Thomas Wentworth Wills (19 August 1835 – 2 May 1880) was an Australian sportsman who is credited with being Australia's first cricketer of significance and a founder of Australian rules football. Born in the British penal colony of New South Wales to a wealthy family descended from convicts, Wills grew up in the bush on stations owned by his father, the squatter and politician Horatio Wills, in what is now the state of Victoria. As a child, he befriended local Aboriginal people, learning their language and customs. Aged 14, Wills went to England to attend Rugby School, where he became captain of its cricket team and played an early version of rugby football. After Rugby, Wills represented Cambridge University in the annual cricket match against Oxford, and played at first-class level for Kent and the Marylebone Cricket Club. An athletic bowling all-rounder with tactical nous, he was regarded as one of the finest young cricketers in England.
Returning to Victoria in 1856, Wills achieved Australia-wide stardom captaining the Victoria cricket team to repeated victories in intercolonial matches. He played for the Melbourne Cricket Club but often clashed with its administrators, his larrikin streak and defections to rival clubs straining their relationship. In 1858, seeking a winter pastime for cricketers, he called for the formation of a "foot-ball club" with a "code of laws". He captained a Melbourne side that winter, and in 1859 co-wrote its laws—the basis of Australian rules. Over their careers, he and his cousin H. C. A. Harrison further developed the game as players, umpires and administrators. In 1861, at the height of his fame, Wills went to outback Queensland to help run a new family station. Soon after his arrival, his father and 18 station personnel were killed in Australia's largest massacre of colonists by Aboriginal people. Wills survived and returned to Victoria in 1864, and in 1866–67, he led an Aboriginal cricket team on an Australian tour as its captain-coach.
In a career marked by controversy, Wills subverted cricket's amateur-professional divide, and was accused of popularising intimidatory tactics, such as the head-high bouncer. He also earned a reputation for bending sporting rules to the point of cheating, in particular throwing. This he boasted about, and in 1872 he became the first cricketer to be called in a top-class Australian match. Dropped from the Victorian team, Wills failed in an 1876 comeback attempt, by which time he was considered a relic of a bygone era. During this period, he supported Australia's first organised women's cricket team—the only prominent male cricketer to do so. His final years were characterised by social alienation, flights from creditors, and heavy drinking, likely as a means of numbing post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms that resulted from the massacre. In 1880, suffering from delirium tremens, Wills fatally stabbed himself in the heart.
Australia's first sporting celebrity, Wills fell into obscurity after his death, but has undergone a revival in Australian culture since the 1980s. Today he is described as an archetypal tragic sports hero and as a symbol of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. He has also become the central figure in "football's history wars"—an ongoing dispute over whether Marn Grook, an Aboriginal ball game, influenced early Australian rules. According to biographer Greg de Moore, Wills "stands alone in all his absurdity, his cracked egalitarian heroism and his fatal self-destructiveness—the finest cricketer and footballer of the age".
Wills was born on 19 August 1835 on the Molonglo Plain[a] near modern-day Canberra, in the British penal colony (now the Australian state) of New South Wales, as the elder child[b] of Horatio and Elizabeth (née McGuire) Wills. Tom was a third-generation Australian of convict descent: his mother's parents were Irish convicts, and his paternal grandfather Edward was an English highwayman whose death sentence for armed robbery was commuted to transportation, arriving in Botany Bay aboard the "hell ship" Hillsborough in 1799. Granted a conditional pardon in 1803, Edward became rich through mercantile activity in Sydney with his free wife Sarah (née Harding). He died in 1811, five months before Horatio's birth, and Sarah remarried to convict George Howe, owner of Australia's first newspaper, The Sydney Gazette. Mainly self-educated, Horatio worked in the Gazette office from a young age, rising to become editor in 1832, the same year he met Elizabeth, an orphan from Parramatta. They married in December 1833. Seventeen months after his birth, Tom was baptised Thomas Wentworth Wills in St Andrew's, Sydney, after statesman William Wentworth. Drawing on Wentworth's pro-currency writings and the emancipist cause, Horatio, in his nationalist journal The Currency Lad (1832–33), made the first call for an Australian republic.
Horatio turned to pastoralism in the mid-1830s and moved with his family to the sheep run Burra Burra on the Molonglo River, near Captains Flat. Tom was athletic from a young age but also prone to illness, his parents at one stage "almost [despairing] of his recovery". In 1840, in light of Thomas Mitchell's account of "Australia Felix", the Willses overlanded south with shepherds and their families to the Grampians in the Port Phillip District (now the state of Victoria). After squatting by Mount William, they moved a few miles north through the foothills of Mount Ararat, named so by Horatio because "like the Ark, we rested there". Horatio went through a period of intense religiosity while in the Grampians; at times his diary descends into incantation, "perhaps even madness", according to scholars. He implored himself and Tom to base their lives upon the Gospel of John.
Living in tents, the Wills family settled a large property named Lexington (near present-day Moyston) in an area used by Djab wurrung Aboriginal clans as a meeting place. According to family members, Tom, as one of the few white children in the area, "was thrown much into the companionship of aborigines". In an account of corroborees from childhood, his cousin H. C. A. Harrison[c] remembered Tom's ability to learn Aboriginal songs, mimic their voice and gestures, and "speak their language as fluently as they did themselves, much to their delight." He may have also played Aboriginal sports. Horatio wrote fondly of his son's kinship with Aboriginal people, and allowed local clans to live and hunt on Lexington. However, George Augustus Robinson, the district's Protector of Aborigines, implicated Horatio and other local settlers in the murder of Aboriginal people. Horatio blamed "distant predatory tribes" for provoking hostilities in the area, and the closest he came to admitting that he had killed Aboriginal people was in a letter to Governor Charles La Trobe: "... we shall be compelled in self defence to measures that may involve us in unpleasant consequences".
Tom's first sibling, Emily, was born on Christmas Day 1842. In 1846 Wills began attendance at William Brickwood's School in Melbourne, where he lived with Horatio's brother Thomas (Tom's namesake), a Victorian separatist and son-in-law of the Wills family's partner in the shipping trade, convict Mary Reibey. Tom played in his first cricket matches at school and came in contact with the Melbourne Cricket Club through Brickwood, the club's vice-president. By 1849, the year Wills's schooling in Melbourne ended, his family had grown to include brothers Cedric, Horace and Egbert. Horatio had ambitious plans for the education of his children, especially Tom:
I now deeply vainly deplore my want of a mathematical and classical education. Vain regret! ... But my son! May he prove worthy of my experience! May I be spared for him—that he may be useful to his country—I never knew a father's care.
Wills's father sent him to England in February 1850, aged fourteen, to attend Rugby School, then the most prestigious school in the country. In his scheme for his children, Horatio wanted Tom to go on to study law at the University of Cambridge and return to Australia as a "professional man of eminence". Tom arrived in London after a five-month sea voyage. There, during school holidays, he stayed with his paternal aunt Sarah, who moved from Sydney after the death of her first husband, convict William Redfern.