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Australian Aboriginal domestic scene depicting traditional recreation, including one child kicking the "ball", with the object and caption being to "never let the ball hit the ground". (From William Blandowski's Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen, 1857, (Haddon Library, Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge)

Marn Grook (also spelt marngrook), literally meaning "Game ball", is the collective name given to a number of traditional Indigenous Australian recreational pastime believed to have been played at gatherings and celebrations of up to 50 players.

Generally speaking observers commented that Marn Grook was a football game which featured Punt kicking and catching a stuffed "ball". It involved large numbers of players and games were played over an extremely large area. Totemic teams may have been formed, however to observers the game appeared to lack a team objective without any real rules, scoring or winner. Individual performances and players were often commended on when consistently exhibiting outstanding skills, such as leaping high over others to catch the ball.^[1] Some variations of the game appeared to discourage the ball from touching the ground.

Evidence supports such games being played primarily by the Djabwurrung and Jardwadjali^[2] people and other tribes in the Wimmera, The Mallee and Millewa regions of western Victoria, Australia (which are commonly associated with the name "Marn Grook"); however, according to some accounts, the range extended to the Wurundjeri in the Yarra Valley, the Gunai people of Gippsland region in Victoria and the Riverina in south western New South Wales. The Walpiri tribe of Central Australia played a very similar kicking and catching game with possum skins known as Pultja.^[3]

The earliest accounts emerged decades after the European settlement of Australia, mostly from the colonial Victorian explorers and settlers. The earliest anecdotal account was in 1841, a decade prior to the Victorian gold rush while the written account dates back to 1857. Although the consensus among historians is that marngrook existed before European arrival not enough is known by anthropologists about the prehistoric customs of Indigenous Australians to determine how long the game had been played in Victoria or elsewhere on the Australian continent.

Marngrook is especially notable as some historians claim it had a role in the Origins of Australian football^[4][5][6]. This connection has become culturally important to many Indigenous Australians, including celebrities and professional footballers^[7] from communities in which Australian football is highly popular^[8].

Eye-witness accounts

Robert Brough-Smyth, in an 1878 book The Aborigines of Victoria, quoted William Thomas, a Protector of Aborigines in Victoria, who stated that in about 1841 he had witnessed Wurundjeri Aborigines playing the game.

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 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.

The game was a favourite of the Wurundjeri-william clan and the two teams were sometimes based on the traditional totemic moeties of Bunjil (eagle) and Waang (crow). Robert Brough-Smyth saw the game played at Coranderrk Mission Station, where ngurungaeta William Barak discouraged the playing of imported games like cricket and encouraged the traditional native game of marn grook.^[9]

An 1857 sketch found in 2007 describes an observation by Victorian scientist William Blandowski, of the Nyeri Nyeri people playing a football game at Merbein, on his expedition to the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers.^[10]

The image is inscribed:

A group of children is playing with a ball. The ball is made out of typha roots (roots of the bulrush). It is not thrown or hit with a bat, but is kicked up in the air with a foot. The aim of the game - never let the ball touch the ground.

Historian Greg de Moore comments:

What I can say for certain is that it's the first image of any kind of football that's been discovered in Australia. It pre-dates the first European images of any kind of football, by almost ten years in Australia. Whether or not there is a link between the two games in some way for me is immaterial because it really highlights that games such as Marn Grook, which is one of the names for Aboriginal football, were played by Aborigines and should be celebrated in their own right.

In 1889, anthropologist Alfred Howitt, wrote that the game was played between large groups on a totemic basis — the white cockatoos versus the black cockatoos, for example, which accorded with their skin system. Acclaim and recognition went to the players who could leap or kick the highest. Howitt wrote:

This game of ball-playing was also practised among the Kurnai, the Wolgal (Tumut river people), the Wotjoballuk as well as by the Woiworung, and was probably known to most tribes of south-eastern Australia. The Kurnai made the ball from the scrotum of an "old man kangaroo", the Woiworung made it of tightly rolled up pieces of possum skin. It was called by them "mangurt". In this tribe the two exogamous divisions, Bunjil and Waa, played on opposite sides. The Wotjoballuk also played this game, with Krokitch on one side and Gamutch on the other. The mangurt was sent as a token of friendship from one to another.^[11]

Relationship with Australian Football

Tom Wills monument in Moyston makes a strong claim to the Marngrook connection.

Some commentators, including Martin Flanagan^[12], Jim Poulter and Col Hutchison postulate that Tom Wills could have been inspired by Marngrook.^[13]

The theory hinges on the evidence largely circumstantial and anecdotal. The tribe was one that is believed to have played marngrook. However the relationship of the Wills family with local Djabwurrung people is well documented.

Wills was raised in Victoria's western districts. As the only white child in the district, it is said that he was fluent in the local dialect and frequently played with local Aboriginal children on his father's property, Lexington, in outside of the town of Moyston.^[14] This story has been passed down through the generations of his family.^[15]

Col Hutchison, former historian for the AFL wrote in support of the theory postulated by Flanagan, and his account appears on an official AFL memorial to Tom Wills in Moyston erected in 1998.

Gillian Hibbins in the AFL's official account of the game's history published in 2008 for the game's 150th celebrations sternly rejects the theory:

Understandably, the appealing idea that Australian Football is a truly Australian native game recognising the indigenous people, rather than deriving solely from a colonial dependence upon the British background, has been uncritically embraced and accepted. Sadly, this emotional belief lacks any intellectual credibility.

Hibbin's account was widely publicised^[16] and caused significant controversy and deeply offended prominent indigenous Australians who openly criticised the publication.^[17]

Comparisons with Australian Football

Advocates of these theories have drawn comparisons in the catching of the kicked ball (the mark) and the high jumping to catch the ball (the spectacular mark) that have been attributes of both games^[18].

However, the connection is speculative. For instance spectacular high marking did not emerge in Australian football until the 1880s.

Marn Grook and the football term "mark"

Some claim that the origin of the Australian rules term mark, meaning a clean, fair catch of a kicked ball, followed by a free kick, is derived from the Aboriginal word mumarki used in Marn Grook, and meaning "to catch".^[19][20] However, the term "mark" has been used for a catch in both rugby football and early Association football in Britain since the 1830s—)—so the claim is obviously a false etymology. The term is still used worldwide in Rugby Union in reference to a fair catch by a player who calls "mark" when catching a ball inside their team's 22 metre line. The application of the word "mark" in these early football codes is derived from the practice when a player catches the ball and marks the ground with his foot to show where the catch had been taken.

In Popular Culture

Due to the theories of shared origins, Marngrook features heavily in Australian football and Indigenous culture.

Marn Grook (documentary) was first released in 1996.^[21]

In 2002, in a game at Stadium Australia, the Sydney Swans and Essendon Football Club began to compete for the Marngrook Trophy, awarded after home-and-away matches each year between the two teams in the Australian Football League. Though it commemorates marngrook, the match is played under normal rules of the AFL, rather than the traditional aboriginal game.^[22]

The Marngrook Footy Show an indigenous variation of the AFL Footy Show began in Melbourne in 2007 and has since been broadcast on National Indigenous Television and Channel 31.

References

Further reading

Origins of Australian rules football

External links

• AboriginalFootball.com, "Marngrook"
• Article by leading Australian historian John Hirst September 2008, The Monthly