their families to the Grampians in the colony's Port Phillip District (now the state of Victoria). After squatting on Mount William, they moved a few miles north through the foothills of Mount Ararat, named so by Horatio because "like the Ark, we rested there". Horatio went through a period of intense religiosity while in the Grampians; at times his diary descends into incantation, "perhaps even madness", according to a number of scholarly assessments. He implored himself and Tom to base their lives upon the Gospel of John. Living in tents, the Wills family settled a large property named Lexington (near present-day Moyston) in an area used by Djab wurrung Aboriginal clans as a meeting place. According to family members, Tom, as one of the few white children in the area, "was thrown much into the companionship of aborigines". In an account of corroborees from childhood, his cousin H. C. A. Harrison remembered Tom's ability to learn Aboriginal songs, mimic their voice and gestures, and "speak their language as fluently as they did themselves, much to their delight." He may have also played Aboriginal sports. Horatio wrote fondly of his son's kinship with Aboriginal people, and allowed local clans to live and hunt on Lexington. However, George Augustus Robinson, the district's Chief Protector of Aborigines, implicated Horatio and other local settlers in the murder of Aboriginal people. Horatio blamed "distant predatory tribes" for provoking hostilities in the area, and the closest he came to admitting that he had killed Aboriginal people was in a letter to Governor Charles La Trobe: "... we shall be compelled in self defence to measures that may involve us in unpleasant consequences". Tom's first sibling, Emily, was born on Christmas Day 1842. In 1846 Wills began attendance at William Brickwood's School in Melbourne, where he lived with Horatio's brother Thomas (Tom's namesake), a Victorian separatist and son-in-law of the Wills family's partner in the shipping trade, convict Mary Reibey. Tom played in his first cricket matches at school and came in contact with the Melbourne Cricket Club through Brickwood, the club's vice-president. By 1849, the year Wills' schooling in Melbourne ended, his family had grown to include brothers Cedric, Horace and Egbert. Horatio had ambitious plans for the education of his children, especially Tom: England Rugby School Wills' father sent him to England in February 1850, aged fourteen, to attend Rugby School, then the most prestigious