People Australia

Tom Wills, c.1857 (printed c.1905-10), by unknown artist

National Portrait Gallery

Thomas Wentworth (Tom) Wills was born on 19 August 1835, most likely on a sheep run near the Molonglo River, 180 miles southwest of Sydney. He was the first-born child of Horatio Wills and his wife, Elizabeth, both of whom were descended from convicts. Industrious and ambitious, Horatio was the driving force in shaping young Tom’s life, and as an ardent nationalist he bestowed and burdened his son with expectations of greatness. When Tom was four the family overlanded from their sheep property, Burra, in southern New South Wales to western Victoria, setting down not far from Mount William on the eastern edge of the Grampians. He was said to have been one of the first two white children seen by the Djabwurring people. This was a time of great frontier violence. Despite this, later letters suggest that he and the Djabwurring developed a mutual affection, and he was remembered as a boy who could fluently speak local Aboriginal languages, something in which his father took great pride.

In 1846 Wills was sent to Brickwood’s boarding school in Melbourne, and that year played in his first known cricket match. His father despatched him to England in February 1850; the fourteen-year-old travelled alone. Attending Rugby School, he learned three things: how to become one of the finest young cricketers in England; how to play the nascent game of Rugby School football; and how to drink beer, which was permitted due to the polluted and dangerous water from the local wells. Wills excelled in cricket and came to the notice of some of the finest cricketers in England. Following his school years, he played for prestigious clubs as a gentleman amateur: this set him apart as a much-admired young player.

In an effort to steer Wills into the legal profession, Horatio charted his son’s entry into Cambridge. He went to the university town but not to enrol in study—rather, he went to play cricket. Of the games he played there, by far the most important was in 1856, when he was permitted to play for Cambridge in the annual Oxford-Cambridge fixture. This flirtation with the university added to the aura of an educated young gentleman which he exploited on his return to Australia. Wills played with the finest teams: the Marylebone Club, the Gentlemen of Kent, and the Gentlemen of England. After over a year of playing cricket across England and Ireland, his father hauled him back to Australia.

Wills returned in December 1856 and was immediately recognised as a prodigiously talented cricketer. Ascending to the position of Victoria’s cricket captain, he was a phenomenal fast round-arm bowler, a hard-hitting batsman, and a fine tactician. He repeatedly penned letters to the newspapers proclaiming how to improve the game. His father was a Victorian parliamentarian, and Wills rubbed shoulders with the most significant individuals in the colony. Intercolonial cricket matches between Victoria and NSW were the highlight of the sporting calendar, and parliament was suspended to allow politicians to see which of the two colonies could boast of their superiority. In September 1857 Wills was elected honorary secretary of the Melbourne Cricket Club. Egocentric, sometimes reckless, he single-mindedly pursued cricket across the colonies instead of settling into a paid profession as was expected of a man of his age and class. 

In July 1858 Wills penned a letter to Bell’s Life in Victoriasuggesting that the colony should have a football club. In effect, he wanted to recreate in Melbourne the life he had lived as an English schoolboy, playing football in winter and cricket in summer. Soon afterwards he co-umpired a football match between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College. Although not the first game of what would turn out to be the new code of Australian Rules, the match was the most significant in the early history of the game. The following year, the oldest known set of rules of this new code was penned; the first-named of the rule writers was Tom Wills. He also became the first captain of the Melbourne football club. This new code of football largely came from a blending of various English ball games, allowing people from different footballing backgrounds to play together. Over the last thirty years a line of thinking has developed that the game has some of its roots in early Aboriginal football, but this is at best speculation.

At the height of his sporting fame, in early 1861 Wills was plucked out of Melbourne and taken by his father to central Queensland to help settle a recently purchased farm. Along with numerous Victorian settlers they travelled to Moreton Bay and then to the Darling Downs, herding thousands of sheep into the heart of Queensland. They arrived at their destination in early October 1861. Just over two weeks after they arrived at their new property Cullin-la-Ringo, on the afternoon of 17 October local Aboriginal men attacked the campsite. Nineteen men, women, and children were slaughtered, including Horatio. Wills survived only because his father had sent him back to collect goods they had left along the way. Several days after the massacre he returned to the campsite. In response, a posse of eleven neighbouring settlers formed a reprisal party that killed a large number of Aboriginal people. Wills was not part of this reprisal raid, remaining at the farm to manage the sheep and the property damage.[1]

Wills was deeply traumatised by the death of his father and the eighteen other settlers and was initially flooded by feelings of anger and vengeance. He developed what we might now loosely call post-traumatic stress disorder marked by hypervigilance, nightmares, and a deep fear that he too would be murdered. Over the next twelve months he remained adrift in Queensland and reports of his unreliability with money—already a feature noted in family letters—became more prominent. By dint of personality, he was never cut out for the life of a pastoralist. Although still supposedly based in Queensland, Wills returned to cricket, and in early 1863 captained Victoria against NSW in a spiteful match in Sydney resulting in spectators storming the field. The match ended in controversy and a NSW victory.

Sport consumed Wills’s life. By early 1864 he was back in Victoria, immediately reclaiming the mantle of that colony’s dominant cricketer, as well as playing football in winter, initially with the Melbourne Club and then with the Geelong Club. Two years later in 1866 he travelled from Melbourne to far-western Victoria to take up the position of captain and coach of a local Aboriginal cricket team. This was an attempt to bring together as a single team the Aboriginal men who worked on local pastoral properties, with the purpose of travelling to Melbourne to play the Melbourne Cricket Club on Boxing Day 1866. When Wills led his team onto the Melbourne Cricket Ground, it is thought that up to 10,000 spectators were present. The match was a sensation throughout the colony. Although they lost, the Aboriginal team won the affection of many observers in the crowd. It was noted that Wills communicated with the players in their own tongue, using the language he had learned as a child in western Victoria.

Wills’s involvement with the team was highly unusual for a cricketer of his stature, and reactions varied from ridicule to vigorous endorsement. Although he planned to take the team to England, reliance on a corrupt entrepreneur resulted in the proposed tour collapsing. Not long afterwards, in 1868, the Aboriginal team was resurrected by Charles Lawrence, an English cricketer, who sidelined Wills and took the team to England. By this time, Wills was a professional cricketer who needed to make money. He sold his skills to whoever wanted him, and many did. A series of controversies dogged him, and in 1872 he became the first bowler in Australian first-class cricket to be called for bending his arm in delivery and throwing the ball. This was followed by an extraordinary visit in 1874 to the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia to play a W. G. Grace-captained English team. The year after, his sporting generosity and appreciation led him to invite an early women’s cricket team to play in Geelong, despite widespread criticism of women playing what was regarded as a man’s game.

Without a paternal steadying hand, the downward spiral of Wills’s life is easy to chart. He was impetuous and thin-skinned, yet egalitarian and generous to many. His excessive alcohol consumption was increasingly commented on, and its ill-effects led his fellow cricketers to publicly taunt him. As the erosive effects of a lifetime of sport wore down his body, he inevitably started to fail. His last match for Victoria in 1876 was a disaster. Brought out of mothballs to captain a Victorian team that had recently performed poorly, Wills was heralded as a saviour. Never reluctant to promote himself, he promised everything in this final match but delivered nothing. Over subsequent years he sank, a rung at a time, until he was playing park cricket in Geelong, then in South Melbourne (called Emerald Hill), and finally on the outskirts of Melbourne in the hamlet of Heidelberg. All the while he grew poorer. Apart from a brief fling with a law firm on his return from England, Wills had never pursued a line of work other than sport.

Wills died on 2 May 1880 by suicide. A heavy drinker, he gradually became alienated from family and other supports. Living with his de factopartner of many years, Sarah Barbor, he had become a beggar within his family. Most likely he ran out of money to buy alcohol and slipped into a state of severe alcohol withdrawal, also known as delirium tremens. Fearing for his and her safety, Sarah placed him in the Melbourne Hospital, where he remained for a few hours before absconding in a haze of psychotic symptoms. Making his way back to Heidelberg, Wills remained under guard from a neighbour but eluding observation, picked up a pair of scissors and stabbed himself in the heart. His religious family struggled to cope with his suicide, and the funeral was not advertised and sparsely attended. The gravesite remained neglected and without a headstone for a century, after which the Melbourne Cricket Club returned to the site, tidied away the weeds, and erected a headstone. The more recent neglect of the site was remedied after a public appeal funded the grave’s restoration.

Wills’s entire life was consumed by his identity as a sportsman. On the field of play he was remarkably egalitarian. If a person had sporting talent, he recognised this regardless of their origins. This is evident in his earliest writings while a schoolboy at Rugby; in his promotion of men who came from less prestigious clubs and of the looked-down-upon professional cricketers; in his support for cricketers from rural areas; in his generosity towards the earliest women cricketers; and in his camaraderie with Aboriginal teammates in 1866 and 1867.

[1] It was recently suggested that Wills may have taken part in the reprisal raid, but there is no evidence of this. The archival evidence shows that Wills was not one of the eleven members of the reprisal party, and that he was physically some distance away and could not have been part of this raid. Additionally, descriptions by men who were in the raid make it clear that Wills was not part of it and was left behind on the station to tend sheep.