Wills descendant claims he sent information to AFL on Aboriginal mass murder claims years ago

The AFL was sent historical research suggesting that football pioneer Tom Wills had participated in the mass murder of Gayiri Aboriginal people but did not respond to the information, according to a Lismore-based academic and Wills descendant.

John McPherson says that in 2019, he sent the AFL his 2005 Southern Cross University honours thesis, titled Marn Grook, Thomas Wills and The Great Australian Silence, marking it to the attention of a senior AFL executive, but claims he didn’t receive a reply.

The AFL advised ABC Sport that the executive in question and their staff have no memory of receiving McPherson’s manuscript, which he says was sent to the AFL in 2019.

Mr McPherson’s thesis used archival material and contemporaneous accounts to suggest that Tom Wills participated in revenge killings of Gayiri people during the Snake Ridge massacre of October 23, 1861.

“This was supposed to be an investigation into the construction of history, as perceived through constructions of the evolution of football,” Mr McPherson wrote in the thesis.

“It turned into an investigation of a mass murder committed, apparently, by a man from within the author’s family.”

Mr McPherson is a direct descendant of the Wills family via Edward and Sarah Wills, the grandparents of Tom Wills. Mr McPherson’s line is through Tom Wills’s cousin, Thomas Antill — another significant cricketer of the colonial period, who played for Victoria.

The Snake Ridge massacre was one of a series of reprisal attacks that followed the Cullin-la-ringo massacre, in which Wills’s father, Horatio, and 18 other white settlers died. Historians put the Aboriginal death toll at 370 or more.

The Cullin-la-ringo attack was itself a reprisal for the unjustified murder of Gayiri by Jesse Gregson, a squatter on the neighbouring Rainworth station.

On Saturday, ABC Sport revealed the discovery by sports history researcher Gary Fearon of a 1895 Chicago Tribune article quotes Wills saying, “I cannot tell all that happened, but know we killed all in sight,” before describing his murder of an Aboriginal man who’d stolen Wills’s treasured I Zingari cricket jacket.

‘The previously untold story of Thomas W. Wills’

Mr McPherson also says that in 2006 he presented his thesis to AFL Publishing, a privately-owned business then based at the league’s AFL House headquarters in Docklands. AFL Publishing produced the AFL Record, the league’s annual reports and official books, and provided a range of other services to the AFL.

Mr McPherson says AFL Publishing considered his proposal but ultimately declined. The publisher instead released another of Mr McPherson’s works, which was unrelated to Tom Wills.

In documents from 2006 obtained by ABC Sport, Mr McPherson corresponds with senior staff at AFL Publishing about turning his thesis on Wills into a book, clearly explaining the manuscript’s highly controversial content.

In his submission to AFL Publishing, Mr McPherson wrote that his work on Wills was “the story of the 1861 massacre of his father Horatio Wills, and 18 others, in the largest recorded massacre of white colonists by Australian Aboriginals, and, six days later, on 23 October 1861 the previously untold story of Thomas W. Wills’ role in the Snake Range massacre of up to 300 members of the Kairi [Gayiri] people.”

Mr McPherson had hoped his work on Wills might be included in The Australian Game of Football since 1858, the AFL’s official celebration of the game’s 150th anniversary in 2008. That book — for which the AFL retains copyright, and which was introduced by then-AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou — contained extensive material on the game’s founders that made no reference to Mr McPherson’s allegation that Wills was a mass murderer.

In a statement, the AFL said AFL Publishing was a “trade name used under license from the AFL and it was not owned or operated by the AFL”, and that any publishing decisions sat with AFL Publishing, not the AFL.

Thirteen years later, in June of 2019, Mr McPherson forwarded his thesis directly to the AFL in the wake of a controversy in which the league seemed to adopt a new position on the origins of Australian football in its apology to Sydney Swans great Adam Goodes.

In the latter instance, Mr McPherson received no reply from the league.

In 2008, three years after the initial academic publication of Mr McPherson’s thesis, the AFL proceeded with Tom Wills Round in honour of the football pioneer, and the GWS Giants training ground is named after him.

‘The family is disappointed’

Mr McPherson’s views do not represent a consensus among Wills descendants. “Family historian” Terry Wills Cooke, the great-grandson of Tom Wills’s brother Horace, told ABC Sport that studies such as Mr McPherson’s had “made the error of judging the events of the 1860s by the standards and mores of the 21st century”.

“When Tom did return [to Cullin-la-ringo], his task was to deal with the shambles which was the massacre site and to try to round up and secure the flock of sheep, not to be running around killing people,” said Wills Cooke.

Wills Cooke said his views represented those of the Wills descendants in Victoria and Tasmania.

Asked whether he believed Tom Wills took part in reprisal massacres of Aboriginal people, Wills Cooke replied: “My answer is that he did not take part, and apart from ‘he might have’ and ‘anything is possible’, there is no evidence to point to his participation. For what oral history is worth the answer is also no he did not.”

Yet in a June 2005 letter to Mr McPherson, responding to his thesis, Wills Cooke wrote: “I have no documentary evidence that Tom took any part in the reprisal but oral history within the family would suggest that he did.

“I would be very surprised if, having arrived back on Sunday, he would allow others to pursue the raiding party on Monday without himself accompanying them. What is known is that [Jesse] Gregson led the party, but exactly who was present and who fired what shots can at this time only be speculative.”

Responding to a section of Mr McPherson’s thesis that speculated on the possibility that Wills’s aunt Catherine Roope destroyed letters related to Wills’s involvement in reprisal massacres, Wills Cooke wrote:

“You need to remember that the days were different, as you yourself have said, and there was no feeling that in carrying out this reprisal there was anything other than fully deserved retribution in their (then) opinion, thus there was no need to hide anything. That is where I think your hypothesis falls down — the view that people were setting out to conceal that Tom took part. My guess is that everyone took it for granted.”

‘People would have expected retaliation’

Asked by ABC Sport to clarify that position, Wills Cooke said he had changed his mind since 2005.

“So many people over the years have made all kinds of claims and put forward theories about the massacre and its aftermath, many of them contradictory. This has made me very wary and I decided that the contemporary evidence was all there was to go on. It is this which caused me to change my mind since 2005.

“If I look dispassionately at the issue and think it through in the light of the standards of the time, I still think that at that time people would have expected retaliation and seen it as justified, thus I cannot see why they would have covered up the events or those involved.

“I am at the stage now that I do not accept any theories which are not supported by evidence.

‘It turned into an investigation of mass murder’

Mr McPherson had originally conceived his thesis as an exploration of historian Geoffrey Blainey’s dismissal of an Indigenous influence on the game’s formation. In a statement preceding his thesis, Mr McPherson explained that his research discoveries had come as a shock.

“At the outset of this project I was aware that my research may either reinforce, or even enhance Thomas Wills’s reputation with regard to his positive conduct with Australian Aboriginals, which was unusual for the time,” Mr McPherson wrote.

“Obviously, by placing Wills at the 1861 Snake Range massacre, the outcome was the opposite of what [I] had anticipated.”

Mr McPherson argued that a report of the Snake Ridge attack, which he concluded to have been written by Wills’s brother Horace, suggested that Tom Wills fired the first shot in the hostilities. In his 1997 biography of Horatio Wills, Terry Wills Cooke claimed the first shot was fired by Gregson. Mr McPherson opposes that view, claiming that the latter theory is “unsupported” by evidence.

In his thesis, Mr McPherson went on to suggest a royal commission into the conduct of the Queensland Native Mounted Police for “their role in the killing of hundreds, possibly thousands of Aboriginal Australians”.

Mr McPherson said his studies took a profound emotional toll.

“I found it really hard to open up the book [afterwards] because the amount of massacres I had encountered during the research, and the detail of it,” he said.

Based on his research, he remains convinced of Wills’s involvement in the killings.

“I just cannot understand how he wouldn’t have been in that hunting party,” Mr McPherson said.

Source: AFL NEWS ABC