A letters page would be welcome. I can even send you a very long letter about the recent comics article you ran if you like.

Greg - why don't you email me your letter, in anticipation of the letters page?

Up where Cazaly? Myth and legend in the origins of football here and there. Roy Hay Ciannan Cazaly’s moving discussion of the recent contribution by players of Aboriginal heritage to Australian football in the Summer issue of Meanjin is something with which most dispassionate observers would agree. However when she tries to deal with the historical debate about the origins of the game she demonstrates a lack of understanding which vitiates her attempt to clarify what is really going on in the research about the origins of the codes of football in this country. Also there is no indication that she is aware of research taking place elsewhere on the origins of Association football in the United Kingdom which throws important light on what was happening here and clear indications of a potential way forward. It is not Gillian Hibbins who has narrowed debate, indeed Gillian Hibbins has significantly broadened consideration of the origins of modern sport in her work. The one page on ‘A Seductive Myth’ is the tip of a very large body of work which has transformed our understanding of the origins of football in this country. Most sports have creation myths, which historians spend great amounts of time and effort demolishing. But their efforts are often neglected as people cling to the romantic story. It is a clear case of when the facts and the legend conflict, print (or believe) the legend. In the search for origins the existence of indigenous cultural practices which looked like modern sports are often found, but in most cases these activities bear only the most tangential relationship to the sports which emerged in the nineteenth century. Historians have been examining these cases for many years. There are many elementary errors in Ciannon Cazaly’s article. It was Wills’ cousin, H C A Harrison who was called the father of football, not Wills. Turner and Sandercock do not suggest that Wills was involved in the foundation of the Geelong Football Club. Having just completed the first chapter of a new history of the club, I have found no contemporary evidence that he was, though there are plenty of claims about his role, some of which he put forward himself a number of years later. It is likely that Wills spent time with the Djabwurrung during his early childhood. The claim that Wills could speak their language comes from Harrison in his autobiography which was written in 1923. Gillian Hibbins is not the co-author of a biography of Harrison. With Anne Mancini she published his autobiography along with an extensive introduction. She did not call Adam Goodes ‘racist’. She pointed out that attributing particular qualities to a social or cultural group in society could be construed as a racist argument. This is like saying all red headed players are uniquely qualified to play football by virtue of being red haired. Gillian Hibbins does not say that football was not played in the Grampians, only that there is no evidence that it was. She says that if Wills saw marngrook or a similar game played it was when he was very young, not that he was too young to remember. She does not present evidence of Aboriginal football being played everywhere from Mereibe to Westernport to Corranderk, but gives examples of football being played in these three areas. Attributing views to Gillian Hibbins which she did not and does not hold only to demolish them is not fair dealing. It is claimed that Gillian Hibbins failed to interview Aboriginal people. If this is such a serious matter then why do Ciannon Cazaly, Barry Judd, Martin Flanagan or Jim Poulter not produce the results of such interviews which clarify the understandings which the oral tradition bring to the debate on the origins of the game. Poulter does use some family oral history and tradition in interesting ways. None of this bears directly on a linkage between Wills and the rules of the game or its early form. John Hirst, suggests that a more open, long kicking game evolved earlier than was thought, citing the work of his student, David Thompson, and a newspaper account of a Geelong versus Melbourne game in 1862. ‘Is it in this process of evolution rather than in the founding moment that we can find an Aboriginal influence?’ If so, it is unlikely have come through Tom Wills, who was in Queensland at the time. Ken Edwards has shown in his published work what can be done to bring Aboriginal games to young people in interesting and innovative ways. I believe he has a mass of unpublished material on representations of ball games or similar cultural activities in paintings and other artefacts many of which date back long before European arrival on this continent. He says that there is silence in the oral record about any link between Aboriginal games and football until the end of the twentieth century. Gillian Hibbins is aware that in the United Kingdom there is a similar debate taking place about the relative influence of the codifiers of the rules of Association football in 1863 and the people who played indigenous games of football up and down the country. Until the last two decades it was the accepted view that folk football in the villages had been destroyed by the twin forces of Puritanism and the industrial revolution. Hence a more civilised game had to be invented in the mid-nineteenth century drawing on various versions played in the public schools of England, brought together when the alumni of these schools went to university and sought common rules so they could play together. Then that code was carried across the country and the world by British imperialism. Richard Holt was one of the first historians to suggest that this view might be flawed. I argued that it was in 1994, but it took the work of a number of British amateur and scholarly historians to prove the point by showing that small-sided, rule-bounded, non-violent games continued to take place in various regions of Scotland and England through the 18th and 19th centuries, so the explosion of popularity of Association football could be explained by the fact that people had football games embedded in their social lives. When they had the time and the resources they embraced this form because it saved you spending hours debating the rules before you started the game. A new view is now in the ascendancy because people have gone back to the traditional and many new sources, including oral traditions, to understand what was taking place and how this influenced the development of the game. So within thirty years of the codification of the game, my grandfather could use his skills as a footballer to escape from life as a coal-miner (one of his brothers was described as a collier in the 1891 census when he was only 12 years old). He went on to be captain of the best football team in the world at that time, Glasgow Celtic, the Scottish national team and the leading English team Newcastle United. Instead of engaging in vilification of a reputable historian by attribution to her of views she does not hold, why not do some research in the Aboriginal oral traditions and produce new evidence from such sources which can be tested by scholarship, just as all the evidence from other sources is tested? It is not true as some people have suggested that the oral tradition cannot be treated in a scholarly way. I was a very early member of the Oral History Society in the United Kingdom and have been researching and writing in the area ever since. It needs to be understood that Aboriginal oral traditions today rarely exist in pure form. They are often an amalgam of Aboriginal and European knowledge mixed together in often very surprising ways and it is only by thorough understanding of both cultures at the macro and micro level that the valuable elements for the study of influences of practices like sport can be teased out. The pleasure which leading Aboriginal players like Michael Long have taken in the notion that their ancestors were there at the origins of the game they have graced with such skill is not to be discounted, nor is the possibility that the rational methods of the academic historian may not be the only appropriate ones for the investigation of cultural practices and the transmission of ideas between social groups. However, the challenge lies squarely with those who wish to show Aboriginal involvement to do the enormously hard work of research in recalcitrant and dispersed sources if the claims are ever to be more than a seductive myth. At the present state of knowledge, it seems that Aboriginal influence did not occur until they began to become directly involved with the game. The first Aboriginal player to play a senior game may have been Albert ‘Pompey’ Austin in 1872 but he played only once for Geelong and he had no followers, as far as we know, for several years after that. Serious Aboriginal influence begins in the twentieth century both on and off the field. In recent times this has grown dramatically and at both senior and grass-roots level Australian Rules deserves credit for the way that it has tried to make up for more than a century of exclusion and denigration of Aboriginal people. In this it reflected and reflects common attitudes among Australian people and its own history, for it was not always as caring about Aboriginal players. Let us not cheat the people of Aboriginal heritage in this country by feeding them more myths, but rather let’s work together to produce better history, a history which includes theirs and those of later migrants to this country. References

I wholeheartedly agree with Roy Hay's support for the historian Gillian Hibbins. It is unfortunate that Hibbins' reputation has been tarnished in this way because she is an experienced researcher of early football (20 years at least) who is committed to finding the facts. I believe that one of the most important lessons that can be learned from this situation is stated by Roy: 'However, the challenge lies squarely with those who wish to show Aboriginal involvement to do the enormously hard work of research in recalcitrant and dispersed sources if the claims are ever to be more than a seductive myth.' And I use this quote in the hope that this research will be done and that new light will be shed on the indigenous input into the game. This will best serve the cause for properly acknowledging the contribution that indigenous footballers have made to our game.

Traditional Ball Games It is my opinion that the Ciannon Cazaly’s article ‘Off the Ball: Football’s History Wars’, published in the December issue of Meanjin (67:4) was in places unfair and flawed. I believe that some of the attacks on Gillian Hibbins and her work were unnecessary and ill-informed.

As an observer of the so-called ‘Marngrook Debate’ and having read almost all the available material I am disappointed to see some of the hostility and inaccuracies that have become part of the ongoing ‘war.’ However, as someone who has been researching traditional indigenous games for many years I am now a reluctant contributor to the debate about the role of the game of marngrook in the codification of Australian football.

I notice that in my very extensive collection of information that I have almost 1000 accounts of ball games from all parts of Australia. It is interesting to note that particular types of ball games were played in different areas. For example, the game of buroinjin played in south-east Queensland was a passing game played in mixed gender teams of around eight players and has many similarities to the game of touch football (rugby). In some areas passing and catching games were predominant and in southern parts of Australia games with kicking and to a lesser extent passing were common. The nature of the societies, the cultural heritage of the people, and seasonal and geographical factors may have had roles in the differences.

I have seen film from Central Australia in the 1930s that shows Aboriginal people playing the game that to me is close to how marngrook has been commonly reported. I also have information about ball games in southern parts of Australia that pre-date the descriptions I see used in the discussions about marngrook.

As an Queenslander and ‘outsider’ to the largely Victorian debate over the role of marngrook I have nevertheless sought to find out as much as I can about traditional games and have diligently collected all the materials on the marngrook debate and have even undertaken a tour throughout the areas that seem to be the focus of the claims and counter-claims. I have visited local history societies, read pioneer reminiscences and newspapers and sought to find out information from various indigenous people. During my trips I was able to add to my information but would have to say I uncovered nothing that overwhelmingly supports – or does not support for that matter – the role of marngrook in the codification of Australian football (then Victorian rules).

I would be happy to endorse the marngrook as having a role in the codification of AFL but I do not feel that I could do so with any confidence with the information that I currently have and I feel has been presented by others. This is not to say that there may not be a ‘lost’ connection but in continuing to exhaust sources of information on traditional games I am always ready for a surprise. For example, I interviewed an Aboriginal elder in Dalby some time ago who was able to provide me with songs and games played by children while travelling to the regular Bunya nut festivals at the Bunya Mountains. Many of the descriptions she provided fitted in closely with some quite obscure archival written records I had found. People with oral traditions regarding information about marngrook may be found and I would be pleased to hear of these. I recognise that there is a traditional and collective memory of ball games in some areas that has been transmitted down through the generations. I also know that some of this ‘memory’ actually relates to games introduced by Europeans and this information needs to be scrutinised.

I have collected different accounts of the same ball game from the particular geographical location made by different people. Although there are some discrepancies in descriptions – which can at times be explained by the background of the observers – there is also the point that the very nature of the games undertaken often had ‘rules’ that could be changed during a game and/or each time it was undertaken – much like backyard games of cricket with changes to the rules. This clearly did occur in some areas but I would concede that some games showed a degree of similarity in form over time.

I respect the different viewpoints people have about the role of marngrook and support the idea of finding evidence of a connection to Australian football. However, I am disappointed to see some of the personal attacks and even ‘sensationalising’ of comments to make it appear that professional incompetence or even racism might be a ‘hidden’ factor in holding a particular viewpoint.

Gillian Hibbins has never denied the existence of traditional indigenous games and I acknowledge that Cazaly recognises this. Because of the universal nature of games in Aboriginal societies it is right for Hibbins to indicate that a ball game was possibly played near the area in which one of the ‘founders’ (Tom Wills) of Australian football grew up. I have read nothing by Hibbins that suggests that it was not possible for Wills to have played with the local Aboriginal people in their games. Her oversight was not to indicate a lack of written or oral records. Cazaly is inaccurate in her comments about the comments of Hibbins and I feel goes a bit too far in her criticism without providing her own measures of proof.

It would be nice to say that Wills played with the local Aboriginal people and took away from them ideas for Australian football but it is not something that Hibbins or anyone should be prepared to say without irrefutable evidence. Speculate of course but be careful about being definitive. In my records I many have accounts of European children and adults engaging with Aboriginal people in games of all sorts and events such as wrestling contests but who did not take anything further from the experience. Wills may have been ‘culturally or game blind’ but currently there is not the historical evidence to make a clear connection between any experience Wills might have had playing marngrook and its contribution towards the codification of Australian football.

When asked my opinion on the marngrook debate I have said that both sides need to do further research and I hold to this view. Based on the way that the groups have polarised it would appear to me that the issue may never be resolved conclusively using current information and interpretations. I do think the attack by Ciannon Cazaly on Gillian Hibbins was unfortunate and unfair. I believe that Hibbins is a conscientious and accurate researcher who has made logical and considered assumptions based on the information she has reviewed (and this seems to be supported by the AFL and their recent 150th year publication). At the same time I acknowledge that people such Jim Poulter make quite different interpretations from similar information. I also sympathise with Aboriginal people who might feel that their oral traditions and the ‘rightful’ recognition in the development of Australian football are questioned and would encourage them to present more evidence. I personally find it of interest that a kicking based game was developed in Victoria and that some local Aboriginal groups also had kicking games but the situation was no different to a great many other parts of Australia.

I would like to direct readers to the comments by Roy Hay who has also responded to the article by Cazaly. He specifically outlines the distinction between various contributing factors, connections and the codification of a sport. It is worth people remembering that the real point of contention has been that marngrook was a direct contributor to the origins and codification of Australian rules football.

It is my belief that some of the comments made by Ciannon Cazaly in her article were a little too much concerned with ‘playing the person’ (Hibbins) and as such do not contribute towards a sensible and rational discussion in the so-called ‘Footy Wars.’

Ken Edwards

I wish to write in defence of Gillian Hibbins whose research was attacked Ciannon Cazaly in Meanjin Vol 67 No 4, 2008. I am surprised that Meanjin thought that Cazaly’s research warrants publication as it added little to our knowledge of marngrook, the origins of Australian Football, or the discrimination that had been directed at them in football prior to 1995. Cazaly displays little knowledge of football history in colonial Australia or in the British Isles and resorts to an ad hominem attack on Hibbins. Cazaly portrays Hibbins reliance on primary sources as something akin to Keith Windshuttle’s questioning the scale of the massacres on the frontier that live through the oral history of Aborigines. Cazaly writes that, “This narrow use of written evidence when dealing with indigenous history is certainly not unique to Hibbins. It is replicated in the work of more prominent history warrior Keith Windshuttle, and brings to attention a significant divide in the methodology of history—a divide often exploited for maximum effect in the history wars evidence to support such a vitriolic, possibly slanderous claim.” Thus Cazaly seems to portray Hibbins as a conservative cultural warrior with a possibly repugnant social and political agenda. This mischaracterisation could not be further from the truth. Cazaly also claims Hibbins called Adam Goodes a “racist”. But I uttely disagree. I watched the episode of the Marngrook Footy Show that Cazaly referred to and the impression I clearly got was that Hibbins said a statement by Goodes’ may be seen as racist because Goodes assumed Aboriginal children are inherently predisposed to play Australian Football. This is a subtle but significant distinction. Quoted by Cazaly, Goodes wrote, “I don’t know the truth, but I believe in the connection [between Marngrook and Australian football]. Because I know that when Aborigines play Australian Football with a clear mind and total focus, we are born to play it.”
Like Goodes, Cazaly’s argument based on a supposition that is directly descended from a Jim Poulter musing, that has developed and changed since it was first known appearance in print in The Australasian Post on August 4, 1983. Tom Wills was not referred to in this initial article but by 1993, when Poulter was published in This Game of Ours: Supporters Tales of the Peoples Game it appears he was now aware of Tom Wills and the mythology that surrounded him. As late as the mid 1990s Wills was popularly trumpeted the originator of Australian Football, a myth developed by Cec Mullen early in the twentieth century, that by the 1970s had become quite widely disseminated in the mainstream media and amongst journalists. Poulter linked Tom Wills childhood on the frontier in the Western District of Victoria (near Ararat) with Dawson’s reputable account of Aboriginal football games in the Western District. Soon it was a basis of a popular story being spread by the mainstream press and marketing departments. It became a powerful narrative that tapped into white Australia’s desire for reconciliation, a renaissance in Aboriginal consciousness and culture, and multicultural Australian nationalism. The story assumes Australia’s most popular football game has an Australian Aboriginal origin or inspiration. The myth is a message of reconciliation and racial harmony, however, it is still based entirely on supposition. Curiously, although Cazaly writes of oral history, there is no known reference to the connection between aboriginal ball games and the process of sitting down and composing the Rules of the Melbourne’s Football in 1859 prior to Jim Poulter, and she contributes not a scrap herself. I await the evidence. Cazaly writes, “Hibbins directly attacks the argument that Tom Wills’ contribution to the early design of Australian football could have been influenced by indigenous football games.” This Hibbins certainly does by quoting and corroborating evidence that Tom Wills wanted the Rugby School rules to be adopted by the Melbourne Football Club in 1859. Thereafter Wills introduced Rugby features to the embryonic Australian game such as the oval ball, drop kick, and even seconded a failed proposal to add a cross bar to the goal posts. Cazaly at no point explains why Tom, despite ample opportunity in the local press and in letters never refers to any Aboriginal ball games in relation to football or his childhood. His time at Rugby School however looms large in his writing and actions. However, Hibbins goes even further. She attacks the premise that Wills was the preeminent figure in the design of Australian Football. “Football” matches had been documented by British migrants in Victoria from the 1840s and throughout the 1850s. Melbourne already had an established football culture by 1858. Therefore less emphasis should be placed on Tom Wills and his 1858 letter to Bells Life in Victoria and a greater emphasis on Tom’s contemporaries, who had a role commensurate with that of Wills in writing the code. Three such men at the initial Melbourne Football Club rule meeting in May 1859, James Thompson, William Hammersley and Thomas “Football” Smith, possibly had a greater impact in some areas such as publishing and promoting the code. Each of these men had there own ideas about playing football and the appropriate laws for the game. However, like Wills, despite ample opportunity to write of their of influences not one refers to Aboriginal ball games, although Hammersley and Thompson mention English Public School games. Unfortunately these men have been less celebrated than Wills and his cousin HCA Harrison as the games originators throughout most of the twentieth century. By scrutinizing the impact of Wills’ role Hibbins attacks the notion that one white male can be the sole driver and promoter of such a communal endeavor as writing and playing a football code. This myth had been sustained by sports writers throughout much of the twentieth century, and finds succour with some proponents of the Aboriginal origins hypothesis. In this light Hibbins is far from the conservative historian/culture warrior that Cazaly erroneously portrays her to be. In fact Cazaly seems to promote the Great Man approach to history and participates in the Australian Football League (AFL) marketing department’s whitewashing of an ugly truth. This truth is that the administration of football has historically reflected wider society even when that wider society supported institutional racism.
It is curious that although Hibbins was obviously not given a brief to document the entire history of the relationship between Aboriginal Australia and football Cazaly apparently gave herself the brief to debunk Hibbins on that very basis. Therefore I suggest we examine how Cazaly goes with her spare few paragraphs dealing with the relationship of Aborigines and Australian Football over the last one hundred years or so. Cazaly’s notes that last decade or since the AFL’s anti-vilification laws were introduced in 1995, Indigenous Australian’s who comprise two percent of the Australian community are represented by about 10% of footballers on Australian Football League (AFL) team lists (a similar percentage of indigenous Australians also appear on the lists of National Rugby League (NRL) clubs – however this and the reasons why are not tackled by Cazaly). This percentage is very impressive figure and all the more so given the communities they represent have been actively marginalized for much of the last 200 years. The AFL owes a great debt to the missionaries on Aboriginal communities throughout Australia who introduced Australian football rather than Rugby League to Indigenous Australians. These communities have produced champions over the decades despite routine prejudice. However, due to institutionalized racism within the game, Indigenous Australians were under represented on League lists for the bulk of the period before the 1980s. Cazaly seems to have overlooked this relationship between Aborigines and Australian Football in history between 1859 and 1995. Australian football administrations at all levels reflected the wider relationship between white and black society. Some anecdotes that speak to the League’s history of discrimination are well known. The fact that before the Essendon Football Club were called the Bombers they were called the Blood Stained Niggers, but no action was ever taken by the Victorian Football League (now the AFL) against the Dons. The fact that the Carlton Football Club was allowed to sack the talented Aboriginal footballer Doug Nicholls because teammates said he “smells” without sanction or comment from the League. The fact that Aboriginal community teams were barred or deregistered from Country Leagues in Victoria. This latter practice was continued into the late 1980s and early 1990s with the forced withdrawal of Framlingham’s Purim Bears and the Lake Tyers club from their respective leagues. The fact that until a photograph of Nicky Windmar publicized racist taunts from the stands in 1993, and Michael Long complained about a racist slur delivered by Damien Monkhorst in 1995, did the AFL seem to do anything proactive in areas of racial vilification. Cazaly ignores football’s institutionalized marginalization of Aboriginal football and sums up her apparently willful naivety with the statement, “But to me, whether or not historians think that the indigenous involvement with and contribution to the game began with a young Tom Wills witnessing centuries-old indigenous sport seems irrelevant seems irrelevant when confronted with the powerful and lasting influence have had on the game every day since.” If one like Cazaly may be so forward as to invent a brief for her (as she did for Hibbins) one may suggest that it is Cazaly not Hibbins who truly seeks to whitewash history.

I too was extremely disappointed at Meanjin in publishing this story, and if you had a letters column I also would have voiced my disapproval at your publication of this piece by Ciannon Cazaly that can only be described as a personal assault on Gillian Hibbins. Indeed these comments form the basis of a letter I drafted in my anger after reading this article.

In her essays in the Australian Game of Football since 1858 Mrs Hibbins covers her subject and lays out her arguments from experience and evidence gained over 25 years of primary research into this topic. Unfortunately for Ms Cazaly, Mrs Hibbins was not writing about Marngrook: she was writing about the influences on the four men who met at the Parade Hotel on May 17 1859 and drafted the original rules of the Melbourne Football Club. Writing about their backgrounds, their culture and the sporting customs they were part of and participated in. No one has done as much research into the lives of these four men that Mrs Hibbins over the past 25 years, tracking down the paper trail and uncovering material long buried. What has been revealed has not produced any documentary or conclusive evidence on the influence of Markgrook on the drafting of the early rules.

Maybe it is not trendy to reveal that the four Anglo/Celtic men who drafted the rules where influenced by the sporting traditions of their motherland in the United Kingdom, when football culture was rapidly evolving from a folk game into organised sports from the 1840s to the 1860s. We know through research and primary evidence that Hammersley, Smith, Thompson and Wills played or experienced football in the UK and that prior to 1859 they played forms of it transplanted here in the Australian colonies by their colleague colonist. Their efforts to codify their game as “a code of our own” in May 1859 using common rules mirror the efforts of their peers in England, Scotland and Ireland during this period. That evidence does exist and for the first time has been examined in great detail during the last 30 years by Australian sporting historians.

Mrs Hibbins would be the first person to welcome any evidence of Aboriginal influence on early Australian football should it appear, and her characterisation by Ms Cazaly could not have been more inappropriate, which Ms Cazaly may have realised had she made the effort to contact Mrs Hibbins during the research for her piece.

It is the total reliance on secondary sources and supposition that reflects so poorly on Ms Cazaly.

It is unfortunate that Ms Cazaly comes across to this reader as guilty of the insults and accusations that she has directed, no thrown, at Mrs Hibbins. For it is Ms Cazaly who has been myopic in her evidence, using irrelevant material and inference to try and build an argument, twisted details to suit her thesis (which fails to understand the scope of Mrs Hibbins’ commission within the AFL’s History of Australian Football) that sadly makes Ms Cazaly seem unprofessional, and naïve in her mischaracterisation of Mrs Hibbins: especially where she resorted to personal insults to smear by association where there are no facts to back up her argument.

No matter how badly Ms Cazaly is portrayed as a result of this, unfortunately it leaves Meanjin in an even worse position by publishing it, with the editor failing to protect Ms Cazaly in the first place. Some editorial research into the focus and accuracy of Ms Cazaly’s essay, especially the venomous personal attacks, may have saved everyone a lot of angst in the long run.

Thank you for the opportunity to post this response, I hope that you do consider running a letters column or section of the blog to allow for critical comments and redress in the future. But then I do hope that in the future we won’t have just cause for criticism of the editors of Meanjin.

Thank you to all my defenders for their thoughtful and lengthy replies. I appreciate their contributions particularly as I value the opinion of Meanjin readers and hope this will enable them to reassess the article which attacked and saddened me. I wish Ciannon Cazaly well as she continues her historical career. Gillian Hibbins

Thanks to all of you for taking the time to comment. I definitely plan to set up an online letters page - but this website is very new and it's taking a while to get it all in order. I think an online letters page would be more dynamic and immediate than publishing letters 3 or 6 months after the event - this is why I'm not running a print letters page. There is also, of course, more flexibility with space.

Where to Cazaly? Pass it to Judd! Barry Judd, Monash University, barry.judd@arts.monash.edu.au

I write in belated defence of the article ‘Off the Ball’ published in Meanjin No 4., 2008. The critical response to ‘Off the Ball’ that appeared in ‘Spike’ suggests the immaturity that continues to colour almost all scholarly debate about Indigenous people in Australian Football. The critique of ‘Off the Ball’ in football parlance ‘played the man and not the ball’, with the personal integrity of Cazaly and the intent of her article unfairly represented. The ‘cheer squad’ mentality of the response ensured that the many serious questions about the relationship between academic inquiry and popular understandings of ‘our’ indigenous game of Australian Football were disregarded. Serious debate about the ideas Cazaly outlines in her article was abruptly rendered silent. While acknowledging some of the criticism of ‘Off the Ball’, I would like to defend the central issues that Cazaly raises in her article that I believe are worthy of further consideration in a way that moves beyond the immature responses put forward by the ‘cheer squad’.
Cazaly draws our attention to the fact that Australian historical writings concerning Australian Football are constructed within a cultural frame influenced by the History Wars that characterised the politics of the Howard era. As Cazaly rightly points out contemporary Australian historical writings must now be in part assessed in the context of the difficult and fraught questions the History Wars opened up about the role the discipline of history can and should play in a postcolonial Australia. The contribution of professional historian Gillian Hibbins to ‘The Australian Game of Football’ is used by Cazaly to press this important line of inquiry.
Hibbins utilising her authority as professional historian to reconstruct the ‘truth’ about Australian Football of the past does so in two short essays ‘Men of Purpose’ and ‘A Seductive Myth’. Cazaly offers a critique of Hibbins work that focuses on the narrow and non-reflective nature of history as an academic discipline. In making reference to ‘Men of Purpose’ Cazaly is able to point to the limits of Australian history. Hibbins vocation as a professional historian requires her to mine the historical archive: to locate the paper trail of written and ‘confirmed’ documentary evidence to which her academic discipline confers objective claims to ‘truth’. The primacy of paper evidence leaves little or no room for Indigenous remembrance of the past. Those familiar with Spivak will be aware that even when the ‘native’ does appear in the archive he or she does so as a construct of the imperial/colonial observer whose written observation provides them only a bit role in the ‘glorious history’ of Britain’s ‘benign’ Empire. The point Cazaly makes in respect to ‘Men of Purpose’ is that the archive utilised by Hibbins to tell us the ‘truth’ about the origins of Australian Football is drawn exclusively from the colonial archive and therefore reflects an exclusively colonial remembrance of the past. As an academic discipline, history does not allow Hibbins the necessary freedoms to speculate about possible Djabwurrung influence during Tom Wills formative years that may have impacted on his later contributions to the founding of Australian Football. Hence her essay ‘Men of Purpose’ is necessarily limited to the events immediately surrounding the formulation of the Melbourne Rules by Wills and fellow leading Victorian cricketers. This is the limit of what Australian history can contribute to discussions about the origins of Australian Football and it has little or nothing to say about possible Indigenous influence.
Cazaly next turns her attention to the second of Hibbins essays included in the ‘big red book’ that claims to be the ‘official history of Australian Football’. In ‘A Seductive Myth’ Hibbins again mines the colonial archive, this time to locate documentary evidence that founder of the game, Tom Wills, witnessed or perhaps even participated in Indigenous football games like Marn-grook. Not surprisingly the colonial archive remains silent on these issues and the professional historian Hibbins uses her academic authority to conclude that Indigenous people and their culture had no influence on Tom Wills and as a result no influence on his later contribution to the founding of Australian Football. Yet in drawing these categorical conclusions Hibbins, as Cazaly insists, oversteps the very limits of the discipline she has elsewhere fought so tenaciously to defend. Given the very real limits of Australian history as an academic discipline any serious scholarly investigation of Indigenous remembrance of the past requires a multi-discipline approach whereby academics from the field of Australian Indigenous Studies and the disciplines of Anthropology, Archaeology, Linguistics and others need to be consulted. It also requires the investigating scholar to climb out of the ivory tower and step into the field to engage with the collective knowledge of the past that is contained within Indigenous Australia. Quit often it requires the investigating scholar to work in partnership with a trusted ‘native informant’. Cazaly is right to ask the basis on which Hibbins draws her categorical conclusions. Cazaly asks on what authority Hibbins dismisses the playing of Marn-grook like games in the Grampians during the mid 19th century? On what authority is Hibbins able to conclude the Djabwurrung were a hostile ‘tribe’ who never interacted with those whom the colonial archive cites as football playing Aboriginal peoples? As I read it, in making these observations Cazaly once again draws our attention to the limits of Australian history. Hibbins, as far as I know, is not an Australian Indigenous Studies expert or an Anthropologist, Archaeologist, Linguist or even a Developmental Child Psychologist. Yet the categorical rejection that Wills might have witnessed a game like Marn-grook or even participated in one (and then recalled these events) is depended on claims to truth that can only be supported from knowledge bases outside of her own discipline of history. This is a key point Cazaly makes in her article and one that deserves far greater discussion.
Primarily concerned to show the limits of Australian history throughout her article Cazaly is successful in placing question marks over the ability of the discipline to provide all the answers in our search for the origins of Australian Football. As evidenced in the response to ‘Off the Ball’ contained in ‘Spike’, the football ‘cheer squad’ incorrectly interpreted the target of the article to be Hibbins and not the academic discipline to which her work is required to conform. In and of itself Hibbins scholarship might be regarded as constituting good and worthy historical writing. This is something that is not at issue. The limits of history which Cazaly alerts us suggest that history and even good historical writings must be willing to be honest about the kind of past it is able to reconstruct with authority. It is a colonial past that history is able to reconstruct, a past that says little or nothing about Indigenous experience or Indigenous remembrance of that same past carried into the present from the other side of the colonial frontier.
Although Hibbins was never the target of ‘Off the Ball’ as my above defence makes clear, I believe that Cazaly is correct in her strongly made assertion that the Australian Football League made a serious error of judgement in publishing Hibbins essays in ‘The Australian Game of Football’ because no space was provided for a counter argument. The response by Geoff Slattery of GSP in ‘Spike’ suggests that Cazaly finds her mark on this particular score. Slattery dismisses these claims by pointing out that Adam Goodes was provided space to respond to Hibbins historical analysis in his essay ‘The Indigenous Game’. Slattery therefore argues that both sides of the debate about origins and the contribution of Indigenous Australians to Australian Football was provided an equal and balanced space in the ‘official history’. That such a defence is used in 21st century Australia is an insult to Indigenous people recalling as it does an inherent paternalism reminiscent of the imperial heyday. The assertion of a fair and balanced debate in the ‘official history’ would have only worked if Slattery had approached Nathan Buckley, Shane Crawford or Michael Voss to write the non-Indigenous response to the Goodes article. With all due to respect to Adam Goodes he is a professional footballer. Adam Goodes is not a professional historian or academic of any persuasion. To claim Goodes essay constitutes proof of a fair and balanced response to Hibbins essays does the seriousness of the debate and the interests of Indigenous Australian in its outcome a great disservice. If Slattery had truly been interested in providing a balanced view of these issues in his ‘official history’ he would have commissioned scholars, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, whose work and expertise within the field of Indigenous Australian Studies would have engaged with Hibbins work in a serious and fairly fought out academic debate. It is the decision of Slattery not to do so that makes his ‘official history’ unworthy of such a title and the courage of Cazaly to engage with these issues that makes ‘Off the Ball’ a worthy, if imperfect, contribution to the study of Australian Football. Meanjin is to be congratulated for allowing those of us outside the ‘cheer squad’ the right to speak.

Where to Cazaly?

I certainly have reflected on the possibility of Djabwurrung influence on Tom Wills and whether this may have impacted on his contribution to the founding of Australian foot ball, and have found it to be very tenuous indeed. I spoke to a number of experts outside the discipline of history, as historians do, of course, in to order to inform themselves. Life is inherently multi-disciplinary. I have never claimed to have reconstructed the 'truth' nor would I.

Judd accuses me of ‘categorical conclusion’ and ‘categorical rejection’ of the playing of marn-grook like games in the Grampians and of Tom Wills witnessing such games or participating and recalling those events. In the small amount of words allowed me on this subject I quoted the Blandoski picture, William Thomas, Robert Brough Smyth, and James Dawson to agree that aboriginal football was undoubtedly played all around Victoria. I wrote that ‘[indigenous] football could possibly have been played near Lexington [Wills’ home near the Grampians] and that ‘as a child he did spend some time with Aboriginal children and this would have been when he was very young as he was at school in Melbourne from the age of 10 and in England from the age of 14. (page 45 A Seductive Myth) Hardly a ‘categorical’, (in the Oxford Dictionary sense of ‘unconditional’, or ‘absolute’,) conclusion or rejection, surely.

The key point in history writing that Cazaly emphasises, according to Judd, is that we must understand that the kind of past [current historical writing] is able to reconstruct with authority is a colonial past and not indigenous experience or indigenous remembrance of the same period of time. This, of course, is true and we seriously await with interest any delineation of the indigenous experience and remembrances to inform and enrich our insights.

Ironically ‘the colonial archive’ as Judd describes it, closely and accurately analysed, suggests that Wills’s influence on the formulation of the Rules, whether from rugby School or indigenous experience, has been exaggerated. There were, after all, three other men also involved in the codification. Apparently there was also a background of immigrant football knowledge, which is currently being researched so it is not possible to indicate how significant an influence that was.

I could rebut some of Judd’s other assertions but I find that a frustrating and negative approach. ‘Serious debate’ Judd calls for and I welcome that call. I do not subscribe to the martial metaphor of wars or warriors (especially as applied to me as a Howard-led Keith Windschuttle follower) finding it distasteful, inaccurate and counter-productive, and believe more in the co-operation with which historians should act. Please read the contributions of my pejoratively-described ‘cheer squad’, where I think there is much serious comment and constructive debate to be found.

Truth; such a strange concept. One mans fact is another mans fiction. History is not a science, and it has been manipulated consciously and unconsciously since people first started treading the boards of planet earth.

There was once a man named Tom Wills (Tommy to his friends). As a boy he grew up with Djab Wurrung friends, spoke their language, could perform their dances. Is it conceivable that he would not have experienced the games they played? They certainly played a version of football. All children play games, they don’t have mortgages. Many people in Victoria at that time witnessed the game that is known collectively as Marngrook.

In that time and place, no white man in his right mind would have admitted that he had been influenced by black culture. Especially if some of that influence had rubbed off on a game he was pretty keen to promote. In that time, an association with Indigenous culture could very well have killed Melbourne Rules Football.

There is only one real fact in this argument. Nobody now alive ever met Tom Wills, shared a beer with him, and asked him to explain the major influences on his idea of football. We don’t know. We can guess, dream and hope but we don’t really know.

What troubles me most in this argument is the violent opposition to the possibility of indigenous influence on the game . It seems that every time somebody pops up to say they believe the idea has some currency, an intellectual game of whack-a-mole ensues and they are cut down.

The real issue here isn’t the origins of football. The real issue is why some people are so vehemently opposed to the idea that aboriginal culture could possibly have had an influence on a white man.