Marn Grook (also spelt marngrook), literally meaning "Game ball", is the collective name given to a number of traditional Australian Aboriginal ball games believed to have been played at gatherings and celebrations of up to 50 players.
Evidence supports the game being played primarily by the Djabwurrung and Jardwadjali [1] people and other tribes in the Wimmera, The Mallee and Millewa regions of western Victoria, Australia (which are commonly associated with the name "Marn Grook"); however, according to some accounts, the range extended to the Wurundjeri in the Yarra Valley, the Gunai people of Gippsland region in Victoria and the Riverina in south western New South Wales.
The earliest accounts, mostly from the colonial Victorian explorers and settlers, date back to just prior to the Victorian gold rush, but the game may have been played since ancient times.
Regarding the playing of the game:
- there was no scoring;
- teams could consist of extremely large numbers of players;
- games were played over an extremely large area;
- the main object appears to have been to have fun, although good passages of play by individual players was usually commented upon; this particularly applied to high marking.[1]
Marn Grook is especially notable as it is claimed by some to have had an influence on the modern game of Australian rules football, most notably in the catching of the kicked ball (the mark in Australian football) and, in particular, high jumping (the spectacular mark in Australian football) exhibited by the players of both games.[2]
The 1858 Australian Rules game between Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar School, which is believed by most historians to have been the first Australian Rules game, included a number of the features of Marn Grook; in particular, the large number of players and the large area of play (the 1858 game had goals that were 500 metres apart). Both of these features disappeared from Australian Rules after the first rules were drawn up in 1859.
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Robert Brough-Smyth, in an 1878 book The Aborigines of Victoria, quoted William Thomas, a Protector of Aborigines in Victoria, who stated that in about 1841 he had witnessed Wurundjeri Aborigines playing the game.
The game was a favourite of the Wurundjeri-william clan and the two teams were sometimes based on the traditional totemic moeties of Bunjil (eagle) and Waang (crow). Robert Brough-Smyth saw the game played at Coranderrk Mission Station, where ngurungaeta William Barak discouraged the playing of imported games like cricket and encouraged the traditional native game of marn grook.[3]
An 1857 sketch found in 2007 describes the game Victorian scientist William Blandowski saw the Nyeri Nyeri people playing a football game at Merbein, on his expedition to the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers.[4]
The image is inscribed:
Historian Greg de Moore comments:
In 1889, anthropologist Alfred Howitt, wrote that the game was played between large groups on a totemic basis — the white cockatoos versus the black cockatoos, for example, which accorded with their skin system. Acclaim and recognition went to the players who could leap or kick the highest. Howitt wrote:
Tom Wills, who drew up the rules of Australian rules football in 1858-59, was raised in Victoria's western districts and is said to have played with local Aboriginal children. He recalled watching a game in which they kicked a possum skin about the size of an orange, stuffed with charcoal.[6] The game was totemic, with teams often representing animal totems. Although there were no goal posts, the game was similar to keepings off and the winner was somewhat subjective. It was sometimes the side with the player who had the most possessions or the side that kicked the ball the most and the furthest. Teams played until there was a single winner.
Some claim that the origin of the Australian rules term "mark", meaning a clean, fair catch of a kicked ball, followed by a free kick, is derived from the Aboriginal word "mumarki" used in Marn Grook, and meaning "to catch".[7][8] However, many point out the fact that the word "mark" has been used in British football codes since the 1830s—in both rugby football and early Association football (soccer)—and that this claim is therefore a false etymology. Indeed, the term mark is still used in Rugby Union in reference to a fair catch by a player who calls "mark" when catching a ball inside their team's 22 metre line. The origin of the term "mark" is said to come from the practice in these early codes when a player, after catching the ball, marks the ground with his foot to show where the catch had been taken and calls out "mark", in order to be awarded a free kick.[citation needed]
In 2002, in a game at Stadium Australia, the Sydney Swans and Essendon Football Club began to compete for the Marngrook Trophy, awarded after home-and-away matches each year between the two teams in the Australian Football League. Though it commemorates marngrook, the match is played under normal rules of the AFL, rather than the traditional aboriginal game.[9]
Origins of Australian rules football
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