The AFL has adopted a new position on the origins of Australian football, now claiming it was influenced by Indigenous games.

Key points: The AFL has recognised Indigenous game Marngrook as an "undoubted influence" on Australian Rules football

The AFL has recognised Indigenous game Marngrook as an "undoubted influence" on Australian Rules football Historians of the game have disputed the AFL's latest stance, suggesting there is no evidence to prove the link

Historians of the game have disputed the AFL's latest stance, suggesting there is no evidence to prove the link The AFL says the sharing of oral history by Aboriginal elders confirms the Indigenous connection to Australian Rules

The change was spelt out in the AFL's recent apology to Indigenous footballer Adam Goodes.

The statement, attributed to the AFL's general manager of social policy and inclusion Tanya Hosch, said: "Aboriginal history tells us that traditional forms of football were played by Australia's first peoples all over Australia, most notably in the form of Marngrook. It is Australia's only Indigenous football game — a game born from the ancient traditions of our country."

The ABC asked Ms Hosch for an interview to clarify whether the AFL believed there was an explicit link between the Indigenous football games, and the sport codified by Tom Wills and others in Melbourne in 1859.

She declined the interview request, but in a statement said: "Marngrook, a high-marking game played in Victoria's western districts, pre-European settlement, undoubtedly influenced what we now understand as the modern AFL football code."

"It is a statement that acknowledges the Aboriginal history of our game. We believed it was important to recognise the Aboriginal origins of the game in this statement."

Aboriginal men playing a traditional form of football in a paddock at Victoria's Coranderrk Station, in 1904. ( Supplied: State Library of Victoria (N.J. Caire) )

The AFL's new position is in direct contrast to the previous statements of the sport's origins.

In 2008 — as part of Australian Rules football's 150th anniversary celebration — the AFL commissioned the historian, Gillian Hibbins, to write an essay on Australian football's origins in which she said the idea that Australian Rules football originated from Aboriginal games was "a seductive myth".

"I can't say when the position changed, however there was no push-back regarding the recognition of the link between the modern game of AFL and the Marngrook game in the process of developing the joint statement," Ms Hosch said in another statement.

Tanya Hosch (right) was appointed as the AFL's diversity chief in June, 2016. ( AAP: Tracey Nearmy )

"We are aware of this part of the game's history being contested and at some stage I hope the AFL will formally resolve this but as it stands, we now have a statement that acknowledges and accepts the link between Marngrook and Australian Rules Football.

"This gives us a good step forward in terms of acknowledgment in future historical records of the game.

"It's worth noting that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's history, perspectives and beliefs have always been and will always be contested or undermined by some people. There is nothing new about that."

Asked on what evidence the position changed, Ms Hosch said the sharing of oral history by Aboriginal elders had changed the understanding of Marngrook within the AFL industry.

In another piece in the 2008 AFL 150 years publication, dual Brownlow Medallist Adam Goodes wrote: "I know that when Aborigines play Australian Football with a clear mind and total focus, we are born to play it."

Is the AFL changing history?

The AFL's new position has baffled some of the game's historians.

Roy Hay has just published a book entitled Aboriginal People and Australian Football in the Nineteenth Century, which examines the idea that Australian football was influenced by games played by Aborigines.

Of the AFL's new position on the origins of the game, Mr Hay said, "That just simply is an attempt to rewrite history."

Winter in Australia: Football in the Richmond Paddock (1866) is the earliest known image of a football match in Melbourne. ( Supplied: State Library of Victoria (Robert Stewart 1866) )

Mr Hay and other historians of the game say there is no doubt that Aboriginal people played many different forms of football, but many argue there is no evidence that Australian Rules Football was influenced by those games.

"The idea that [Indigenous football] was somehow a blueprint for the game that the white men developed in Melbourne around the late 1850s — I have searched high and low, and many other historians have done [the same], to find out if there is substantial evidence that supports that, and really we can find none."

Another football historian, Dr Greg de Moore, has been unable to find any link between the Aboriginal games and the one codified in the late 1850s, in more than 10 years of research.

Dr de Moore co-authored a landmark history of the sport Australian Football, A National Game, and is the biographer of the sport's most important founding father, Tom Wills.

"There is an evidence gap … I've seen nothing in recent years to change my view," Dr de Moore said.

The claim that Australian Rules has its origins in Aboriginal games is largely based on Wills' childhood in country Victoria, before he was sent to Rugby School in England for seven years.

From the age of around four to 14, Wills lived in the Grampians and made friends with the local Djab Wurrung people.

An 1857 image by Gustav Mutzel near Mildura depicting children playing kick to kick with a spherical object. ( Supplied: Museums Victoria )

"He knew these people very well. He was befriended by them. They felt very warmly towards him," Dr de Moore said.

But did Wills ever play football with them? And, if so, did that influence the sport he later helped create?

"I've found nothing that documented that he saw the game. He never made reference to it, and no one ever else made reference to it," de Moore said.

The British rules

Supporters of the Marngrook origin story often point to the visual similarities the Indigenous game shared with Australian football — particularly the high mark.

But Mr Hay and Dr de Moore argue that Wills and his contemporaries borrowed exclusively from the English school games of the time when they wrote the first 10 laws of what was then known as the Rules of the Melbourne Football Club.

"The things that he wanted to introduce into the game derived from his background at Rugby School in England and the sorts of games that people were playing in the public schools," Mr Hay said.

A football match between Cartlon versus Melbourne in 1881, 22 years after Australian Rules was codified. ( Supplied: State Library Victoria )

Mr Hay said the football of the sport's early decades was a low, scrimmaging rugby-style game, that would be unrecognisable to modern observers.

As to the possible Aboriginal origins of the game: "I wish it were true, I really wish it were true, but I can't find any evidence that supports that," he said.

The central tenet of Hay's book is that Aboriginal people were playing Australian Rules Football, almost from its inception in the late 1850s.

"What I found is that the Indigenous people who were left after the massacres and the invasion and the disease and the ethnic cleansing — if you really want to go about it — the survivors who were left in the missions and stations around the periphery of Victoria, saw the white men playing their game and forced their way into it, first of all as individuals, then forming teams and eventually becoming good enough to win local leagues," he said.

Mr Hay added that the AFL's apology to Goodes was "the cleverest piece of image management I've come across in a long time from the archetypical and best of the image managers: the AFL".

In response, Ms Hosch said "all 18 clubs signed the statement. This is one of the strongest statements ever made by a sporting code concerning racism in our game and the history of our nation more broadly".