Greg de Moore is a consultant psychiatrist at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital and his study of Wills’s life stems from his interest in male suicide. His ten years of research has unearthed original medical records, letters, text books and notes, previously believed to have been lost or destroyed. He lives in Sydney.

Tom Wills

First Wild Man of Australian Sport

By Greg de Moore

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2008 Greg de Moore
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74237-598-4

Contents

Cast of Characters,
Finding Tom Wills,
PART ONE 1835–1862,
1 The Favoured Son,
2 A Boy in a Tent,
3 Cock of the School,
4 The Governor’s Displeasure,
5 Genius,
6 The Shrinking and Expanding World of Tom Wills,
7 Applause, Prosperity, Social Acquaintance,
8 Foot-ball,
The Tree of Life,
9 To Bowl With the Gods,
10 A Father Calls for His Son; Expectation is Fulfilled,
11 The Pride of Queensland,
PART TWO 1862-1880,
12 God Preserve Me From a Sydney Mob,
13 Leaving Cullin-la-Ringo,
14 The Man With no Clothes,
15 Have Not These Blacks Names of Their Own!,
16 A Lot of Black Savidges a Playing Against Xtians,
17 Mr Wills Takes a Job,
18 Tommy Wills! Tommy Wills!,
The Art of Forgery,
19 Satan’s Little Helper,
20 The Arrival of Grace,
21 Dust Him Off Once More,
22 No Room at the Inn,
23 The Emerald Hill,
24 An Island in the Sun,
25 The Gates o’ Hell,
26 The Sweetest Man,
Epilogue: A Conversation,
Afterword: Tom Wills and the Origins of Australian Rules football,
Selected Bibliography,
Picture Credits,
Acknowledgements,

CHAPTER 1

THE FAVOURED SON

AUGUST 1835–APRIL 1840

Tom Wills was born on 19 August 1835, on a sheep run on the Molonglo River, 180 miles south-west of Sydney. The first child of Elizabeth and Horatio, Tom lived his first four years on the plains next to the river.

The parents of Tom Wills were descended from convicts. Tom’s mother, Elizabeth, was born to Michael Wyre and Jane Wallace, both convicts from Ireland who were transported to the penal colony of New South Wales for seven years. Wyre and Wallace married on 11 April 1815 at St John’s Church, Parramatta, 15 miles inland from Sydney. Elizabeth was the middle of their three girls. When Michael Wyre accidentally drowned in 1823, all three girls were admitted to the Female Orphan School, Parramatta. Elizabeth was recorded in the admission register as being six years old and her surname was recorded as McGuire, the name she would keep until she married.

The Female Orphan School was established to civilise the colony of New South Wales. Girls came from all segments of the colony: free settlers, convicts and Aborigines. Looking up from the stone jetty on the Parramatta River, the girls could see a path that led from the river, rising along a hill towards the front entrance of the three-storey school. Outside the school walls were six acres of gardens in which grew flowers, fruit and vegetables for the girls’ pleasure and sustenance. Routine and order marked days at the school. Mornings were devoted to reading, writing and needlework and after lunch to domestic instruction. Each morning and night the girls were mustered for Bible readings and prayer, and on Sundays they were taken by boat to St John’s Anglican Church for worship.

At the age of twelve or thirteen most girls were apprenticed out, either into homes in the colony or to work as servants within the school. After five years, Elizabeth and her older sister Catherine were discharged from the school on 23 June 1828 and were apprenticed as servants within the school. Five years later, Elizabeth entered Mrs Jane McGillivray’s Boarding School for ‘a select and limited number of young Ladies, whose morals, comforts and education shall be attended to with fidelity’. Elizabeth’s handwriting book from this year has survived:

Elizabeth McGuire, 15 years old January 29th 1833

The art of Writing is one of the most necessary acquirements and greatest blessings that mankind can enjoy Ignorance and impudence are generally twins Careless habits retard our improvement generally Do not rashly that which you may repent Humility, that low sweet root, from which all Heavenly virtues shoot Modesty that unfolding ornament, adorned the maid Graceful manners distinguish the well bred Miss McGuire presents her kind compliments to Miss Thomson and requests the favor of Miss T’s interesting company to Tea this evening Indolence saps at the root of virtue and happiness Let no one know your secret sentiments be discreet Mildness is the proper characteristic of woman Those who despise learning are unworthy of it Useful employment produces happiness Endeavour to acquire a graceful address Knowledge cannot be prized too highly Improve the opportunities given you now True Philosophy is only found in Religion Scorn falsehood as the greatest meanness Be cautious how you give pain to those who love you.

Elizabeth left Mrs McGillivray’s and on 2 December 1833 married Horatio Wills, editor of the Sydney Gazette, after a courtship of eighteen months. She was, as far as can be reckoned, sixteen years old when she married.

Horatio Wills was born in 1811, the son of a convict. Or more correctly, Horatio was the son of a dead convict – five months before Horatio was born his father, Edward Wills, died in the family home on George Street, Sydney. The obituary in the Sydney Gazette described Edward as a man of respectability and integrity. But it had not always been so.

Edward Wills had committed robbery on the King’s Highway in England and was sentenced ‘to be Hanged by the neck until he be Dead’. The sentence was commuted to transportation for life to the colony of New South Wales and he arrived at Botany Bay on 26 July 1799, aboard the Hillsborough, with his wife and daughter. Although Edward and Sarah survived the voyage, nearly a hundred convicts did not: typhoid and cruelty saw to that. Edward Wills received a conditional pardon in June 1803 and a full pardon in 1810; soon, he and his wife Sarah were merchants of wealth and standing in Sydney. He died, only thirty-two years old, leaving five children and his wife four months pregnant with Horatio.

Sarah Wills remarried the next year. Her new husband was George Howe, owner, printer and editor of Australia’s first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette. George died in 1821, followed two years later by Sarah. Horatio’s older siblings, in particular the urbane and wise Thomas, cared for and mentored the young boy.

Horatio was apprenticed to George Howe’s son, Robert, who had taken over the running of the Sydney Gazette. When he was little more than fifteen years old, Horatio ran away from work. Robert Howe immediately advertised in the Sydney Gazette to locate him; six months later he was back as an apprentice. Horatio and his older stepbrother quarrelled repeatedly; it soon came to a head when Horatio, threatened with a whipping, brawled with Robert Howe. Horatio was struck over the eye; ‘a severe wound’. Some months later, Horatio again fought with Robert Howe and a warrant was issued for Horatio’s arrest. Always there for his younger brother, Thomas Wills arranged for William Charles Wentworth to defend Horatio when the impetuous adolescent returned to Sydney. Wentworth was one of the best-known barristers in the colony; however the magistrate was unmoved by Horatio’s stories and ordered him to return to the Gazette office as an apprentice with the advice: ‘You do not appear to have shown that subordination which an apprentice ought to do.’ At sixteen, Horatio’s personality was set. He was adventurous, even reckless, and had a temper, and he needed little material comfort to survive in life.

When his stepbrother died the following year, Horatio, released from servitude, continued to work at the Gazette, becoming the editor and printer. On the verge of turning twenty-one, Horatio wrote to his brother-in-law, Assistant Surgeon to the Colony, Dr William Redfern. Horatio had met Elizabeth not long before and seemed determined to marry and live a more stable life – a life also with ambition. Redfern replied on 31 October 1832:

My dear Horace, I had the pleasure of receiving your letter … and rejoice to hear that you have sown ‘all your wild oats’ and that you are determined to become a sensible, steady, clever fellow. To become so only requires resolution. Stick close to your studies and the rest will be sure to follow. If you go on as you promise to do, you will be a credit to yourself, an honor to your relations, and a benefit to mankind. Persevere!

Horatio anguished over his limited formal education and was driven to pursue knowledge to compensate for what he felt he had been deprived of as a young man. It was not just a personal desire for self-learning – he advocated that colonists advanced themselves through science and literature. Before he turned twenty-one, Horatio established his own newspaper, the Currency Lad, and sought subscriptions ‘to promote the cause of Literature in this Colony’ and ‘for the purpose of establishing a Public Library’. The library, he said, would be open to all free men, freed convict or free settler. There was to be no division among men. He believed a man should receive rewards in accordance with his abilities and industry. Horatio bristled with anger towards those born overseas who looked down upon native-born Australians, and wrote in the Currency Lad: ‘Look, Australians, to the high-salaried foreigners around you! Behold those men lolling in their coaches – rioting in the sweat of your brow … we were not made for slaves!’ But like many native-born Australians he looked overseas, particularly to England, for advancement in culture and business.

Horatio was well connected in Sydney and seemed to have every reason to remain there, but he and his young wife left to take up a sheep station, Burra Burra, on the Molonglo Plains next to the Molonglo River. Burra Burra rested on a bedrock of limestone and shale; in all directions grey-white outcrops of stone, like roughened shafts of bone, broke through the soil. It was a hard land for a birth. Seventeen months after Tom was born, he was baptised Thomas Wentworth Wills in the Parish of St Andrew’s, Sydney. Horatio and Elizabeth named their first-born after Horatio’s much-loved and respected brother, Thomas. His second name, Wentworth, was an unmistakable acknowledgement to William Charles Wentworth, the Cambridge-educated barrister who defended Horatio in court against Robert Howe. Wentworth – the son of the colony’s chief surgeon and of a convict woman – had the qualities that Horatio valued and desired for his son: he was a statesman, explorer and fighter for the rights of the Australian born.

Life on the Molonglo Plains offered little comfort. In January 1839, soon after one of Elizabeth’s several miscarriages, Tom fell sick – ‘poor little Tom was so dangerously ill’ that Horatio and Elizabeth ‘almost despaired of his recovery’. Tom survived. He had been a precious child before his illness, but now he was even more so. The uncertainty of further children for Horatio and Elizabeth, coupled with Tom’s recovery from illness, deepened the bond between mother, father and child. In Horatio’s eyes, this son whom providence had let live would have every advantage that Horatio had been denied. Most importantly, Tom would have a father.

In late April 1840, Horatio, Elizabeth and four-year-old Tom left the Molonglo River and overlanded south to Mount William, in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.

CHAPTER 2

A BOY IN A TENT

APRIL 1840–August 1850

The Wills family journeyed to Mount William, on the eastern edge of the Grampians mountain range, 140 miles northwest of Melbourne. It was here that Horatio took up land in November 1840.

Horatio settled upon Djab wurrung land, where over forty Aboriginal clans lived, sharing a common language. The main Aboriginal camps were sited on waterways: to the north flowed the Wimmera River and to the south the Hopkins River. Emu and rock wallaby were to be found on the plains and amongst the boulders; and in season the Djab wurrung clans consumed eels by the thousand at the fishing grounds of the Mount William swamp. Beyond the Djab wurrung land to the north and west were the Jardwadjali; to the north-east the Djadja wurrung and to the south the Dhauwurd wurrung. Although the Djab wurrung had an identifying language, much of their vocabulary was shared by these neighbouring clans. Many Europeans had difficulty hearing certain sounds of the Djab wurrung and were unaware of the subtlety of the language. Horatio, however, learnt to speak Djab wurrung and made the movements of his lips and palate mimic the hard and soft sounds. It had been four years since the first Europeans or Ngammadjidj had intruded into Djab wurrung territory.

In 1838 the Colonial Office in London had created ‘The Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate’. The Protectorate consisted of a chief protector and four assistant protectors to oversee and record interactions between settlers and Aborigines. Chief Protector George Augustus Robinson visited the four districts of the Aboriginal Protectorate regularly, keeping extensive notes, and on several occasions visited the Wills family.

Robinson’s diary of the period is a bleak collection of impressions and laments, of Aboriginal word lists and sketches. He recorded how sheep and cattle stomped upon the grass, driving away the kangaroos and denying the Aborigines a source of food. These heavy-footed farm animals damaged swamp vegetation where native women had previously dug for roots and delicate shoots and tubers. He recorded that Europeans had ransacked the Aboriginal fishing weirs and the secret hides the Djab wurrung used so cleverly to snare birds for food. He wrote that the skulls of black men were hung upon hut doors to intimidate natives, that rifles were fired repeatedly to warn and threaten, and that settlers rode horses through native camps to disorient and bully. Poisoning of natives was rumoured but hard to prove. Concealed from magistrates, vice and pleasure were controlled by the conscience of each individual man. Robinson recorded the pain of starving natives, syphilis, filth, death and a godless world of villainous acts by whites.

Robinson wrote words of hate at times in his journal, but never towards his natives. Oversensitive to slights, he was estranged from most of the European settlers he met; they saw the Protectorate as meddlesome and offered Robinson only begrudging assistance as he moved among the natives offering blankets, sugar, flour, fishing hooks and knives. Robinson documented many deaths – both Aboriginal and European. In January 1840 he came across a young Aboriginal man murdered by settlers:

He was lying on the opposite side of the creek. He was a fine young man, apparently about 22 years of age, well made and about 6 feet high. His face was of a light hazel brown, resembling an half caste. His hair was black and resembled that of the Otahetians. His back was cicatrized, having 2 rows one above the other. The ball had entered his back and had passed completely through his abdomen. Part of the intestines were protruding. His tongue was greatly swollen and quite black, occasioned by his biting it in the agony of death. His hand was clenched. I turned him over and viewed him. Two kangaroo teeth, worn as ornaments, were fastened to his hair. These I cut off and brought away as a momento of the unfortunate victim.

In 1841, Robinson travelled near the settlement of Portland where he met Governor Superintendent Charles La Trobe. La Trobe told him of the recent murder of a settler:

They had received a letter last night of another horrible murder committed at the Glenelg on a Mr Morton and his shepherd. Mr Morton was represented as a gentleman, kind and humane. The blacks it was stated had stretched the man Larry out on his back and drove spears through the palms of his hands and, the report says, they had cut the flesh off his bones when alive and had eaten it and had eaten the flesh of Morton. Morton was a respectable settler – an Englishman. The particulars I learnt after I left the Governor.

Robinson first wrote of the Wills family when he was told that natives had recently attempted to rape (or, in Robinson’s words, ‘to have connection with’) and abduct Mrs Wills. Robinson rode to Horatio Wills’ station: a paddock under construction, and two huts – one for the men, one for the overseer – and a tent for the Wills family. Aborigines had murdered a shepherd in the overseer’s hut eight months earlier. It was raining hard when Robinson arrived and Elizabeth emerged only briefly from the tent where she and Tom, five years old, were living. Horatio was away. Elizabeth agreed to supply Robinson with some meat for that evening, then returned to the tent leaving Robinson in the rain. He dismounted and sheltered beneath an ‘old tarpaulin’ before going to see the overseer whom he found to be ‘as uncouth as the rest’. Affronted, Robinson left Horatio’s property dissatisfied with the level of respect and comfort offered him.

In his diary Robinson wrote that a native youth had told him: ‘Thomson, Captain Bunbury, Captain Brigs and Mr Wills shot natives, plenty natives, “all gone too much boo white man”.’ Robinson continued and gathered further information, writing on 29 July 1841: ‘Wills, Kirk and Rutter shot women who had infants and that the latter were left without milk. The attack was made on the camp, as far as I could learn, after Wills’ man was killed.’ There were other accusations made against Horatio in Robinson’s diary:

Coom.ber.nin, F. shot by Wills Mittecum, M. shot by Wills

Edward Stone Parker, an assistant protector under Robinson, visited Mount William the following year in March 1842, and offered a different view of Horatio Wills. Parker, unlike Robinson, spoke to Horatio: ‘Mr Wills speaks well of the natives congregated at his station. They have been with him several months and make themselves very useful.’ Parker noted favourably that Wills supplied the natives with food twice a day.

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