30 years, I’ve been party to futile attempts to “get up” films and mini-series about both Tom Wills and Weary Dunlop. In 2013, a bold trio from Sydney – David Thrum, Tom Thompson and Phil Austin – took up the Tom Wills challenge once more. I wrote the treatment; they took it upon themselves to place it with as many people in the film and television industry as they could. The replies were uniformly depressing. There were issues of cultural politics. The ABC and people connected with government funding bodies were apprehensive about the scene involving the Cullinlaringo massacre, the biggest massacre of whites by blacks in Australian history. No matter that the script detailed that the whites then went out and killed possibly ten times as many blacks in retributive raids or through the agency of the Native Police. But the most common response was that the ending – Tom committing suicide in a horrible manner – was “too negative”.
In fact, Tom’s suicide isn’t the ending – the final scene is Warlpiri man Liam Jurrah taking the 2010 AFL Mark of the Year, tumbling over the top of a pack and catching the ball on the way down. But that scene, and all which it implied, was routinely overlooked because of the manner of Wills’s death. In 1880, Tom Wills was buried in an unmarked grave and his memory was deleted from polite society because he committed suicide. Australians in the 21st century would think themselves so much more broad-minded than that, but the reality is that it was still a story no-one wanted to tell. I understand that all sorts of modifications and additions have to be made to a historical story in bringing it to the screen, but there were issues I would not compromise on and one was the stature of the drama.
Tom Wills is the young man with at least two, and possibly four, different versions of Australian history running through his head. (blackfeller, whitefeller, convict, squatter and all the possible variations thereof ). No-one in his time understood him. How could they? He didn’t understand himself. All he knew was that when he was out there, on the sports field, he was himself. Out there, he did what he had always done, what had made him a great sportsman – he did what came naturally to him and that inevitably takes us back to the factors which shaped his nature. Towards the end of his life, Tom expressed the fear that there was no place for him. In one terrible sense, he was correct. He had shared the innocence of play with Aboriginal kids, he had witnessed the barbarity of the frontier war, he had coached the Aboriginal cricket team. Who had seen what he’d seen? He was the old sportsman, the former champion whose life had been filled with crowds. Now they were gone and he was alone in a haunted landscape. Tom Wills is a tragedy. What’s more, he’s an Australian tragedy.
In 2013, when I took on the task of writing a film treatment about Tom Wills, I crossed a personal line. What films and novels have in common is that the reader/viewer has to be able to visualise the subject – has to be able, literally, to see them in their mind’s eye. And so, for four weeks, I dared myself to actually picture Tom Wills in the various situations I knew him to have been in during his life and backed my fancy. It was like entering a creative delirium. Pictures appeared before me which I wrote down in scenes. If I do the same thing in ten years’ time, I may come up with a different story but I doubt that will happen. I doubt the energy that accompanied the writing of this treatment will ever return.
It was Tom Thompson’s idea to publish my movie treatment of the Tom Wills story as a book along with photographs, sketches and paintings from that time with which to feed the reader’s imaginings. And so, in this way and for these reasons, The Tom Wills Picture Show was created...
Martin Flanagan
Melbourne
1
1840, Western Victoria. A wagon labours across a grass plain and up a slope, surrounded by several hundred sheep and a number of shepherds. The camera lingers on the face of one of these, a rough-looking man called Miller. In the wagon is a pregnant woman of 24, a four-year-old boy and a short exuberant man of 30. This is the family of Horatio Wills. His Irish-born wife Elizabeth is clearly weary from the arduous journey overland from New South Wales. She holds her belly, there is discomfort in her face. The boy’s name is Tom. They are in western Victoria only that name has not been invented. They are in the colony of Port Phillip and they are this particular area’s first white settlers. He is a man who dreams grand dreams and has the drive and energy to make them real. He is the son of Edward Wills, a convict trans-ported to Botany Bay for highway robbery. He would have been hanged but for the intervention, on his behalf, of the Duke of Marlborough, thus leading to the belief that Edward Wills was an illegitimate member of the Duke of Marlborough’s clan, the Churchills.
Horatio springs from the wagon. Before him are the range of rocky outcrops the Scottish settlers who follow will call the Grampians. The local Aboriginal people, the Tjapwurrung, call the mountains Gariwerd and say it is the place where fire first fell to earth. The Wills family are surrounded by rolling hills and native grass plains. Horatio takes Tom from the cart. Holding him in his arms, he says gleefully, “Look, Tom, look! This is the new world and it is ours, ours to fashion and shape”. Horatio hardly seems to notice the boy does not respond. Horatio turns to his wife. “Elizabeth,” he cries. “Elizabeth, I am naming this place Ararat because here, as in the Bible, we rested”. Her response is remarkably like her son’s. She merely wants to lie down. Horatio’s zeal, his excitement, remain undiluted.
2
Six months later. A tent now stands where the wagon stopped. Elizabeth emerges, a basket with clothing in her hands, no longer pregnant. From within the tent a baby can be heard crying. She is a pale, nervous woman. We see a sudden look of fear on her face. The camera shows us what she has seen – a group of blacks camped round a waterhole several hundred metres down the slope to the west. Then she looks around, crying out, “Tom! Tom!” Dropping the basket, she cries out, “Horatio! Horatio!”, and runs away towards a group of men cutting redgums 100 metres away. “The blacks are here. The blacks are here and I can’t find Tom”. For the first time we see fear in Horatio’s face. He rushes to the tent, looks down, sees the blacks camp which has appeared in the night. To one side a group of four or five kids are playing a ball game with a stuffed possum skin. One of the kids is white. It’s Tom.
“Get the guns,” says Elizabeth.
“No, no, no,” says Horatio, putting a calming hand across his wife’s front. “No, no, leave this to me. I’ve dealt with native folk before. I lived among them when I was a whaler”.
Horatio strides down the slope and into the blacks’ camp sporting a big smile. He walks among them nodding and smiling, showing obsequious respect. Stopping in front of an old woman, he leans forward and puts on a performance, gesturing elaborately. “You – me – the same. Me – worship – the Sun”. He point upwards to the sky and makes a bowing motion which then becomes a little dance. “At night – big black – me worship the moon”. The old woman’s impassive face at first looks puzzled. Then a woman to her left cackles at the sheer stupidity of Horatio’s dance and the old woman laughs, too. Encouraged, Horatio continues, “Me jump-up whitefeller like William Buckley” He holds up his white skin. “Me blackfeller underneath”. Judging Horatio to be mad but harmless, the tension dissipates. Horatio believes he has persuaded the blacks he is one of them. He turns and firmly takes his small son’s arm.
“Tom, we are going,” he says.
The kid resists. “But I don’t want to.”
Horatio pulls Tom away, nodding and smiling to the Aboriginal people he passes.
