On the origins of Australian football

The Indigenous game of marngrook and its claimed connection to Australian rules football has provoked unusually intense debate.¹ Dismissed as ‘an emotional belief’, ‘falsifying history’, ‘lacking any intellectual credibility’—who could have imagined that the seemingly innocuous matter of an Indigenous game of football would meet with such invective.

Several accounts of Indigenous football reveal a striking similarity with key features of the Australian game, suggesting an unarticu­lated link between the two games. In the insistent denial of such a link, a critical factor has been that none of these historic accounts of Indigenous football has placed the game directly in the Western District of Victoria, in the area where Tom Wills lived. ‘Were there any reports of Aboriginal football in the Western District where Wills lived?’ Hibbins asks.² The short answer is, yes.