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for Ruth Brain
My book threatened some people because they jumped to the conclusion that I was portraying Tom Wills as a moral hero. I don’t think Tom Wills was a moral hero any more than I think Ian Botham was a moral hero when he walked out on Somerset County Cricket Club after his black West Indian team-mates, Joel Garner and Viv Richards, got sacked in 1985. I don’t think Botham saw himself as a champion of race politics. I think he was a great cricketer who knew two other great cricketers when he encountered them and revelling in their talents also meant embracing them as human beings. No matter how corrupt sport becomes, there is within it a radical innocence: when people play together so many barriers – cultural, racial, political – become superfluous.
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I’ve met whitefellers who can speak Aboriginal languages; I’ve never met one who grew up speaking the Aboriginal language for the place he was growing up in. Tom Wills did. As I once said to a Jewish audience, speaking the Aboriginal language for the place you’re from in Australia is like speaking Hebrew in Israel. Wills also knew Tjapwurrung songs and dances and there are various reports of him playing games with Aboriginal children as a child. This is surely the most believable part of the story because, at one level, his life was one long game. That’s what Tom Wills was – a player.
In 2006, “The Call” was made into a play by director Bruce Myles after we co-wrote the script together. We had three Aboriginal actors, two non-Aboriginal actors and an Aboriginal dancer. When we did a reading of the script, the first question came from the Aboriginal dancer, since deceased. He said, “Did Tom go through Law?” That is – did Tom go through Law, did he do men’s business, was he initiated? It’s a whole different story if he was – the conflict within him would have run so much deeper. But when I wrote “The Call” I didn’t speculate on such things. They were too big. They pushed the narrative too much in one direction and, at the end of the day, it would only be my imagining. I didn’t want to open one door and then close another. Now, ten years later, do I think Tom Wills was initiated? I doubt it. My impression is that circumcision generally occurs around the age of 12 or 13 when boys are on the cusp of manhood by which Tom was mostly in a boarding school in Melbourne. So how far into Aboriginal culture did he go? Far enough for the Tjapwurrung elders to send a messenger to the Wills house asking when Tom was coming home after he went to the Rugby school in England. That suggests to me that the elders saw young Tom as a bridge between the cultures, one they desperately needed having become refugees in their own land.
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