David Carment review of Greg de Moore, Tom Wills: The Insubordinate Life of an Australian Sporting Legend, 3rd edition

(Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2023), 400 pp., PB $36.99, ISBN 9781761068546

Thomas Wentworth (usually known as Tom) Wills (1835–1880) was an exceptionally talented Australian cricketer and footballer. He is prominently commemorated, including by the Australian Football League (AFL), as a founder in 1858 and 1859 of what became the Australian Rules Football game, and is admired as the captain of Australia’s first Aboriginal cricket team in 1866. There is a bronze statue of him outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground. An exhibit at the Bradman Museum and International Cricket Hall of Fame in Bowral presents him as a pioneer of reconciliation between Aboriginal and white Australians. He is also often remembered for his direct experience of Australia’s Frontier Wars that resulted from the killing of his father and 18 others at Cullin-la-Ringo (sometimes Cullinlaringo or Cullin-la-ringo) station in central Queensland on 17 October 1861. More white people died in what is often called the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre than in any other incident during the wars.

First published in 2008, Greg de Moore’s biography of Tom Wills was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. It is an engaging, extensively researched and comprehensive account of Wills’s life. Particular attention is devoted to his sporting career that mainly occurred in Victoria. There is perceptive analysis of his unsettled mental state as well as his suicide. Both a psychiatrist and a sports historian, de Moore was very well equipped to write about Wills. The main reason for his preparing a third edition of the biography and the focus of this review was the emergence of suggestions during 2021 that Wills’s reputation may require substantial reappraisal due to his possible participation in the mass murder of Aboriginal people following the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre.

I first encountered Tom Wills when carrying out research during 1979 for a journal article on the massacre.¹ Greatly influenced by the work of the Queensland historians Noel Loos and Henry Reynolds, the article is a case study supporting their arguments that Aboriginal armed resistance to white colonisation was widespread and frequently sophisticated. As de Moore did while researching the first editions of his book, I found that although Tom Wills was with his father Horatio Wills at Cullin-la-Ringo, he was absent from the station when the Aboriginal attack occurred. None of the written sources we saw showed he had a direct role in the brutal white reprisals that followed it. My sources included Queensland government archival records, contemporary newspaper accounts and Wills family correspondence. Members of the Wills family that my colleague Fred Morton and I interviewed or informally spoke with at the massacre site and nearby Minerva Creek station in November 1979 did not mention that Tom Wills took part in reprisals. A 93-year-old Aboriginal woman and an 88-year-old man in Springsure, the closest town to Cullin-la-Ringo, that we interviewed during the same research trip recalled stories they were told when young about the massacre but did not discuss him.²

In September 2021, however, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the Melbourne-based researcher Gary Fearon had discovered an 1895 Chicago Tribune article whose anonymous author claimed that Wills had talked about his participation in reprisals. According to Fearon, while the article includes numerous errors and exaggerations, there is important information in it that only someone closely familiar with Wills’s story could know. Of particular significance here is Wills’s outrage at the theft during the Cullin-la-Ringo attack of his treasured I Zingiari cricket jacket, which another source shows was his only stolen personal item.³ During the media coverage of Fearon’s find, various experts, including de Moore, agreed that there may be some truth in the article.⁴ A Wills family descendant, John McPherson, drew attention to his 2005 honours thesis, in which he concluded that Tom Wills was probably involved in revenge killings of Aboriginal people at Snake Creek on 23 October 1861, a claim that other Wills family members disputed. McPherson also claimed that he had sent a copy of his thesis to the AFL two years earlier with no reply.⁵ Jess Coyle, who specialises in Indigenous Australian studies and sports sociology, and Barry Judd, a senior First Nations scholar who has studied Tom Wills and his relationship with Aboriginal peoples and cultures, in an article for the Conversation, wrote that Fearon’s discovery ‘challenges popular understandings of Tom Wills as a peaceful friend of all Aboriginal people’. Would the AFL ‘use this as an opportunity to engage in an honest discussion of its history and culture?’ Rather than removing tributes to Wills, they concluded that the new findings ought to be an opportunity ‘to grapple with our shared difficult history’.⁶

A committee representing the AFL, Cricket Australia and the Melbourne Cricket Club Trust commissioned John Maynard, another senior First Nations scholar whose work focuses on the intersections of Aboriginal political and social history, and Judd ‘to review and make recommendations as to the veracity of alleged participation in frontier violence of Australian historical sporting figure Thomas Wentworth Wills’.⁷ Although their carefully written 21-page 2022 report finds no conclusive evidence from the Chicago Tribune article or elsewhere implicating Wills in the direct massacre of Aboriginal people, they rehearse ‘the old historical saying’ that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’.⁸ They point to widespread killings in central Queensland following the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre in which Wills may have been involved. Describing their report as ‘nothing more than a starting point in a process of truth-telling and justice’, they recommended a ‘properly resourced and supported investigation of Tom Wills and his interactions with Aboriginal peoples and cultures’.⁹ However, by early August 2024, there was no action on their recommendation.¹⁰

Most of the third edition of Tom Wills replicates earlier editions. Only a handful of new sources were found to add to those de Moore had previously used. In considering again whether Wills took part in the killings of Aboriginal people, de Moore could ‘still find no evidence that Tom Wills took part in any reprisal raids of mass murder in the days to weeks after his father’s death’ (p. x). He does, nevertheless, record that Wills reacted ‘with a raging hatred towards his father’s killers’ (p. 120) and, in a letter after the massacre to his cousin Colden Harrison, cried for a revenge party of ‘good resolute men that will shoot every black they see’ (p. 121). Wills was bent, de Moore writes, ‘upon destroying Aboriginal property to inflict suffering for its own sake’ (p. 122). A year later, Wills was vehemently critical of ‘Brisbane saints’ who wanted to protect Aboriginal people (p. 146). He and his family regarded the Aboriginal cricketers he captained in 1866 quite differently from Aboriginal people in central Queensland.

De Moore is more critical of the Chicago Tribune article in Tom Wills than in his earlier media comments, arguing that it contains so many errors that it is a ‘poor document’ (p. 302). While the article’s author clearly knew something about Wills, including his education in England, cricket prowess and heavy drinking, many parts of it, de Moore argues, are ‘made up and fanciful’ and it ‘conflates multiple and often distorted stories’ (p. 303). According to de Moore, much more reliable evidence shows that, while other settlers sought violent revenge, Wills stayed behind at Cullin-la-Ringo to look after the stock and was then at neighbouring Rainworth and Albinia Downs stations until early 1862. He continues that there are mistakes in the article regarding sequence, place, people and Tom Wills’s whereabouts. Men who were in the reprisal group or who were linked to them ‘independently and over time, clearly stated that Tom Wills was not part of their group’ (p. 304). John McPherson is accused of making unsubstantiated assertions. In forensic support of his case, de Moore includes a detailed timeline of events at Cullin-la-Ringo between 13 October 1861 and December 1863 that is closely based on numerous archival and newspaper sources that are listed and discussed in the book’s notes. Although he does not refer to Maynard and Judd’s report, of which he may have been unaware, de Moore’s conclusions are not markedly different to theirs. He admits that it remains possible that Wills was engaged in violent acts against Aboriginal people while he was in central Queensland from August 1861 to December 1862, and August to December 1863. ‘We should’, he sensibly concedes, ‘be open to any new evidence that may be discovered and modify our views accordingly’ (pp. 304–5).

Until such evidence emerges, it is worth noting the comments of two other expert historians whose opinions Maynard and Judd sought. It would be understandable, Geoffrey Blainey says, if ‘Tom Wills did think of retaliating’.¹¹ Raymond Evans observes that after the killings of Aboriginal people at Myall Creek when white perpetrators were convicted and hung, ‘there is this conspiracy of silence … You don’t implicate others and you don’t implicate yourself.’¹²

Sixteen years after its initial publication, de Moore’s biography remains a worthy study of an extraordinary but flawed man. Among its continuing strengths are numerous well selected images. Its analysis of recent findings regarding Tom Wills’s responses to the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre assumes, probably unsurprisingly, that historical truth concerning the Australian Frontier Wars largely depends on the same kinds of documentary evidence expertly employed in other parts of the book. Although de Moore does not acknowledge that other and broader methodological approaches now increasingly being used in writing the history of Aboriginal–white encounters in Australia might be just as appropriate, he appears open to changing his mind here. He also clearly demonstrates that even if Tom Wills did not take part in the bloody reprisals following his father’s death, he enthusiastically supported them.

1. 1 David Carment, ‘The Wills Massacre of 1861: Aboriginal–European Conflict on the Colonial Australian Frontier’, Journal of Australian Studies 4, no. 6 (June 1980): 49–55, doi.org/10.1080/14443058009386807.

2. 2 Papers, notes, slides and interview tapes used for the article are in the Central Queensland Collection, Central Queensland University Library, Rockhampton, A44/173/3.

3. 3 Russell Jackson, ‘Research Discovery Suggests AFL Pioneer Tom Wills Participated in Massacres of Indigenous People’, ABC News, 28 September 2021, abc.net.au/news/2021-09-18/suggests-afl-pioneer-tom-wills-participated-indigenous-massacres/100463708. The first version of this was published online on 18 September 2021.

4. 4 Russell Jackson, ‘Experts Add Weight to Discovery That Sporting Hero Tom Wills Participated in Mass Murder of Indigenous People, ABC News, 19 September 2021, amp.abc.net.au/article/100469428.

5. 5 Russell Jackson, ‘Wills Family Descendant Claims He Sent AFL Information on Tom Wills Aboriginal Massacre Allegations Years Ago’, ABC News, 23 September 2021, abc.net.au/news/2021-09-23/wills-family-descendant-claims-he-sent-afl-murder-information/100479830.

6. 6 Jess Coyle and Barry Judd, ‘Tom Wills’ Story Is the AFL’s Opportunity for Truth Telling about Its Ugly History’, The Conversation, 24 September 2021, theconversation.com/tom-wills-story-is-the-afls-opportunity-for-truth-telling-about-its-ugly-history-168381.

7. 7 John Maynard and Barry Judd, ‘Thomas Wentworth Wills: Did He, or Didn’t He’, [unpublished report to committee of Australian Football League, Cricket Australia, and Melbourne Cricket Ground Trust, 2022], 2nd page. Pages are not numbered. I am grateful to John Maynard for sending me a copy of the report.

8. 8 Maynard and Judd, ‘Thomas Wentworth Wills’, 17th page.

9. 9 Maynard and Judd, ‘Thomas Wentworth Wills’, 18th page.

10. 10 John Maynard, email to David Carment, 3 August 2024.

11. 11 Maynard and Judd, ‘Thomas Wentworth Wills’, 16th page.

12. 12 Maynard and Judd, ‘Thomas Wentworth Wells’, 17th page.