Goldfields may have provided Gaelic's roots

Many Gaelic football fans - and, for that matter, many Australian football fans - believe that the Australian game is derived from its Irish cousin. Martin Flanagan, whose book on Tom Wills, the founder of Australian rules, is to be published this month, says it is the other way around.

"Hurling is thousands of years old but Gaelic football isn't," Flanagan says. "There is a view among the Kooris (Aborigines from south-eastern Australia) that Irish football took its cue from Australian football."

Flanagan makes the point that Australian rules is among the first football games to have been "codified". The rules were laid down in 1858 before the first match between Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar. The match, the brainchild of Tom Wills, was played on a patch of dirt that was later to become the site for the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which to this day is the spiritual home of Australian football and cricket.

Flanagan says soccer was codified in the 1860s, rugby in the 1870s and Gaelic football in the 1880s. He believes that Irishmen who returned from the goldfields of Victoria took a little bit of the Australian game with them, perhaps influencing Gaelic football.

"That's an Australian view. But the Irish had a major input into the Australian game. There was a huge Irish input into the culture of this colony, with the Eureka Stockade, etc. Clearly, they brought a great deal of the character and spirit to Australian football."

The Eureka Stockade is a landmark in Australia's history. In 1854, Peter Lalor, an Irishman, led a revolt against government troops at the heart of the goldfields in Ballarat, which is 150 kilometres west of Melbourne.

A further 100 kilometres west is Ararat, where Horatio Wills was the first white man to settle. It was the country of the Djabwurrung tribe and most of the settlers who followed Wills drove the Aborigines from their land at gunpoint.

Wills, however, allowed the Djabwurrung to remain on his property. His son Tom grew up learning their songs, their dreams, their language and their games.

In the late 1840s, Tom Wills was sent to boarding school in Melbourne and then Rugby in England. After six years he returned and revolutionised sport in the young colony.

He led Victoria to its first cricket victory over New South Wales and then set about devising an indigenous football code. "We'll have a game of our own," he declared.

The phrase became famous and the book A Game of Our Own, by eminent historian Geoffrey Blainey, leads the studies of the origins of Australian rules football.

He says Wills wasn't won over by rugby, which was a house game played by teams of 60 and 80 when he was at the elite English school, because he had seen a better game in his back yard when he was a child. "He opened the door to an indigenous code of football."

Wills saw, and played, "marn grook," a form of keepings-off in which the Djabwurrung kicked around an inflated possum skin.

It had a high aerial content, as acknowledged by Brough Smyth in The Aborigines in Victoria in 1878. "The tallest men, and those able to spring to a great height, have the best chance in this game," Smyth writes.

The evidence seems clear that "marn grook" inspired Tom Wills to devise the rules for a game that was to represent Australia more than even he, perhaps, intended.

In 1866, Wills coached the first cricket squad to tour England, a team of Aborigines from the Edenhope area in western Victoria. By then Australian rules was entrenched as the football code of south-eastern Australia, with matches played with great vigour on the gold fields especially. In the 1880s, the Victorian Football Association was formed in Melbourne. An offshoot, the Victorian Football League, started in 1897 and entrenched itself as the flag-bearer of the southern code until the Australian Football League was formed in 1990.

Tom Wills became a wracked alcoholic and failed to see the burgeoning of his brainchild. In 1880, he took his own life.

Last month a plaque was unveiled at Moyston Oval in Ararat, just a kilometre from the site of the Wills homestead, to commemorate his founding of Australian rules football.