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Thomas Wentworth "Tom" Wills (19 August 1835 – 2 May 1880) was an Australian sportsman who is credited with being the country's first cricketer of significance and a pioneer of Australian rules football. Born in the British colony of New South Wales to a wealthy family descended from convicts, Wills grew up in the bush on properties owned by his father, the pastoralist and politician Horatio Wills, in what is now the Australian state of Victoria. He befriended, and learned the language of, local Aborigines. At the age of 14, Wills was sent to England to attend Rugby School, where he became captain of its cricket team, and played an early version of rugby football. After Rugby, Wills represented the Cambridge University Cricket Club in the annual match against Oxford, and played in first-class matches for Kent and the Marylebone Cricket Club. An athletic all-rounder with devastating bowling analyses, he was regarded as one of the finest young cricketers in England. Returning to Victoria in 1856, Wills achieved Australia-wide stardom as a cricketer, captaining the Victorian team to repeated victories in intercolonial matches. He played for many clubs, most prominently the Melbourne Cricket Club, for which he served as honorary secretary. In 1858 he called for the formation of a "foot-ball club" with a "code of laws" to keep cricketers fit during the off-season. After founding the Melbourne Football Club the following year, Wills and three other members codified the first laws of Australian rules football. He and his cousin H. C. A. Harrison spearheaded the sport as players and administrators. In 1861, at the height of his fame, Wills joined his father on a trek into the Queensland outback to establish a family property. Two weeks after their arrival, Wills' father and 18 others were murdered in the largest massacre of settlers by Aborigines in Australian history. Wills survived and returned to Victoria in 1864. He continued to play football and cricket, and, in 1866–67, coached and captained an Aboriginal XI—the first Australian cricket team to tour England. In a career marked by controversy, Wills challenged the divide between amateur and professional cricketers, and was frequently accused of bending rules to the point of cheating. Called for throwing in 1872, he mounted a failed comeback four years later on the brink of the birth of Test cricket, by which time his sporting glory belonged to a colonial past that seemed "like a distant land". Psychological trauma from the massacre was worsened by his alcoholism. Now destitute, Wills was admitted to the Melbourne Hospital in 1880, suffering from delirium tremens, but shortly afterwards escaped and returned to his home on the city's margins, where he committed suicide by stabbing a pair of scissors through his heart. Wills fell into obscurity after his death, but since the 1990s he has undergone a resurgence in Australian culture. He was an inaugural inductee into the Australian Football Hall of Fame, and is commemorated with a statue outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground. In modern times he is characterised as an archetype of the tragic sports hero, and as a symbol of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The claim of an Aboriginal influence on Wills' conception of Australian football has been the subject of heated debate. According to biographer Greg de Moore, Wills "stands alone in all his absurdity, his cracked egalitarian heroism and his fatal self-destructiveness—the finest cricketer and footballer of the age." ==Family and early years== Tom Wills was born on 19 August 1835 on the Molonglo Plain near modern-day Canberra, in what was the British penal colony of New South Wales, as the elder child of Horatio and Elizabeth (née McGuire) Wills. Tom was a third-generation Australian descended from convicts: his mother was born to convicts transported from Ireland, and his paternal grandfather was Edward Wills, an Englishman whose death sentence for highway robbery was commuted to transportation, arriving in Botany Bay aboard the "hell ship" ''Hillsborough'' in 1799. After receiving a conditional pardon in 1803, Edward amassed immense wealth through mercantile activity in Sydney with his free wife Sarah (née Harding). He died in 1811, five months before Horatio's birth, and Sarah remarried to convict George Howe, owner of Australia's first newspaper, the ''Sydney Gazette''. During his tenure as the newspaper's editor, Horatio met Elizabeth, an orphan from Parramatta. They married in December 1833. Seventeen months after his birth, Tom was baptised Thomas Wentworth Wills in the parish of St Andrew's, Sydney, after statesman William Charles Wentworth. Influenced by Wentworth's pro-Currency writings and the emancipist cause, Horatio set forth a strident nationalist agenda in his 1832–33 journal ''The Currency Lad'', the first publication to call for an Australian republic. Seeking to translate his rhetoric into action, Horatio took up pastoral pursuits in the mid-1830s and moved with his family to the sheep run "Burra Burra" on the Molonglo River. Although athletic from an early age, Tom was prone to illness, and at one stage in 1839 his parents "almost despaired of his recovery". In November 1840, in light of Thomas Mitchell's discovery of "Australia Felix", they overlanded south to the Grampians in the colony's Port Phillip District (now the state of Victoria), and, after establishing a run on Mount William, moved a few miles north to the foothills of Mount Ararat, named so by Horatio because "like the Ark, we rested there". Horatio went through a period of intense religiosity while in the Grampians; at times his diary descends into incantation, "perhaps even madness". He implored himself and Tom to base their lives upon the New Testament. The Wills family settled on a large property named "Lexington" (near present-day Moyston) in an area that served as a meeting place for Djab wurrung Aboriginal clans. Tom, as an only child, "was thrown much into the companionship of aborigines". In an account of corroborees from childhood, his cousin H. C. A. Harrison remembered Tom's ability to learn Aboriginal songs, mimic their voice and gestures, and "speak their language as fluently as they did themselves, much to their delight." It is speculated that Tom may have also played Aboriginal sports. Horatio wrote fondly of his son's kinship with Aborigines, and allowed local clans to live and hunt on Lexington. However, like many frontiersmen in the area, he was implicated in deadly conflict with what he called "distant predatory tribes". Tom's first sibling, Emily, was born on Christmas Day 1842. In 1846 Wills began attendance at William Brickwood's School in Melbourne. There he was looked after by Horatio's brother Thomas (Tom's namesake), a Victorian separatist and son-in-law of the Wills family's partner in the shipping trade, convict Mary Reibey. Tom played in his first cricket matches at school, and he came in contact with the Melbourne Cricket Club through Brickwood, the club's vice-president. Wills returned to Lexington in 1849 where the family had grown to include siblings Cedric, Horace and Egbert. Mainly self-educated, Horatio had ambitious plans for the education of his children, especially Tom: 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tom Wills」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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