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 east of Melbourne playing the game.
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This connection has become culturally important to many Indigenous Australians, including celebrities and professional footballers from communities in which Australian rules football is highly popular. Some historians claim that Marn Grook had a role in the formation of Australian rules football, which originated in Melbourne in 1858 and was codified the following year by members of the Melbourne Football Club. A news article published in 1906 suggests that the game of Marngrook had been observed around a century prior. Although the consensus among historians is that Marn Grook existed before European arrival, it is not clear how long the game had been played in Victoria or elsewhere on the Australian continent. The earliest anecdotal account was in 1841, a decade prior to the Victorian gold rush. The earliest accounts emerged decades after the European settlement of Australia, mostly from the colonial Victorian explorers and settlers.
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The Warlpiri tribe of Central Australia played a very similar kicking and catching game with a possum skin ball, and the game was known as pultja.
Historical reports support such games being played all over south-eastern Australia, including the Djabwurrung and Jardwadjali people and other tribes in the Wimmera, Mallee and Millewa regions of western Victoria (However, according to some accounts, the range extended to the Wurundjeri in the Yarra Valley, the Gunai people of Gippsland, and the Riverina in south-western New South Wales. Individual players who consistently exhibited outstanding skills, such as leaping high over others to catch the ball, were often praised, but proficiency in the sport gave them no tribal influence. A winner could only be declared if one of the sides agreed that the other side had played better. However, to observers the game appeared to lack a team objective, having no real rules or scoring system. The game was subject to strict behavioural protocols: for instance all players had to be matched for size, gender and skin group relationship. It involved large numbers of players, and games were played over an extremely large area. Marn Grook featured punt kicking and catching a stuffed ball. Marn Grook or marngrook, from the Woiwurung language for "ball" or "game", is a traditional Indigenous Australian football game played at gatherings and celebrations by sometimes more than 100 players. (From William Blandowski's Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen, 1857, (Haddon Library, Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge) Australian Aboriginal domestic scene depicting traditional recreation, including one child kicking the ball, with the object and caption being to "never let the ball hit the ground".