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A marngrook possum ball
Playing the possum
Australians have been obsessed with sport for millennia in one form or another. The first Australians were playing footy when Captain Cook was a boy. Instead of a pigskin they used a ball made of possum skin.
One of the earliest records of an Indigenous football game comes from William Thomas, Assistant Protector of Aborigines in Victoria, in 1841. He is quoted in Robert Brough Smyth’s The Aborigines of Victoria (1878) describing Wurundjeri people east of Melbourne playing the game known as marngrook at Coranderrk mission station:
The men and boys joyfully assemble when this game is to be played. One makes a ball of possum skin, somewhat elastic, but firm and strong. The players of this game do not throw the ball as a white man might do, but drop it and at the same time kicks it with his foot. The tallest men have the best chances in this game. Some of them will leap as high as five feet [1.5 m] from the ground to catch the ball. The person who secures the ball kicks it. This continues for hours and the natives never seem to tire of the exercise.
Marngrook involved kicking the ball, marking or catching the kicked ball on the full (the spectacular ‘mark’, meaning a high jump to catch the ball), and forward positioning of the players (a definite contradiction to Rugby). In those respects it was similar to Australian Rules football.
There are many accounts of Indigenous football, from as far afield as Central Australia, where the Warlpiri had a kicking and catching game with possum skins known as pultja. The Wiradjuri people around the Riverina played woggabaliri, which resembled soccer.
Commonly it is the tribes of the Wimmera, Mallee and Millewa in western Victoria that are most associated with marngrook. The word is from the Gurnditjmara language and means ‘game ball’. There are reports of games of marngrook from Melbourne to the Snowy and elsewhere.
Tom Wills, one of the founders of Australian Rules, grew up in the Western District of Victoria. Unlike many men of the era, Wills enjoyed the company of Aboriginal sportspeople. In fact, he was coach and captain of the first Aboriginal cricket team to tour the United Kingdom.
Wills is one of the heroes of Australian multiculturalism. His family ran a property in Queensland at Cullin-la-ringo. Aboriginal people in the area raided the property and killed Wills’ father and 18 others. Despite the massacre, Wills didn’t encourage reprisals but understood the Indigenous grievance. He never let this horror affect his relations with Aboriginal people. In that sense he was a true sportsman and the relationships between black and white negotiated on the playing field were the beginning of a very long healing.
It has been speculated that Wills adapted the Aboriginal game he learned as a child into the new game he devised, but the evidence for this is only circumstantial. Many of the supposed similarities between the modern game and marngrook, such as the spectacular mark, are recent tropes not described in early versions of the game. Tellingly, Wills himself never stated the connection. We will never know whether or not he was thinking about marngrook in 1858 when he drew up the rules.
Sports, however, are living and evolving cultures. Many Aboriginal players have been among the greats of Australian Rules, and black and white Australians have played the game – it would be naive to think that players would not adapt one code into another. Certainly Aboriginal culture runs right through Australian Rules, possum ball or not.