I AM an admirer of the paintings of Sidney Nolan. Nolan saw this land as a vast, ancient, pitiless stage and his genius was to recognise the historical dramas that have made human beings loom as epic figures within it.

He painted Ned Kelly. He painted Burke and Wills. I have no doubt he would have painted Tom Wills and the Aboriginal cricket team, had he known of them.

Look at the photo of Tom Wills and the Aboriginal cricketers at the MCG on Boxing Day 1866. Historians argue over whether the photo was taken in Melbourne or Sydney, but I'm more interested in Wills' face.

It's a mask. It looks like a river bed after a decade of drought. He's 31 but he could be 51. He's like a Vietnam vet.

Everyone thought they knew about the Vietnam War because it was on television. To the men who'd been in the war, they knew shit. Tom Wills had been in the war being fought at the Australian frontier. But he'd also grown up at Moyston, outside Ararat, playing with Aboriginal kids, speaking their language. He played black games before he played organised white sport.

Former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser once told me he couldn't see himself — he meant he couldn't explain to me, when asked, how or why he had become the person he is.

Fraser is highly unusual for his absence of racism given his background and generation. I reckon there's a bit of Tom Wills in Malcolm Fraser and vice-versa. Both western district boys, both sons of squatters, both sent to England as young men to finish their education.

I fancy Tommy sounded like Malcolm — that curious English edge to his speech. Tommy's accent changed at the Rugby school. His aunt who was in London wrote that he was becoming more gentlemanly which to my ears means more like those around him.

Tommy was captain of the Rugby cricket XI the year after the Charge of the Light Brigade in which four old boys of the school died. He was also drinking and having a mighty good time. When he got back to Australia, he was in his pomp. Arrogance may not have been a quality he lacked. He was a young leader. Creating leaders was what Rugby was about. Around this time he declared of football that we should "have a game of our own".

How good was he? As a cricketer, he became known as the Grace of Australia although by the time he met W. G. on a pebbly wicket in country South Australia, Tommy's body had gone and probably a good deal of his mind as a result of his drinking. Even so, Tommy got Grace in the second innings. As a footballer, he was described in the critical early period of the game's development (by a critic) as being without peer in the Southern Hemisphere, " as a player, and as a general".

As for the rules of the game, I think Tommy's idea was you make up the rules as you go along or, rather, he made up the rules and everyone else went along. Like E. J. Ted "Mr Football" Whitten with his flick pass. He soon fell out with the Melbourne Cricket Club, even coming to blows with some members. Like E. J. Whitten, Tommy was also a lair — or was at the time of his return from England.

Garry "Buddha" Hocking once told Tony "Libba" Liberatore you've done well in footy if you leave the game with a different name to the one you started with. Tom Wills was the first gentleman sportsman on first name terms with those in the crowd, then called — unlovingly and somewhat fearfully — the mob. The mob called him Tommy. Tommy Wills played with anyone, even the slum boys from Collingwood. Unfortunately, their view of him was not recorded. He drank with anyone too.

In 1861, the same year Burke and Wills perished in the desert, Tom Wills' father and the rest of his party were murdered by blacks in Queensland. Three times as many blacks died in the retributive raids that followed. In the immediate aftermath of his father's death, Tom Wills swore to kill any black who returned to his father's property.

Within two years, he was accused of permitting them to do so. Within five years he was coaching the Aboriginal team that became the first Australian cricket team to tour England. Significantly, he never accepted the white version of the massacre in which his father died.

In sporting terms, the tragedy of Wills's life was that he didn't tour England with the Aboriginal team. With him, it might have beaten the mighty MCC — as it was, it led on the first innings — and he would have been the first Australian captain to win at Lord's. His life would have made some sense. But by then he was a hopeless alcoholic.

Tom Wills died in 1880, the same year as Ned Kelly. Both were dropped into unmarked graves. Wills stabbed himself in the heart. That is the tragedy of his life but it is not the end of his story. Wills is a complex character whose life is open to interpretation but what was simple about him was this — he thought it was natural to play games with Aboriginal people.

This doesn't make him a moral missionary but it means he had knowledge in an area where so many Australians have been, and are, ignorant.

One hundred and fifty years later, basically due to the game he helped create, more people think like Tom Wills than ever.

"The Call from Tom Wills", a night commemorating Tom Wills, will be held at Moyston football oval on Monday August 18, starting at 6.30pm. Special guests Kevin Sheedy and Martin Flanagan. Inquiries to Ruth Brain: 0427 641480.