MARTIN Flanagan reproves me for suggesting "a single point of origin" (The Age, May 10) in my account in The Australian Game of Football Since 1858 of the origins of the first football rules written on May 17, 1859.

On the contrary, although for years conventional wisdom has proclaimed Tom Wills as the sole founder, I wrote there were three other men elected to be on a representative committee to sort out the varying views of the many young men in the colony who, after some experimental games in 1858, wanted a code so they could play football together instead of separately.

Hardly a single point of origin!

My second essay denied that Aboriginal football played any part in this, or that Tom Wills, having seen such football in his youth, incorporated some elements of the Aboriginal game into the codification.

Flanagan admits there is no evidence to confirm such a view and, indeed, what turns out to be support for the idea, depends on the romanticised account of the novelist, not the painstaking, focused research of the historian.

The self-confessed "imaginings of real events" in his novel The Call are just that.

He does not pretend it should be read as a seriously researched history. However, his evocative language and renowned empathy with Aboriginal culture have mistakenly led some readers to take what he wrote as historical fact.

Of course, Aborigines played football in this era. Not only did they play football but they played different forms of football in different parts of the country. James Dawson, who studied the clans of the Western District where Wills lived as a child, described the indigenous game he watched called min'gorm. Dawson lived at Port Fairy in the 1840s, and in the 1860s near Hamilton, places some distance from the northern area of the Grampians and the Wills family pastoral station called Lexington. These clans did, however, meet, feast, trade, corroboree and may have played some football, the "cultural exchange" by which Flanagan contends min'gorm would have reached Lexington.

Dawson maintained such a gathering occurred once a year, and that the coastal clans, that is, those he knew who lived near Port Fairy, did not attend "as they were afraid of treachery and of an attack on the part of the others". Evidently, the "cultural exchange" of the Western District clans was limited. It does not seem likely football reached the Lexington Aborigines too often, if at all. The Wills family never mentions football being played nearby. It was, of course, possible, and that is what I wrote: "Football could possibly have been played near Lexington."

If "cultural exchange" is as significant as Flanagan asserts, then reflect on the sporting culture of the colonists coming from England, where recent archival research shows football of different kinds was being played by at least 90 teams in the 1840s and 1850s, as well as at the elite private schools.

Wills spent his adolescence at Rugby School. If you came back to Melbourne in 1856, as he did, and wanted to suggest a game of football to be played, mindful of the racist, white, colonial population, what would you choose? Indigenous football or Rugby School football? The evidence favours the latter.

During 1858, before the rules were laid out and when scratch games were being played, some are described as being played under "a modification of Rugby (School, not Union) rules". Wills' fellow rule-maker, William Hammersley, wrote that, "Tom suggested the Rugby rules but nobody understood them but himself". Rugby School rules were rejected because they contained complicated offside rules and allowed violent "hacking", kicking a man's shin.

Wills did insist on the use of the oval Rugby School ball in 1860 and unsuccessfully advocated the addition of the Rugby goal crossbar in 1865.

There is no evidence found that refers to a link between any form of football played by Aborigines to the code played from 1859 in Melbourne, and later in country districts.

NOTE: Flanagan also claims that Wills wanted us to have "a game of our own". He relies on the autobiography of Wills' cousin, H.C.A. Harrison, for this phrase, published more than half a century (1923) after the rules were laid out (1859).

The respectable Harrison was always punctilious, putting his family's best face forward, not mentioning the alcoholic suicide of Tom, or their joint convict ancestors.

It is James Thompson, the Argus reporter, who doggedly pursues the idea of "a code of our own", using that term in print in 1860.