The Call

Martin Flanagan

2 ideas

1. Tom Wills, Cullin-la-ringo, and the Aboriginal XI

   In October 1861, Gayiri (Kairi) warriors killed Horatio Wills and eighteen others at his new Queensland station, Cullin-la-ringo, while his son Tom was away fetching supplies. It was the largest killing of colonists by Aboriginal people, and it was followed by reprisal raids that killed far more Aboriginal people. Tom Wills had co-written the first rules of Australian football in 1859. Within five years of his father's death he was coaching and captaining an Aboriginal cricket team from Victoria's Western District, which played at the MCG on Boxing Day 1866. He later drank heavily and killed himself in 1880.

2. Intimacy and violence coexist on frontiers

   Tom Wills grew up alongside Aboriginal people in western Victoria and spoke their language. His father's expansion north ended in mass killing on both sides. The frontier was not a clean line between strangers. The same colonial families who shared play and language with Aboriginal people also took their land, and both violence and friendship came from that same closeness.

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