Andrew Bolt: ABC must admit its story on AFL pioneer Tom Wills is a hoax

The ABC used dodgy evidence to accuse AFL pioneer Tom Wills of murdering Aborigines — proving few care about truth when calling Australia racist.

I made a bad mistake in my column last Thursday attacking the ABC, and must apologise.

I’d assumed that even the ABC, despite its bias, wouldn’t use an apparently fake report to accuse an Australian Rules football pioneer of murdering Aborigines.

As I said last week, the ABC chose grand final week to smear Tom Wills, who helped to write the game’s rules and was the first captain of the Melbourne Football Club.

It relied on a report in the Chicago Tribune in 1895 that allegedly quoted Wills admitting to joining a reprisal raid and shooting Aborigines who’d killed 19 white settlers, including Wills’ father.

This rocked the AFL, which promised to ask indigenous advisers how to deal with this traumatic news.

But, stupid me, I read only the one bit of this Chicago Tribune report the ABC chose to show, and took for granted it was an honest account of a guilty man’s confession.

So my only complaint last Thursday was that the ABC was unfair not to note, for instance, how horrific the slaughter of the whites had been, with two babies and three young children among the dead.

Tom Wills devised what we know as AFL in the late 1850s.

As I said last week, the ABC chose grand final week to smear Tom Wills, who helped to write the game’s rules and was the first captain of the Melbourne Football Club.

But I’ve now read the whole Chicago Tribune story. I’m shocked: the ABC must apologise for using such dodgy evidence to yet again smear Australia as racist.

That Tribune writer claimed to quote Wills directly in huge slabs, 15 years after Wills’ suicide, but almost nothing he wrote is true.

He claimed Wills’ family came to Australia in the 1860s.

But this massacre was in 1861, and Wills’ parents were in fact born here.

He says Wills had just three sisters, and no brother. He had five sisters, plus three brothers.

He describes the massacre happening in Victoria. In fact, it was in Queensland, where Wills and his father went to run a new station.

He reports Wills saying he rode home from an errand in Melbourne after the Aborigines attacked: “By the very door were the heads of father, mother, and three sisters, stuck on sticks.”

In fact, Wills’ mother and sisters were all alive in Victoria, and died there decades later.

How could the ABC rely on such trashy evidence? Why did a Western Sydney University academic then declare in The Conversation: “Wills’ story is the AFL’s opportunity for truth telling about its ugly history”?

But few care about truth when calling Australia racist. Don’t expect the ABC to admit its story is a hoax.