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)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I.... I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Major [William] McKinley visited me. He is on a stumping tour.... I criticized the bloody-shirt course of the canvass. It seems to me to be bad “politics,” and of no use.... It is a stale issue. An increasing number of people are interested in good relations with the South.... Two ways are open to succeed in the South: 1. A division of the white voters. 2. Education of the ignorant. Bloody-shirt utterances prevent division.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)