Tom Wills as a young man in 1857/58, when he was regarded as the finest cricketer in Australia. At roughly the same time he instigated the game of Australian Rules football. Credit:Terry Wills-Cooke Born in NSW, Tom Wills descended from convicts. Growing up in western Victoria all his playmates were black. Tom grew up with the Djab Wurrung Aboriginal people and learnt their language and games until he was regarded as kin – a white boy in a sea of black faces. As a young man Wills was the finest cricketer in Australia, his mind crammed with sporting genius. Along the way he crafted the first rules of what became Australian Rules football. But cricket was his game. At the peak of his fame, in 1861, when 26 years old, something shattered his life. In that year he travelled with his father to central Queensland to settle a new pastoral property. There, on October 17, after lunch and in the heat of the day, local Kairi Aborigines attacked and slaughtered 19 white settlers. Among the 19 dead lay Wills' father. It was the biggest killing of white settlers in Australian history. Miraculously, Wills survived. As the blood coagulated on the dry grass, local white settlers sought revenge. The final death count has been lost in hysteria and time. But Wills did not kill anyone.

Marooned in Queensland, the forces of isolation, alcohol, and nightmares rendered his world unliveable. Wills' mind began to unravel. In the shadow of his despair arose a remarkable story that led to the Boxing Day cricket match of 1866. Returning to Victoria after the massacre, Tom travelled through the land where he had grown up as a boy among Aborigines. He helped find and then train 10 indigenous farm labourers. The son of man murdered by Aborigines helped create an Aboriginal cricket team. He became their white captain and coach. He brought this team, whom the Melbourne media regarded as little more than "savages" to the MCG on Boxing Day to play the Melbourne Cricket Club. When Wills stepped on to the MCG leading his black team, 10,000 curious spectators craned their necks to observe the spectacle.

The word on the street was that Wills was mad, deranged. But what he did that day towers above what any Australian captain has ever done on the cricket field. Some in the crowd whispered of his villainy, shaming his father's memory by playing with Aboriginal cricketers; to others he was a hero for building a bridge between black and white. Wills spoke to his team in an Aboriginal tongue until, in the eyes of the Melbourne media, he was one of them. Fearing humiliation, the ungracious Melbourne Cricket Club stacked its team with the best players it could unearth. But public sympathy was with Wills and his team. As each wicket fell, the whispers in the crowd became a roar. The outsiders rode a wave of popularity. Egalitarianism won the day. Aboriginal cricket was on everyone's lips. The black team lost the match but won the public's adulation.

Journalists ran about agog, astonished that this team tutored by the white Tom Wills could play so well. Unstated but implicit in every line was this: if they could play this English game of cricket, what else might they be capable of? Just over a year later, that Aboriginal team prepared to go to England. It became our first-ever cricket team to tour England – 10 years before the first white Test team. The 1866 Boxing Day Cricket Match was the denouement of one of the great, but little-known, chapters in Australian history. How does a man, having lost his father in such a bloody fashion, find the courage and grace to create an Aboriginal cricket team? This is surely one of the great acts of healing in this nation's history. But, sadly, I doubt whether there is a schoolboy or schoolgirl in Australia who could tell you this story.

How could this story – the nation's largest massacre of white settlers, the revenge attack upon Indigenous people, and the triumphant ascension on Boxing Day 1866 – be so little known? The Boxing Day Test is the sporting heart of the nation. Nowhere else in this land do people assemble in such numbers to admire the gifted few. This year we will watch in droves as Steve Smith and David Warner continue the tradition. Observers will experience the undiluted joy of sport, and, at times, its vulgar ostentation. Millions will regurgitate memories of the Ashes, Bradman and Bodyline. I won't. I will think of something that happened 150 years ago, on this very day, in 1866. When Tom Wills and his black team walked upon the MCG, just for an instant, cricket was an exalted game, suspended above a yet-to-emerge nation and spoke to us of what it might mean to be Australian.

Greg de Moore is conjoint associate professor of Psychiatry at University of Western Sydney and author of Tom Wills: First Wild Man of Australian Sport.