Early Life and Education
Wills was born on 19 August 1835 on his father's property on the Molonglo Plain near present day Canberra, in what was the British colony of New South Wales, to Horatio Spencer Howe Wills, and his wife, Elizabeth (née McGuire). Both his parents were descended from convicts: his mother was the daughter of two convicts transported from Ireland, and his father was the son of Edwards Wills, who was originally sentenced to death for highway robbery before having his sentence commuted to transportation. Wills' parents had married in December 1833, with Horatio Wills at the time serving as editor of the Sydney Gazette. A year after Wills was born, he was baptised Thomas Wentworth Wills after William Wentworth, a famous native-born emancipist in early colonial New South Wales.
The Wills family lived at Burra Burra near Gundagai until around 1840. In November that year, Tom moved with his parents and the rest of his family to the Mount William area of Victoria. A couple of years later at the end of 1842 they moved to Lexington, a 125,000-acre (510 km2) property in the Ararat District of Western Victoria. He was educated in Melbourne for two years.
There is no evidence that Wills played Marn Grook, an Aboriginal game alleged to have similarities with Australian rules football; however, the connection may have had some influence. Wills was fluent in the language of the people with whom he grew up, the Djab wurrung, knew their songs and dances, mimicked their gestures, and the first games he played were with local Aboriginal children. Due to his family's extensive interaction with local aborigines, it is assumed that he would have at the very least seen the game being played and some believe this may have had an influence on his rules for Australian football. Lawton Wills Cooke, the grandson of Tom's brother Horace, reported that "Tom played some form of football with Aboriginal kids. We have no documents to prove this, but there is a family story that they kicked a possum skin sewn up in the shape of a ball."
Read more about this topic: Tom Wills
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)