If there’s something a lifetime of following footy teaches you it’s that the rain never arrives when you want it to. With that in mind I find myself standing in a persistent drizzle on the corner of Upper Heidelberg road and Darebin street in Heidelberg, 13km north-east of Melbourne, on a dark and gloomy morning that at least offers a bright prospect.
Local English as an additional language teacher, amateur football historian and true believer Phil Dimitriadis is about to guide me through the gates of Warringal cemetery to the newly restored grave of Tom Wills, the founder and father of Australian rules football. Finals beckon, so its hard to begrudge winter’s lingering chill.
What’s in front of us as we huddle from the rain under Dimitriadis’s umbrella is far different than the sight confronting this determined footy fan when he first approached the monument two years ago, on a regular visit to Warringal to pay his respects to his late father, Tom, only “a short stab pass away”. Decades of neglect had left Wills’ resting place a shabby and crumbling ruin, its cast-iron railings rusted over and the grave’s central slab broken.
Dimitriadis couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “When I found it in a state of total neglect it pissed me off,” he tells me. So he issued a call to arms, posting a contribution to the Footy Almanac website (since deleted, which is a good thing because I don’t have to link to it and make you tear up too) that was equal parts manifesto and exasperated concession of defeat. Included were photos that detailed the extent of the damage. It stirred something in those who read it. “People were really upset when they saw it,” Dimitriadis says.
“We sat on it for a few months, and then Marius [Cuming, a fellow Almanacker] got on to it. We had a meeting in September that year and he organised the crowdfunding and liaised with Melbourne memorials to make sure it was restored as close to the original as possible, which it is. It just went from there.”
Now, thanks to 150 donors who contributed to the $15,000 crowdfunding campaign driven by Dimitriadis and a cohort of fellow football history buffs – including the Almanac founder, John Harms, Wills’ biographer, Greg de Moore, and the chief organiser, Cuming – the grave has been restored to its original state, as per a previous overhaul helmed by the Melbourne Cricket Club for the centenary of Wills’ death in 1980.
For Dimitriadis this has been a deeply meaningful quest to preserve the memory of an important sporting figure, but also an unexpected source of personal salvation. “I’ve had the same issues with alcoholism and delirium tremens that he [Wills] suffered, so I had an empathy for that as well,” he tells me, matter-of-factly. “I was struggling with a relapse myself at the time and it was as if this guy was reaching out from the grave and saying, ‘Do something to help yourself.’ It was really weird. It was almost like a metaphysical encounter.
“I just thought of all that with my own battles and his, and I just made the connection. I want his name to be brought out for the good things he did and not just the dark elements. Though they’re important to explore too, but not to judge.”
Standing in front of the freshly restored monument and talking footy for an hour and a half, we both soon forget the biting morning cold. Neither of us outwardly acknowledges the sweeping backdrop provided by the distant green valleys depicted after Wills’ death by the likes of Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts – views perfectly glimpsed from the plot high up on the cemetery’s pronounced slope.
Widely recognised as Australia’s first truly great sportsman – and certainly its first significant cricketer – Tom Wills remains a strangely under-explored figure in Australian sport. On account of his central role in the creation of Australia’s football code, and his significant and fascinating ties with Indigenous Australia (his father was one of 19 people killed in a bloody chapter of the frontier wars, the Cullin-la-ringo massacre in central Queensland, yet only five years later Wills was coaching the country’s first Aboriginal cricket team), this is particularly regrettable.
Yet even at current levels of apathy, relatively speaking, we’re in the midst of Wills’ great revival, driven in large part by the football writer Martin Flanagan’s 1998 novel The Call, a fictionalised account of Wills’ remarkable life, and the appearance 10 years later of Greg de Moore’s comprehensive biography. A Louis Laumen statue of Wills now adorns the concourse outside the MCG, Greater Western Sydney train on the Tom Wills Oval, and a Wills documentary was screened (in a somewhat off-Broadway timeslot) on network TV. Yet outside historians and scholars Wills is only partially understood and undoubtedly under-appreciated, his complicated life and abundantly clear legacy paid no more than lip service by the AFL.
That is difficult for diehards like Phil Dimitriadis to accept. In 2008 the league commemorated the 150th anniversary of the famous game between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch college with a soon-forgotten Wills-themed round, but there has been nothing in the way of a follow-up, and the AFL showed no interest in the grave restoration project. “If it wasn’t for him, they wouldn’t have their game and their bloody big-money positions,” Dimitriadis says, “It’s about respect.”
He adds: “There’s something to be learned from this in terms of why we do the things we do as sports fans. The role that he played in the formation of the game is something we just take for granted. He was the one who wrote the letter and said, ‘We need a game in the winter for our cricketers.’ His part in the rules might be debatable, but he lit the flame. That can’t be denied.”
Funding for and interest in the project did come from the Melbourne Cricket Club and Cricket Australia, the latter of which has now expressed a desire to properly honour the 150th anniversary of the trailblazing, Wills-initiated 1868 Aboriginal Australian cricket tour of England, perhaps with a documentary. “Once they found out about it, and that we were fair dinkum about restoring it, Cricket Australia wanted to be a part of it,” says Dimitriadis. “They’ve been good. The interest was really genuine.”
On a practical level, the project could not have got off the ground without Cuming, who produced a video for the crowdfunding campaign and liaised with Melbourne memorials. It has also shown the strength, determination and community spirit of the Footy Almanac community, enough of whom rallied for the cause and dug into their pockets when a football league swimming in money wouldn’t.
Nobody poured as much of themselves into the project as Phil Dimitriadis. “Symbolically, I saw it as like a restoration of myself,” he says. “The more I got involved with it – when I started I was suffering from really severe depression – just being part of this project helped me see my life in a different light, and get help. I’ve been great the last year or so. I think being part of this really helped in my healing.”
It being September, Dimitriadis and I end up talking about falling in and out of love with footy and how easy it is to become cynical and lose sight of what made you cherish the game in the first place. For Phil, it’s been a case of watching games through his daughter’s eyes. “Her expression, and the hugging … It lit another fuse in me,” he says. “This is why I love it. This is why I keep coming back. Why deny it, and why let the bastards at the AFL and all the commercial interests ruin it?”
This is a case of football not just intersecting with life, but revealing itself at life’s very core – love, family, community, and the chaos and unpredictability of human existence. “My parents shifted to Collingwood from the village, and from civil war in Greece in the 50s,” Dimitriadis says. “Collingwood was their new village. For their kids, part of that expression and identity was following the football club. So in a way the football club symbolised our village: a new language, a new game. Powerful. It stays with you. It’s huge.”
We also talk about how lamentable it is that some of Wills’ philosophies didn’t outlive him. “Sometimes I think it’s a tenuous link, but I think of the way [Adam] Goodes was booed out of the game last year,” Dimitriadis says. “This bloke [Wills] was so far ahead in his vision and I still think we haven’t in many ways as a country, as a culture … we don’t get it.
“The more I learn about his life the more I’m intrigued by the influence he had on cricket with the Aboriginal team in 1868 – I mean, that was huge. In the context of the society we’re living in now, to get a team of Indigenous cricketers together back then was incredible, especially considering an Aboriginal tribe massacred his old man and 18 other people. And he tried to do something to heal the situation.
“The more I learn about him the more I want to know about his motivations for that. Have a look at the representation of Indigenous Australians in cricket. It’s disgraceful.”
Dimitriadis now has his sights set on loftier goals for the project: a Tom Wills society with an annual dinner on Wills’ 19 August birthday, ongoing preservation of the grave, plus – if funding permits – an annual Tom Wills scholar who can address members on research conducted into this fascinating Australian.
The last thing I wonder is what it felt like to see the finished restoration for the first time, after investing so much of himself into honouring a man who’d been dead for 135 years. “It actually felt like a new beginning and a rewriting or revisiting of Tom Wills’ life,” he says.
“It was like opening a new chapter. It’s a new beginning.”
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