In a week when AFL vilification again raised its ugly head in the media, further evidence has emerged about the game's Indigenous origins, with a historian citing transcripts she says proves a key Aboriginal influence.

Key points: Transcripts prove Indigenous game Marngrook was played where AFL inventor Tom Wills grew up

Transcripts prove Indigenous game Marngrook was played where AFL inventor Tom Wills grew up Marngrook and Australian Rules Football are strikingly similar

Marngrook and Australian Rules Football are strikingly similar AFL sticking to official history denying Marngrook influence

Monash University historian Professor Jenny Hocking found transcripts placing Indigenous football, commonly known today as Marngrook, firmly in the Western district of Victoria where Australian rules founder Tom Wills grew up.

Tom was the son of landholder Horatio Wills and the district's only white child in the 1830s to 40s.

He grew up playing with Indigenous children, speaking their language and participating in corrobborees and ceremonies.

After travelling to England to study at Rugby School at the age of 14, Wills returned to Australia where he later designed football as a modified version of rugby for Australian conditions.

His adapted game included rules to keep the ball in the air as much as possible, rather than encouraging tussles and scrums on the ground, and to reward those who plucked it from the air.

It bore a striking resemblance to Indigenous football, which involves two sides keeping a ball in the air as much as possible by kicking it perpendicularly from the hands, and then celebrating those who marked the ball.

Some tribes even call the action of catching the ball — made from possum fur — "mumark".

"We found in the State Library of Victoria records of a transcription of an interview with [Mukjarrawaint man] Johnny Connolly, who describes actually playing the game in the Grampians region as a child in the 1830s to 40s," Professor Hocking said.

"We've later found connections between Johnny Connolly and the area in which Tom Wills actually lived. He [Johnny] worked on some of the stations in that area, including Ledcourt, which in the very early period was occupied by Tom Wills' father."

"The most important thing is it situates the game in its local version in the Grampians region at the same time as Tom Wills. There's now no doubt about that."

Professor Hocking's find is particularly significant because some historians had argued there was no proof that Marngrook was played in the Grampians region and Wills could therefore not have been exposed to the game before he left for England.

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Wills family a story of colonial Australia

Professor Hocking, who recently spoke at an exhibition on football issues at Melbourne's Couninhan Gallery in Brunswick, said she found the transcripts among the personal papers of ethnographer AW Howitt while researching for a biography on three generations of the Wills family.

She said the Wills story began in Sydney during convict times and ended for Horatio when he and 18 members of his overlanding party were killed in Queensland during the largest massacre of white people by Indigenous people in Australia's history.

Tom himself survived because he had walked away the previous day to retrieve a bullock that had become stuck on the way there and had returned to find an "extraordinary scene of desecration".

"It's hard to imagine the impact of that on him, but the impact on the local Indigenous people was far worse, because the so-called reprisal raids, even for that very deadly frontier in Queensland, were bloody and out of proportion, you might say, for the numbers killed," Professor Hocking said.

"But by looking at all three generations, the self-government of Victoria, Horatio being elected to the Victorian Parliament, and his son being part of this development of Australian football, I think, is a fascinating story to tell about Australian colonial settlement and Indigenous dispossession."

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

AFL unmoved by the Marngrook story

Despite its celebrations of highly skilled Indigenous players, the AFL has been historically reluctant to concede an Indigenous influence on Australia's national game.

Artist Bernadette Atkinson makes a Marngrook at Melbourne's Leather Poisoning: Football Possessions exhibition. ( Supplied: Victor Griss )

For football's 150-year anniversary when the AFL commissioned the book, The Australian Game of Football since 1858, it went so far as to include a controversial piece by AFL historian Gillian Hibbins who labelled the idea a "seductive myth".

"There is no mention of Aboriginal football by Wills in letters or in the two cricket guides he edited," she wrote.

"There is no mention in existing family documents or in those of his fellow football founders.

"On the contrary, there is much evidence to show that Wills, in fact, favoured Rugby School, as set out in the preceding text."

Writer Jim Poulter told the ABC's Mike Sexton in 2008 that it should be no surprise that Wills did not publicly state the Indigenous influence on his game, such was the racism and distrust towards Indigenous people at the time.

"If Tom Wills had said, 'Hey, we should have a game of our own, more like the football that black fellas play', it would have killed it stone dead before it was even born," he said.

Professor Hocking said the AFL had made an appalling omission of Marngrook in the book, and did not consider Ms Hibbins' piece to be an "appropriate one".

"I think it too easily dismisses this as even an influence and it is undoubtedly one of several," she said.

"There's no doubt it formed an influential part in Tom Wills' skills and his subsequent skills in rugby, and has influenced the way he reconfigured the game of rugby, when he and others established football."

Professor Hocking added that further calls for "text-based evidence" about Indigenous football's own origins before white settlement were nearly "impossible" to produce because Aboriginal culture was not written down but inhered in song, dance, stories and art.

But she said there was no "no shortage" of Indigenous football game descriptions by settlers before "the depredation of European occupation", including by Assistant Protector of Aborigines William Thomas in 1858, who said between 50 or up to 100 players would engage in one of their "favourite games" at any one time.

Other accounts, some of them from as early as 1840, pointed out the game was played by both sexes without discrimination.

"I think this is very interesting in the context of women's football at the moment," Professor Hocking said.

An AFL spokesperson said he had not seen the material by Professor Hocking and could not yet make comment on it.

"The debate is really one between historians as to what Wills was exposed to," he said.

"Ultimately any view on our game's history is really a matter for the AFL Commission through the Hall of Fame."