On October 16th, The Call, based on Martin Flanagan’s 1993 book of the same name, opens at the Playbox theatre in Melbourne. It is based on the story of Tom Wills, who is credited with synthesising a number of games, including Marn Grook, to produce Australian Rules. He was also coach of the first Aboriginal cricket team that later toured England. Ironically, his father, Horatio, was killed in Australia’s greatest massacre of whites by Aboriginals. Tom stabbed himself to death at age 44. Flanagan talks to Robert Drane about the play, Tom Wills and the game he produced. 

What made you think The Call would lend itself to stage adaptation?

Bruce Myles the Director, a Hawthorn man, approached me and said he wanted to do it. I said to him ‘do you understand sport?’, because I don’t like theatrical adaptations of sporting works, when actors can’t act sport.

I notice there’s choreography in the play. Is that to get the actors to move like sportsmen, or because there is dancing in it?

Both. They come together in the fact that the old Aboriginal game of Marn Grook is very close to a dance. The fact that the story had an Aboriginal dimension immediately lent it to dance.

Are you happy that it won’t look corny?

In certain respects Bruce had to trust me and I had to trust him. But he knows sport and we were constantly looking for the same things. When I wrote scenes he’d say, “You’re reporting. You’ve got to make it sound pretty sharp.” That was the big thing we had to work out.

What made you believe it would work?

I’m a bit of a hitchhiker in life. This car comes along and I trust the bloke driving so I get in. It’s taken me to the theatre and feels OK so far. I sincerely hope it’s a success because it’s not just about Tom Wills, it’s about Australian culture. We’re going to try very hard to get the football community interested because Australian football is one of the last bastions of Australian culture.

You going to get first night jitters?

I’m grateful I’ve written a couple of novels and been scourged alive for them. It’s a bit like being shirtfronted. Once you know how hard you can be hit, it’s never quite as bad again.

Tell us a little about the story.

It’s about a man in this time trying to look back on a man in another time. I mean this place was a lot different to what it is now. After that book came out, the story didn’t end for me. I kept on getting to know it. The book doesn’t presume that I intimately know Tom Wills. I based him partly on Gary Ablett, and partly on Brent Crosswell. Ablett doesn’t display great knowingness about himself, and my experience with sportsmen is that they’re like artists. They don’t necessarily know how they do it. Crosswell was an intellectual and an athlete at a time when you weren’t allowed to be both. He ended up a double outsider, and that what Wills was. If you understand that, you understand the whole story.

What was it about the Tom Wills story you felt you needed to imprint on the Australian legend?

In 1993, I spent a year with Footscray footy club. They had no history on their walls and they hardly spoke. I started reading everything I could on the history of Australian football and the history of Melbourne’s Western Suburbs. I came across a passage about Tom Wills – about five lines. I went to the state library and started cross-referencing everything against him and his father.  I think he’s a legend, in the way that Ned Kelly or Phar Lap is a legend, or Bradman, or Darcy. I thought, I want to get this bastard out of the dirt where he’s buried and throw him up into the sky. Everyone will have a different version of Tom Wills, but that doesn’t matter to me. What matters is to just get it up there.

My Tom Wills is predicated on the fact that a white boy who happens to be a sporting genius, who plays black games first, before he plays white games, is always going to carry something of that within himself, in the way that David Gower grew up in Africa and played like a West Indian. I’m not making an historical argument that football is an Aboriginal game. Historians can argue about that.  Some bloke gave me a caning on radio and said I mythologise the origins of the game. I never have. I never said Wills did more than say “Let’s have a game of our own.” The interesting question is, “Why did he say that?”

Some aren’t happy with the place Marn Grook now has in Aussie Rules history, saying it’s a myth that it was the origin of Aussie Rules. But you actually don’t make those claims, do you?

In John Howard’s Australia, there’s black and there’s white. I’m saying there’s grey. You could say The Call was a reconciliation novel, about an utterly unreconciled man. He carried the two cultures within him, but he also carried the war in him.

Is that why he died?

The chaos between two cultures was embodied in him. He’s not accepted into the white circle. So the people who give him solace are the people who murdered his father. Wills was the loneliest man in the universe by the end of his life.

When the Aboriginal team starts and Wills coaches them six years after his old man’s been murdered by blacks, and they come up the east coast, four of them die, and the deaths are listed as pneumonia but they’re all alcohol related. Wills was drinking with the team. Now, was Wills taking the grog in? There was one member of that team who was really strong in Aboriginal law. Where does that put Wills relative to Aboriginal law? That’s what Michael Long told me. Four blokes died on that tour, and their traditional penalty is payback. I don’t think Wills knew everything that was going on.

You’re from a literary family. Do you and your brother, the novelist Richard, ever talk about writing?

All the time. We have a lot to do with each other’s work one way or the other. We’re the Krakouer brothers. We’ve got to the point where we can be totally honest with each other without being misunderstood.

Do you consider yourself a writer or a journalist?

A writer. My first instinct is to put life on the page. I approach the space they give me, no matter how big or small, like a painter approaches a canvas. I don’t start until I’ve got something life-like. What I write has to interest me. If it doesn’t, it won’t interest anyone else. The times when it’s ever become a real issue, about whether I’m a writer or a journalist, I’ve chosen that I’m a writer and been prepared to put my job on the line.

Is sport the doorway through which you enter the world of larger issues?

The last book, The Game in the Time of War was based on the fact that, if the war in Iraq was coming, one of the last places I could relax was by going to the footy. Maybe in a different culture, I would have written about different things, but in this culture, sport was the only way I could say certain things.

How do you feel about matters like performance enhancing drugs or the corporate influence in sport?

My reading of the history of sport is that there’s always something going on somewhere. I enjoy the characters. When I get people asking me to write columns that make sport into a middle-class morality play, I always buck, because then you forget about blokes like Tommy Wills. That’s why he was forgotten, because he was an alcoholic. I’ve never written about drugs in sport. It’s not something I have a large view on.

Money?

I remember Phil Cleary saying that one day they’ll make a certain change, and the magic will be gone. At the moment, footy’s still got the magic, and when it’s good, it’s very good. But if I keep worrying about the future of Australian football, I’ll lose my enjoyment of it. I barrack for the game.

Does that mean the fate of individual clubs like the Roos or Bulldogs means less to you than the game?

One measure of the game is the characters. If you reduce the number of clubs, you reduce the number of characters. North Melbourne are fantastic, and the Doggies, after spending a year out there, I love the Doggies. I love ‘em all.

Do you think writing about AFL is an art still to be refined, like cricket writing or boxing writing?

George Best told me that the writing about a sport will tell you the quality of the sport. If the sport continues to be of high quality, it will provoke deep responses from artists. A tutor at Melbourne University said that my football writing was over the top. I wish I’d said ‘I hope it’s so far over the top it reaches the other side.’ That was C.L.R.  James’ point. Why should you write any less seriously about sport than you do about music, or anything else?

Published in Inside Sport, July 2010