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Issue No. 126 | 01 March 2002 |
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I Don�t Like Sprouts
Interview: Clean Hands Corporate: Out of Asia Unions: Tears, Real And Crocodile, At The Ansett Wake Economics: Labour�s Capital: Individual Or Collective? History: Mardi Gras: The Biggest Labour Festival? International: Driving A Hard Bargain Review: In Bed With a Sub-Machine Gun Satire: Whitlam Forgives Kerr: "At Least He Didn't Dismiss A Rape Victim" Poetry: Dear Mother
The Soapbox The Locker Room Week in Review
 More on Harry BridgesWell Done, SplitterRepeating History
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The Locker Room Black and WhiteBy Neale Towart
*************** Martin Flanagan unearthed his story in his novel, The Call, a few years ago. Tom Wills' sporting prowess and his relationship with Aboriginal people can show us that our current bigotry and racism were not inevitable developments of our history. The prevailing ideologies of race worked against his position in the cricket world of Melbourne, and contributed to his tragic death. More like him and the racial horror that is the history of black-white relations in Australia would be a happier one. "The game which every newspaper in the colony now instructs me is necessary to the moral health of our young men was a noisy mobile collision lasting several hours. For the whole of that time, young Mr Wills was in the thick of the action, grabbing the ball and passing it out, calling, 'keep it moving! keep it moving!'. [could be one of the Ellas on the job here]. He says needless injuries occur if the ball remains trapped too long in one place." According to Martin Flanagan, these were Dr John Bromfield's comments on Tom Wills, recently returned from Rugby School in England under Arnold, and his impact on the way rugby was played in Australia. His impact spread to the development of Aussie Rules, and he made Victoria into the leading cricketing colony. He also organised the first Aboriginal team to play a World team in Melbourne, and was behind the first tour of the UK by an Aboriginal team (although he had fallen foul of cricket authorities by this time and wasn't allowed to accompany them), mainly drawn from people from around Lake Wallace, Victoria, where he had grown up and leant a lot about cricket and the form of football that became Aussie Rules. He played this game with the Aboriginal kids around his father's station in Western Victoria. Wills family history was a maze that Flanagan skilfully traces in this novel, based on many facts about Tom and his father. We learn of apparent harmony between the Wills family and the Djabwurrung people in Western Victoria. Tom spent much of his childhood with the Djabwurrung and spoke their language. The half truths and family legends that develop around the station and the sport are emphasised by Flanagan as he gradually peels back the story. An manuscript from around 1920 purports to recount the family history with "gifts of good food and flour, a sympathetic womanly heart, and uniform kind but firm treatment by the master brought about a mutual feeling of goodwill and trust enabling the onerous work of the run to progress.... Playing the games and singing the songs of the younger gnomes of the forest, little Tommy steadily imbibed the language and learnt the tricks and forest lore of his wonderful playmates. Even so, who would have dreamt that in manhood's prime he would lead a band his playmates of the forest to green cricket swards where they would defeat on level terms a representative team of players from the conquering white race in the presence of Royalty?!" Flanagan points out that Tom didn't play. This letdown for the reader begins the unveiling of many of the family myths. His father was supposed to have been captive on a Pacific Island and have made a daring escape. He moved with his family later down from Molongolo to Western Victoria and hostilities were fatal, to many Blacks. Friendly relations were achieved by this initial slaughter. Later having sold out and moved to Geelong and Tom having come back from Rugby, played cricket and football, they decamped to Western Queensland, where the fathers confidence in his relations with Aborigines lead to tragic consequences fore himself and his squatting party, and later to much more savage reprisals against the Aboriginal people west of Rockhampton. Tom urged his father to arm the party of squatters as they moved further into western Qld, but his father refused, feeling he had no problems with the blacks. While Tom was away to get other stock, his father and the rest of the party were killed. We learn the Aboriginal people were the ones retaliating, after another squatter who dressed like Mr Wills had killed a number of Aboriginal people for supposedly stealing sheep (they hadn't). Some would question Tom's affinity for blacks when he was the one who wanted weapons, but Flanagan says it was because he was capable of seeing the world as they did. He knew that going into that part of the country was a warlike situation and he knew the Aboriginal people would see it that way. The attitude to Aboriginal people current at the time was that they were an inferior race. Flanagan says that Tom never expressed this idea and would have seen it as superfluous to the world he knew. Bonicelli asked Wills about the indolence of Aborigines and the problems this would cause in coaching. Wills reply was to the contrary. Bonicelli thought Wills meant "whereas we Britons will combine for a great cause or if there is a prize to be won, with the blacks it was the natural way." Tom's self-confidence, evident on his return from Rugby at first helped in the world of Melbourne cricket, but his larrikin streak eventually was his undoing as the authorities gradually turned against him, no matter that he was still regarded as the beat cricketer in the country (apart from his Aboriginal friend, Johnny Mullagh). The football connection is made clear after the great Victorian cricket victory over NSW in 1859. Alfred Bonicelli in the Melbourne Illustrated News wrote that "Wills called getting drunk having a bushfire ('Burn off the old growth')...but on the night in... Sydney he threatened to blaze out of control. It began with him sitting in the middle of the room, cross-legged and bare-footed, clacking a hairbrush against a hearth broom, and accompanying the racket with a flat nasal chant...After perhaps twenty minutes of this...he sprang to his feet and stamped about the room, fingers pointed in front of his face like a mask he was peering through...he brought the room to total silence by dropping to his knees and emitting a strange piercing howl. Catching the eye of one of his fellow players, William Tennant [who, we later learn, clearly never forgot Wills and put the boot in when he got the chance], he said 'you should be glad I made that sound, Tennant, because one day it won't be heard. Dingoes are vermin, you know - they have to be killed.' He declared a game of native football would be played forthwith, and to this end, commandeered a settee cushion and organised two teams, the Romans and the Greeks. Of course, no-one could better Mr Wills at the game, which he insisted on playing bare-foot. He had an extravagant leap which he would employ to balance himself momentarily on the back or shoulders of an opponent and thereby increase his upward reach." Skills he learned from his Aboriginal friends came through. His attitude to unnecessary injury was one reason he and his cousin Colden Harrison developed Australian Rules. He felt the grounds in Australia were too hard for Rugby as played on soft English grounds. Flanagan gets to the crux on Aussie Rules: "Whose game is it, you ask? The blackfellas say it's theirs. The Irish claim they invented it and poor old H.C.A. Harrison went to his grave swearing it was British. If you want my opinion, it's a bastard of a game - swift, bold and beautiful - for a bastard of a people. If it has a white father he wasn't a cautious, calculating fellow like Colden Harrison. He was a reckless young dandy capable of dismissed the suggestion of an English school game English game with the merest shake of his curly brown head, saying, No we'll have a game of our own. There were other ways of playing football. He'd seen one as a boy, a game of style and grace played for appreciative audiences. The old men sang the cockatoo Dreaming songs before the young men went out and competed to see who could fly the highest." The story of a forgotten Australian whose story has the capacity to teach and inspire us all. As Flanagan calls at the end Tom Wills leapt from this land and almost caught the sun. Martin Flanagan. The Call (Allen & Unwin, 1998) It should still be around in the bookshops (although things get pulled off the shelves pretty quickly these days. Ask for it.
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