RUTH Brain was laying concrete when I rang.

The farmer's wife and mother of four is also the president of the Moyston-Willaura Football Club.

Last year, netball matches couldn't be played at Willaura became the surface was deemed dangerous. With two other volunteers, one of whom was in his 70s, she was helping to build Willaura's new netball facility.

Like nearly everyone who lives in the country, Brain says the club is about community. That's a cliche to most people in the city. What does it mean? It means that two years ago, when fire exploded in the Grampians and swept towards Moyston, trapping a man and his son in a car, withering trees and melting tin sheds, the Moyston-Willaura Football Club headed out when the fire abated, re-building fences, "doing whatever we could".

The Moyston-Willaura Football Club has something else going for it. The grand house Tom Wills' father built is on the hill above the Moyston footy ground, looking out towards the Grampians, where an Aboriginal story says fire first came to Earth.

The first fateful transaction between Wills and Aboriginal people occurred here, at Moyston.

Wills spoke their language. He could sing their songs. The debate is over whether he knew their games. Why wouldn't he have? The argument in the AFL official history that Aboriginal football was unknown to the Tjapwurrung people and other clans surrounding the Moyston area brazenly flies in the face of all known evidence. If you want some idea of what I believe Wills encountered as a child when he entered the Aboriginal camp, listen to the comments of Victorian policeman Barry Randall, who is coaching the Ltyentye Apurte (Santa Teresa) team from the Northern Territory in the curtain-raiser tonight at the MCG.

In that traditional community, says Randall, "people live and breathe football". "From four or five, the kids walk around, bouncing a football. There's barely a kid over five who doesn't own a football. They live in their football gear." That's more or less how it's been in every traditional Aboriginal community I've visited over the past 20-odd years.

Wills was a sportsman like Nathan Buckley. Like Jimmy Stynes, like Barassi, like Richo. It was in his nature to play. Why wouldn't he have played with the Tjapwurrung kids? Do you think he cared if they were black?

Brain says Wills is "a fantastic story".

"He's not a particularly loved character but a lot of Australian heroes aren't. He's just so colourful. He's someone who stands up against conventions. He was an individual at a time when society frowned on people who wanted to buck the system".

She knows Neil Murray, who lives, and was brought up, at nearby Lake Bolac. Murray, who wrote My Island Home, spent a decade in the Northern Territory and speaks an Aboriginal language. He wrote a great Wills song, Tom Wills Would, which is somehow timely:

"If I'm shunned and ignored by the mighty who preside,Mick Thomas, formerly from Weddings, Parties, Anything, also wrote a great Wills song. Mick's a St Kilda man, like Shane Warne. If you want to get his idea of Wills, imagine Warnie if he had grown up with the blackfellas. It's a rollicking tune. Tommy Wills rollicked early. Shane Howard, formerly of Goanna, is also writing a Wills song. There's something about Tommy that's catching.

I'll not curry for their favour, I'll not bootlick at their side,

I'll be gone with those who knew me well

My dark friends who died in their own sad hell

As Tom Wills would, if he were here now he would."

As a kid, Brain always went to the local footy with her dad. He was what was known in the old days of footy as a champion of the bush and might have played for Carlton had he not lost an eye in a farming accident. She started her education at the local primary school, finished it at Genazzano in Kew and did a couple of years of economics at university before heading back to the farm.

With her husband Lloyd, she now works a property outside Willaura. They have four children or, as she puts it, "three footballers and one netballer". She became club president last October, assuming that Moyston would be part of the AFL's 150th celebrations. It hasn't happened. Why? "We've been written out of the history," she says. "We know that because the Ararat Council contacted the AFL and received advice to that effect.

"It would have been huge for us. We were a struggling football club and four years ago, it looked like our only option was to fold up. To keep going has been really hard work and to be part of the 150th would have been really huge for us. Words can't describe what it would have done for us as a club. Wouldn't it have been wonderful if the AFL had put something back into the place the game comes from?"

I ask her how often she rang the AFL, asking to be involved in the 150th. "A lot". In the end, she was promised a high-profile AFL player would visit Moyston during the AFL's Community Football Weekend. The club planned a president's lunch, a half-time clinic for kids and for the AFL player to spend 10 minutes in each coach's box. She was rung on the Friday before the event and told "it wouldn't be happening".

"Why is the AFL playing these games like the Marn Grook Trophy and Dreamtime at the G?" asks Brain. And she's right.

If the opening essays in the AFL Official History are to be believed, Australian football has no more connection with Aboriginal culture than rugby union does. If the AFL believes its own official history, these games are no more than a marketing exercise. A seductive myth.

Meanwhile, at Moyston, such beliefs are part of the fabric of the local footy club. Brain says: "The AFL owes Moyston an explanation as to why it has been obliterated from the history of the game."

It sure does.