Fri 23 May 2008
Marn Grook and the History Wars
Posted by jangari under Culture, History, Indigenous, Sport
[6] Comments
Last night’s 7:30 Report featured a report on the origins of AFL footfall, and specifically that it may have been inspired by a game played by the Aborigines of western Victoria called Marn Grook.
The main proponent of this theory is Jim Poulter, a descendant of settlers who saw Marn Grook played at the goldfields near Warrandyte1 in the 1850s; several years before AFL was established. However, the historian interviewed for the report, Gillian Hibbins, disagrees on the basis that the celebrated inventor of AFL football, Tom Wills, never mentioned the indigenous sport in any of his writings, either personal or professional.
I personally like the idea that Marn Grook was the inspiration behind the game, but beyond mere contemporaneous probability – Wills grew up in the area in which Mark Grook was reported to have been played and, by all reports, was inducted into the local indigenous culture, making it unlikely that he never knew about it – the evidence is a little thin.
One aspect of the evidence that Poulter refers to is that the ‘Aboriginal’ word2 for ‘catch’ was mumark3. As the story goes, this became the ‘mark’ of the modern game. Although, using the term ‘mark’ to refer to an unequivocal catch and subsequent free kick had apparently been well attested in England for years already.
The word ‘mark’ comes from at least two public schools where they marked and ground and shouted ‘mark’ so that everybody would clear away and give them a free kick.
The official history of the ALF maintains that Wills invented the game with direct inspiration from English Public – that is, Private – schools, and not from the indigenous people of the area in which he spent much of his time. However, the AFL today appear quite happy to capitalise on its purported Aboriginal roots, which presents an obvious paradox as far as another writer, Martin Flanagan, is concerned:
If the official history of the AFL is true, the AFL has got no more claim to having a connection with Indigenous culture than Rugby Union does and so all these big games it has like the Marn Grook Trophy and ‘Dreamtime at the G’, what are they? Are they just marketing exercises?
I don’t have anything novel to add to this debate, though I lean, probably as a result of romanticism, toward the indigenous roots story.
If anyone knows of any more conclusive evidence either way, then by all means, let me know in the comments.
- Spelled Warendight in the transcript ↩
- That he can’t name a language is a bit of weak point in his argument, if you ask me. ↩
- Mumark is the 7:30 Report‘s transcription, but Poulter clearly pronounces it [məma:k] ↩
May 24th, 2008 at 11:54 am
I saw that broadcast too, and was skeptical about Poulter’s comment. I consulted Blake’s ‘Woiwurrung, the Melbourne language’ in HAL 4 (1991), where the vocab lists mama- ‘hold, grab’ (p.114) and the fields list has the extra information “(=’save’) Wg” (p.99) i.e. recorded by John Green in Brough Smyth, from the ‘Yarra Tribe’. Blake summarises the incomplete information on verbal inflexion, amidst which there is an imperative inflexion -k (pp.75-6). Blake thinks the 3rd singular object pronominal is zero, and “that the primary stress occurred on the first syllable as in most other Australian languages” (p.61). So from Blake’s account we can say that the Melbourne language word pronounced ['mamak] means ‘hold it, grab it, save it’. It is implausible for this to have been borrowed into English as [ma:k], don’t you think?
June 14th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I’ve always thought there’s a potential for a documentary on football presented as a mock Attenborough-style wildlife documentary. Such a program might, for example, describe players of all football codes as related species with different evolutionary adaptations. It would take talent to pull this off but done well it could be very amusing.
July 28th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Wills was captain of Rugby at Rugby School. However, the game he invented had many differences to Rugby and some similarities to Marn Grook. There was no offside rule in the first rules of Aussie Rules. Wills encouraged running with the ball. Wills developed positional play whereby two opposing players were paired off, much as it was in Marn Grook. There is much denial of the potential influence of the indigenous game on Wills. Wills grew up with the Djab Wurrung, he spoke their language, sang their songs and performed their dances. To contend that he would not have played and been influenced by their games is absurd.
July 28th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Yes, Fossman, I’d heard something like that, that Wills was very up to speed with the local culture. To think that he then invented Aussie Rules without being heavily influenced by Marn Grook, and then come up with something so similar, is absurd.
August 19th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
I had a long running battle with the AFL over the origins of Australian rules football.
They told me repeatedly that proof was in a letter on display at the MCG.
I have yet to see this letter.. However I am certain Marn Grook is a total fabrication as neighboring Aboriginal tribes did not mix or even talk the same dialect for that matter.
August 19th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
No, Peter, they probably didn’t speak the same ‘dialect’, but there would have been significant similarities between the neighboring languages. There would also have been plenty of multilingualism, so many people in community X would have easily understood, if not spoken themselves, language of community Y.
To say that the communities did not mix is a bit of a furphy; they would have, but even if they didn’t ordinarily mix, there was certainly still linguistic, social and cultural commonalities. All of which, I concede, merely allow – rather than entail – the Mark Grook story to be the truth.