Marn Grook
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Marn Grook, marn-grook or marngrook is the popular collective name for traditional Indigenous Australian football games played at gatherings and celebrations by sometimes more than 100 players. From t
Australian Aboriginal domestic scene depicting traditional recreation, including one child kicking the ball, with the object and caption being to "never let the ball hit the ground". (From William Blandowski's Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen, 1857, (Haddon Library, Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge)
Marn Grook (detail)
Australian football pioneer Tom Wills grew up as the only white child among Djab wurrung Aborigines in Western Victoria
Tom Wills monument in Moyston makes a claim to the Marn Grook connection
Tom Wills
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Thomas Wentworth Wills was an Australian sportsman who is credited with being Australia's first cricketer of significance and a founder of Australian rules football. Born in the British penal colony o
Marn Grook
…Since the 1980s, some commentators, including Martin Flanagan, Jim Poulter and Col Hutchinson have postulated that Australian rules football pioneer Tom Wills could have been inspired by Marn Grook. The theory hinges on evidence which is circumstantial and anecdotal. Tom Wills was raised in Victoria's Western…
Wills, c. 1857
Wills grew up amongst Aboriginal clans in the Mount William area of the Grampians, shown in this 19th-century painting by Eugene von Guérard.
Daguerreotype of Wills, dating from his school years