The footy season is done and dusted and trade week is behind us, so it is time for historians to put away the beanies and the scarves and get down to some serious research. The debate about the origins of the game has died down a little but just the other day Ian Syson of Victoria University discovered a little gem while researching the early history of the round ball code in Australia. In itself the material he discovered relates to an event which did not take place, but the implications are profound. It is one of the first pieces of contemporary evidence which links Aboriginal sportsmen to the game of football as played by the European migrants to this country.

Syson used the National Library of Australia’s wonderful digitization project, which has made research in nineteenth century newspapers a completely new and rewarding experience. It enables searches for key words like football to be made with relative ease. This time football turned up in a piece about cricket. Syson found an article about the Aboriginal cricketers who had been organized by the English cricketer, Charles Lawrence, and the nephew of a local squatter, William Hayman, ahead of the first tour by an Australian team to England in 1868. They were on their way from Edenhope and Harrow in the western district to Geelong via Warrnambool.

‘On Saturday morning the party arrived at Trainor’s Hotel near Hamilton, where they were entertained to dinner by the host. A number of cricketers from Hamilton came out to meet them, with a view to inducing the blacks to play a game at football on Saturday afternoon; but Messrs Lawrence and Hayman declined, as the Hamiltonians had refused to meet them again in the cricket-field. The troupe therefore passed through without making a call, as they were disappointed at the Hamilton Club not wishing to regain the laurels they lost two years since.’

The article in which this extract appeared is in the Warrnambool Examiner on 1 October 1867. In 1988, Rex Harcourt and John Mulvaney had picked up the football reference and commented on it in Cricket Walkabout: The Australian Aborigines in England. But their take was somewhat different. Relying on an article in the Hamilton Spectator they argued ‘lack of time made them decline an invitation to play the new fangled game of football which Tom Wills had introduced a few years previously.’

Leaving aside the question whether Tom Wills introduced football into Victoria, it looks like the Hamilton men having been thrashed at cricket in March 1866 decided to get their own back by taking on the Aboriginal players at football. If that is the case then some of the western district Aborigines must have been at least familiar with the game and capable of putting up a good performance.

But the contribution to one issue simply throws up another. Tom Wills had been in Edenhope in November 1866 coaching the Aboriginal cricketers from the area inn preparation for a match to be played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Did he teach them to play football in the white man’s style while coaching them as cricketers, or was it the other way round? Were the Aborigines naturals at the game already? In the summer of 1866-67 Wills played with the Aborigines when they toured Victoria and New South Wales, but by September 1867, however, Wills was no longer involved with the Aboriginal team, which had now been resurrected and added to by Charles Lawrence for the tour to England in 1868. So Wills’ influence on this particular group of cricketers and potential footballers, and theirs on him, remains a puzzle.

Football was booming in the Western District of Victoria in the 1860s. The Warrnambool club was started in 1861. Initially the style played was the old English game of football, but since the early rules of Australian football and the English game as codified in 1863 were quite similar it was not till some time later that a clear divergence emerged. Geelong was playing by its own rules in the early 1860s, so no doubt there were local variations in western Victoria.

There was a game at Cavendish, just north of Hamilton in 1867. The publican of McCallum’s hostelry was at the centre of events on 28 September. He entered into the spirit of things as captain of one side, but ‘finding himself rather hot, indulged in a quiet swim in a small water-hole as there were plenty of them on the ground after the late rain. Several players followed suit by going in for regular headers, evidently to cool themselves.’ The match finished in a two-all draw and ‘it was agreed that a football club should be started, although late in the season.’

Another significance of the discovery of a very early invitation to an Aboriginal team to participate in a game of football is that the ‘imperial archive’, as Aboriginal scholars sometimes call material from newspapers and government records, can yield contemporary evidence of the origins and early development of modern sports and the possible links between Aboriginal games and these sports.

Perhaps we might make a little more sense out of the arguments which have been going on about Aboriginal influences on the origins of football in this country if we looked beyond our shores. I suggest three places. The first is the United Kingdom where there is a very similar argument going on about the relative importance of the university men who codified the rules of Association Football in the mid-nineteenth century and those ‘lesser breeds without the law’ who played football in various parts of the country and made rules for it and had small sided games and didn’t just engage in mayhem. These outsiders do not figure largely in the dominant stories of the origins of football in Britain, but the careful empirical research of a number of scholars including Neil Tranter, John Goulstone, Richard Holt, Adrian Harvey, John Hutchinson, Alan Metcalfe and Hugh Hornby has cumulatively shown how important they were. Not necessarily in writing the rules, but in explaining why there was such an explosion of popularity of the game in the United Kingdom in the second half of the nineteenth century. What unites all these researchers is that they have spent hours searching for contemporary evidence of what was actually taking place around the country. In one sense they have it easier. They are dealing with a literate society which has left much conventional written material, but they also wrestle with other forms of communication including oral traditions. They don’t accept the oral traditions as gospel, but subject them to testing and triangulation and realise that what is handed down in stories from one generation to another changes according to many influences, including modern political and ideological concerns.

The second place is East Africa where imperialists and colonists discovered many strange practices. The classic case was Tutsi high jumping. If you went to visit the king he would send a couple of his young men to jump over you, to put you in your place and show your relative subordinate position. Needless to say people marvelled at the athletic feat, and perhaps unsurprisingly the German colonists in East Africa produced some iconic images, one of which showed a young Tutsi leaping over a bar suspended between two forked sticks with the Duke of Mecklenburg standing almost underneath. The heights achieved appeared to be well above the world record for the high jump at the time. But you can scour the records of the Olympic games or athletic meetings and you will not find any Tutsi high jumpers. As John Bale puts it the Europeans ‘imagined Olympians’ thinking that these skills would translate into athletic performance to stagger the world. But they did not.

Similarly, in our third case, when the Australian Society for Sports History published an article by a Chinese scholar Professor Ling Hongling, of Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, arguing that golf had originated in China from the practice of chuiwan, there was an international furore led by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. The article was complete with illustrations showing Chinese participants swinging clubs at balls and knocking them into pits in the ground, and the Professor argued ‘we may safely deduce that it is due to the propagation of Chinese Chuiwan that golf has been able to emerge in the West as a mature game’. The R&A begged to differ. ‘Stick and ball games have been around for centuries but golf as we know it today—played over 18 holes—clearly originated in Scotland’, was its reaction. The R&A’s imperial view is reflected on its website:‘At the China Golf Development Forum held in Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton, the R&A Director of Golf Development, Duncan Weir, presented a commemorative plate to the Vice Executive Chairman of the China Golf Association, Mr Hu, to mark 20 years of golf in China’.

So ancient and ongoing cultural activities may translate into or influence modern sports, but they may not and we need to examine what happened in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century very closely if we are to answer the questions raised about Aboriginal influence on the early inchoate years of what became Australian Rules. We will short change Aboriginal people and indeed the people of Australia if we don’t do the same sort of research in Australian history.

John Harms’ suggestion in his excellent account of the debate in Insight last week that ‘indigenous Australians should not have to prove their story to the community’ will just not do. It undermines the very people it is designed to protect. Of course the oral tradition is important, as it is in other societies, but untriangulated, unexamined, untested it is not history. The same, of course, applies to all varieties of Australian and world history including the oral components about which I have been researching and writing since the 1960s.

Martin Flanagan has conceded there is no evidence of Aboriginal influence on the drawing up of the rules. But he thinks that through Tom Wills there was an influence on the early inchoate game. That to me is possible, though the things we know about his innovations include the shape of the ball and perhaps the Geelong running game and a proposal for the rugby crossbar. None of these seem to relate to what little we know about the form of the various Aboriginal games.

My fear, reinforced by John Harms’s last section, is that anyone from a non-indigenous background who raises these legitimate historical questions will be pilloried by journalists and others as anti-Aboriginal. So let me say I will be delighted if we can find the evidence of the type which has emerged from disciplined historical research in the United Kingdom to show that there was a link between indigenous games and our fledgling game, but at the moment I have to remain sceptical.