Book Review – Tom Wills: His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall

Tom Wills is considered by many to be the most influential person in the invention of Australian Rules football. It was he who suggested football as a winter game to keep Victoria’s cricketers fit for their summer sport. He was one of four men who met, on the evening of 17 May 1859, at the Parade Hotel on Wellington Parade, up the slope from the Melbourne Cricket Ground and wrote the first set of rules on behalf of the Melbourne Football Club. As a talented player and canny captain, he influenced the development of the game within that set of rules. He was also the best Victorian cricketer of his time.

More elements of Australian legend intersected in the body of Tom Wills than merely the origins of our dominant summer sport and the home grown football game. Tom Wills’ four grandparents were convicts transported from England. He was born on a property on the upper Molonglo River, the dammed waters of which enhance the look of our national capital. His early childhood was spent on a property established on the land of the Djab wurrung peoples on the eastern edge of the Grampians, 140 miles north-west of Melbourne. While Tom grew up with Aboriginal children and learned their language, the frontier wars went on around him with settlers being killed and, very likely, Tom’s father, Horatio Wills, having shot and killed Aboriginal people.

In early 1861, Tom left his beloved cricket at his father’s request and travelled to Cullin-la-Ringo, west of Rockhampton to establish a sheep property. 10 days after arrival, Tom was sent by his father, with a bullock dray and two men, to collect provisions. Three days before Tom’s return with provisions, on 17 October 1861, Horatio and 18 others, men, women and children, were killed by Aboriginals. One of the more bloody chapters in the frontier wars of the north had occurred, itself, triggering reprisals which shed even more blood.

Tom Wills was generally considered a poor station manager, despite attempting to carry on his father’s dream, and he returned to the world of sport. His inability to prevent estate money from running through his fingers had triggered the disapproval of the accountant trustees who had been charged by Horatio’s will with administering his assets.

Tom Wills went on to play with and against the famous WG Grace on his tour of Australia. He coached and developed an Aboriginal cricket team which went on to create sensation on a tour of England, albeit, without Tom.

One might have thought that a man who was associated with so much of the history which continues to influence Australian society would be more of a household name, even in the non-AFL states. One would also have thought that so much would have been written by a bevy of historians that there would be no more to discover about Tom Wills.

Greg de Moore’s book draws on extraordinary amounts of original material that had never been searched for, let alone found. As to the former proposition, Tom Wills was an alcoholic for much of his life and he took his own life by twice driving a pair of scissors into his chest and penetrating his heart. Such a shameful death in Victorian Victoria led to his own mother denying that she had ever had a son called Tom and, possibly, led to a more subtle denial of Tom Wills by the sports he had dominated and the colonies across which he had cast such a large shadow for so much of his life.

Greg de Moore’s day job is as a consultant psychiatrist at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital. Perhaps, it was the left field approach of the amateur that caused him to spend five hours looking through boxes of patient records in a back room of the Royal Melbourne Hospital before turning up the patient entry for TW Wills made the day before the patient’s death. Dr. de Moore travelled to the family property outside the modern town of Springsure and found original letters sent from Rugby school by the teenage Tom Wills. In the old homestead on the same property, Dr. de Moore found the text books written in but barely studied by the youth who thought of sport and little more, almost all of the time. And, in Rugby school, itself, Dr. de Moore found Tom’s old cricket book where he maintained records of matches in which he had participated.

Greg de Moore’s discoveries, themselves, would have earned him a place of honour in the world of Tom Wills’ scholarship. The book, however, adds greatly to the honour gained. A very careful biography has been written, piecing the new evidence together with what was already known and on the record. The author uses his professional understanding to assist the reader to understand those matters which were troubling the mind of his subject from quite early on in his life and to understand the personality of Tom Wills and the way in which that personality constructed the incidents which brought him friends and popularity but also landed him in scrapes and made him many enemies. But, although the knowledge of the psychiatrist is brought to bear, the writing style never loses its intimacy with the reader.

This is an excellent piece of biographical writing. Two bonus chapters add a brilliant parting touch. An epilogue consists wholly of an interview with Lawton Wills Cooke, grandnephew of Tom Wills born in 1920, forty years after Tom Wills’ death. Mr. Cooke, now a very old man, looks back at his childhood and remembers what he learned from his grandfather about the grandfather’s hero and older brother, the famous Tommy Wills. The epilogue is a brilliant piece of oral history.

The Afterword is a discussion of the vexed question of the origin of Australian Football, namely, whether it owes anything to Indigenous games played by Aboriginals in country Victoria. The verdict of Dr. de Moore is in the negative, not because it was impossible that it might have happened in that way but because the historical record, mainly composed of what Tom Wills said and wrote in his lifetime, makes no mention of any such influence having occurred. While that may not be the last word on that subject, it is certainly an informed word and will carry much weight.

I highly recommend this book. For the cricket or AFL fanatic, it should be a must read. However, even a mild interest in the origins of the society in which we live will be more than enough justification for the trip to your favourite local bookstore and the enjoyable hours spent reading it.2

Stephen Keim SC

Footnotes

1. http://www.allenandunwin.com/
2. It will certainly justify the very reasonable publisher’s price of $32.95. See http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=96