The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20060512152437/http://www.aboriginalfootball.com.au:80/marngrook.html
SO
wrote a certain Mr.
Thomas (Aboriginal Protector - 1841) of a game he was
eye-witness to. This traditional
Aboriginal word of this traditional Aboriginal game belongs to the
Gunditjmara people originally from what is now western
Victoria, in Australia's south-east.
It is believed
this
very game, played for millennia, provided the lawmakers of Australian
football with
some of the fundamentals of the game we know and play today.
Opinion across the
footy-loving Australian public is divided as to Marn Grook's
contribution to this great game of ours, but historical anecdotes
containing much less detail have been long accepted as fact in other
fields of life. Various works on the subject
presented here will hopefully provided you with your own conclusion.
--
Darren Moncrieff, March 8,
2005.
Marn-Grook
- Forgotten ancestor or PC myth?
Footy
Folklore (2005) p.10
(No.
1 Dec.
2004-Apr. 2005)*
IT
used to be that the ancestor of Australian football was held to be
Gaelic football. As a child in the 1950s I was taught that football was
either invented by H.C.A.
Harrison after the first game was played between Scotch College
and Melbourne Grammar in 1858, or brought to Australia from Ireland
during the gold rushes of the early 1850s. The Harrison theory seemed
plausible; at the time the VFL was run from Harrison House. The Gaelic
theory gained credibility in the 1960s when Harry Beitzel started
organising matches between the VFL and the Irish Gaelic Football
Association.
At the time most of our knowledge of football's past
came from newspaper articles. Academics had yet to declare football a
subject suitable for study and if sports journalists wrote books they
were usually about footballers rather than broader aspects of the game.
By the late 1970s scholars began to take an interest
in football. Ian Turner,
described in the papers as "the Footy Prof", delivered the Ron Barassi
Lecture at Monash University and later published with Leonie Sandercock Up Where Cazaly?, the first
academic study of Australian football.
Other scholars also began looking at the origins of
the game. An early casualty of early research on football's beginnings
was the Gaelic myth. Sandercock and Turner rejected it for lack of
evidence, and Geoffrey Blainey
and research assistant Rob Hess
comprehensively buried it.
Research also diminished Harrison's role. Scholars
pointed out that not only was it Harrison's cousin Tom Wills who had written a
letter to Bell's Life (a type of magazine - DM) calling
for a football club with its own code of laws to keep cricketers fit in
winter, but also it was Wills rather than Harrison who had been to
Rugby School and experienced the growing English passion for organised
football.
Tom Wills sat on the original Melbourne Cricket Club
sub-committee that drew up the first set of rules, and he managed the
Melbourne Grammar team in the match against Scotch College.
Both Harrison and Wills played in the early years of
football. Harrison went on to a long and productive life as an
administrator in the game and wrote a memoir in his old age. Wills
died, by his own hand, at the age of 45. He had problems with
drink and depression. For respectable Melbourne in the first half of
last century Harrison made a more appropriate "Father of the Game" than
Wills.
NO
sooner did historians bury one set of myths than another rose. In 1993 Jim
Poulter published an essay entitled Marn-Grook – Original Australian Rules,
arguing that Australian Rules had descended from Marn-Grook, a game
played by Aborigines kicking and catching a ball made of possum skin.
Variants of the game have been observed from Victoria to the Northern
Territory although the name Marn-Grook and the most detailed
descriptions seem to be associated with western Victoria and the
Gunditjmara people.
The
existence of Marn-Grook is not itself controversial. Poulter
produces documentary evidence from two works published late in the 19th
century that quote eyewitness accounts from the 1840s. The controversy
comes from the attempt to link Marn-Grook with Australian football.
Poulter makes the link in a number of ways. The most
spectacular feature of the Australian game is its high marking. Not
only do the contemporary accounts of Marn-Grook refer to high leaping
catches of the ball but Poulter reports that "mark" or "mumarki" is "an
Aboriginal word meaning catch". Poulter does not indicate which of the
many Aboriginal languages he is referring to, but I assume it is that
of the Gunditjmara. Certainly Australian football uses the term "mark"
quite differently to other codes.
Poulter also seeks to establish that goldminers at
Warrandyte would have observed a major corroboree held in 1852 and then
gone on to incorporate their observations into the early football games
played on the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo. He is on somewhat
stronger ground when he suggests that Tom Wills may have learned from
local Aborigines as a child in the Ararat area. In fact, Harrison's
memoirs state that his cousin Tom could speak the local language, which
means he was quite likely to be familiar with their games.
Marn-Grook wins almost no support as an ancestor of
Australian rules from the academic community. Robin Grow (writing in More
Than A Game), Rob Pascoe
in The Winter Game and Blainey in the second edition of A Game of our
Own all reject the notion for lack of evidence. Pascoe allows that the
idea is "not preposterous" and Blainey concedes that some players may
have learned to mark from watching Aboriginal footballers.
All, however, argue that the high marking came in to
the game in the 1870s and 1880s rather than with Wills and and his
fellow MCC rule makers in 1859. Furthermore, all historians date the
development of the game from the 1859 rules drawn up by MCC members who
had access to the rules of the various English school football games.
The closest Marn-Grook gets to academic support is Colin Tatz's statement that
he gives Poulter more credence than Blainey does, which is not the same
as saying that he endorses Poulter.
However, despite the views of the academic
community, Marn-Grook is getting increasing support as an ancestor of
Australian football. The AFL has referred to Marn-Grook on several
occasions and in fact describes the Sydney-Essendon (annual) game as
the "Marn-Grook fixture". It has also featured demonstrations of
Marn-Grook before at least one game on the MCG.
Marn-Grook is partly benefiting from the revived
interest in Tom Wills. Martin
Flanagan has written a novel and a play about Wills entitled The Call which implies that
wills learned some aspects of football from the Aborigines of western
Victoria. Flanagan may be right, the problem is that there is no way of
knowing what Wills learned as a child in Ararat, or how influential his
ideas were on the original 1859 rules. These rules do mention marks,
but may not have been the high marks of the Marn-Grook players.
The other reason for the rise of Marn-Grook is the
prominence of Aboriginal footballers. The struggle against on- and
off-field racism and the sheer brilliance of black footballers has made
the argument for Aboriginal ownership of the game very attractive. What
could make the game more native to Australia than an Aboriginal game?
While it might be impossible to establish the role
of Marn-Grook by the rules of written historical evidence, there is
enough speculation about the role of Wills to allow the possibility. I
suspect that soon Marn-Grook will be as firmly established in the
popular consciousness as the origin of Australian football as Gaelic
football was 50 years ago.
* This article first
appeared
in Inside Football magazine's Footy Folklore (No. 1 Dec. 2004-Apr.
2005), a quarterly football magazine. Inside Football is published
every Wednesday during the season, beginning mid-February.
Origins
of Australian Rules Football
By Colin Tatz
AFL's Black Stars (1998) p.10
FOR
a time, the most famous Aboriginal cricket team that toured England
in 1868 was coached by Tommy
Wills.
It was Wills (who went to school at Rugby in
England) and his cousin H.C.A.
Harrison, who between 1858 and 1866 hammered out the basic
design and laws of a game that came to be known as Australian Football
after being influenced by an early, similar Aboriginal game.
