off-shoot of 19th century English school games. Clearly, it was heavily influenced by them, but that does not sever Tom Wills’ link with Aboriginal football.
There are three things I know about Aboriginal football and Moyston.
Number one – the local Aboriginal people, the Tjapwurrung, had their own word for football: mingorm. Did the Italians invent the word macaroni without ever having seen or eaten a macaroni? Did any people in the history of the world ever invent a word for something which they didn’t know to exist?
Number two – James Dawson was a Scottish squatter in the western district in the 1840s who actually liked Aboriginal people and spent a lot of time with them. His 1881 book Australian Aborigines. The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia is regarded as authoritative. Dawson describes a big corroboree at Terang and gives an elaborate and much-quoted account of the Aboriginal football he saw being played, especially the leaping and kicking. Dawson lists the Tjapwurrung as being one of the tribes present. Amy Saunders, a Koori woman with a sharp wit, satirised the argument that the Tjapwurrung didn’t have a version of football thus: “Do you know what they’re saying now? They’re saying there was a tribe of blackfellers in Victoria who didn’t like footy. Well, they must have all got killed out because there’s none of them around now”.
And, thirdly, the closest living person to the whole Tom Wills story is Lawton Wills Cooke, now well into his 90s and living in Melbourne. He is the grandson of Tom Wills’s younger brother Horace. Horace Wills told his daughter, Lawton’s mother, and Lawton’s mother told him, that when Tom Wills was at Moyston he played Aboriginal football with a stuffed possum skin bound up in sinew.
In “The Call”, Tom Wills is seen through the eyes of characters who knew him, all of them coming to Wills and what he represented from different directions. I provided an outline of the person I thought Tom Wills was but there was a point beyond which I wasn’t prepared to go in terms of describing him more closely. I said earlier that my assumption in writing the book was that, like me, Tom Wills was a whitefeller influenced by blackfellers. What I didn’t know was how deeply he had been influenced by Aboriginal culture and in exactly what ways.
I’ve met whitefellers who can speak Aboriginal languages; I’ve never met one who grew up speaking the Aboriginal language for the place he was growing up in. Tom Wills did. As I once said to a Jewish audience, speaking the Aboriginal language for the place you’re from in Australia is like speaking Hebrew in Israel. Wills also knew Tjapwurrung songs and dances and there are various reports of him playing games with Aboriginal children as a child. This is surely the most believable part of the story because, at one level, his life was one long game. That’s what Tom Wills was – a player.
In 2006, “The Call” was made into a play by director Bruce Myles after we co-wrote the script together. We had three Aboriginal actors, two non-Aboriginal actors and an Aboriginal dancer. When we did a reading of the script, the first question came from the Aboriginal dancer, since deceased. He said, “Did Tom go through Law?” That is – did Tom go through Law, did he do men’s business, was he initiated? It’s a whole different story if he was – the conflict within him would have run so much deeper. But when I wrote “The Call” I didn’t speculate on such things. They were too big. They pushed the narrative too much in one direction and, at the end of the day, it would only be my imagining. I didn’t want to open one door and then close another. Now, ten years later, do I think Tom Wills was initiated? I doubt it. My impression is that circumcision generally occurs around the age of 12 or 13 when boys are on the cusp of manhood by which Tom was mostly in a boarding school in Melbourne. So how far into Aboriginal culture did he go? Far enough for the Tjapwurrung elders to send a messenger to the Wills house asking when Tom was coming home after he went to the Rugby school in England. That suggests to me that the elders saw young Tom as a bridge between the cultures, one they desperately needed having become refugees in their own land.
Tom Wills was sent to Rugby at the age of 15. One, and probably both, of Tom’s grandfathers were convicts. Ten years after Tom arrived at Rugby, Charles Dickens published “Great Expectations”, his novel about the shame felt by an upwardly mobile young man from the lower classes of English society (helped on his way, as it turns out, by a convict transported to Australia). Anyone who has been to a boarding school can imagine how dangerous such shameful knowledge would be to a 15-year-old. From a young age, I concluded, Tom Wills, at least in his dealings with the outside world, was a person with a hidden life. On the sports field, he was the opposite – nothing was hidden. Was he aware of these opposites in his character? I doubt it. Insight into self doesn’t seem to have been one of his virtues. Insight into games was another matter.
My aim in writing “The Call” was to get Tom to rise up from the unmarked grave in which his corpse was dumped to take his place in the Australian consciousness. But to really implant a story in the national psyche, you need to make either a film or a television mini-series and, in Australia, that is very difficult. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been party to futile attempts to “get up” films and mini-series about both Tom Wills and Weary Dunlop. In 2013, a bold trio from Sydney – David Thrum, Tom Thompson and Phil Austin – took up the Tom Wills challenge once more. I wrote the treatment; they took it upon themselves to place it with as many people in the film and television industry as they could. The replies were uniformly depressing. There were issues of cultural politics. The