Is Gary Ablett Jnr better than Gary Ablett Snr? Should we really be letting footballers into nightclubs in the first place? Is the ‘interchange debacle’ the best ever example in Australian football of fixing something that wasn’t broken? Will the Melbourne Football Club ever manage to get its act together? All of these questions have led to vibrant debate in football in 2008 (though the last one is probably more a plea for answers from a desperate fan). These questions and many others have captured column inches and front bar conversations for much of the year. But another debate has also been raging—one that, I suspect, few in the football-watching community will have noticed, but which greatly affects the way the game is understood and the influence it has on public opinion.

The Australia Football League (AFL) landed itself squarely in controversy early in 2008 by including in its official 150th anniversary publication, The Australian Game of Football, a one-page comment that argues against the suggestion that there could have been indigenous influence on the origins of the game we call Australian football. The argument about the impact that indigenous games had on the origins of Australian football, and its subsequent development, has been simmering quietly away for at least fifteen years. In 1993 Jim Poulter wrote a short essay that posed the possibility of some influence.^[i] Over the years his ideas, and several more, have been taken up, investigated and written about by a number of writers, journalists and historians, with many of them coming to believe that Australian football must have some relationship to the indigenous game of Marngrook or its variants. One key debate that has come to prominence surrounds Tom Wills. Described as the ‘father of football’ since Sandercock and Turner’s Up Where Cazaly?, Wills published a letter in Bell’s Life in Victoria in 1858 that called for the development of a game of football. He subsequently contributed to development of the rules of the game, played and umpired early competitions and was involved in the founding of the game’s two oldest clubs, Melbourne and Geelong.^[ii]