drinking, likely as a means of numbing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms that plagued him after the massacre. In 1880, suffering from delirium tremens, Wills committed suicide by stabbing himself in the heart. Australia's first sporting celebrity, Wills fell into obscurity after his death, but has undergone a revival in Australian culture since the 1980s. Today he is described as an archetypal tragic sports hero and as a symbol of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. He has also become the central figure in "football's history wars"—an ongoing dispute over whether Marn Grook, an Aboriginal ball game, influenced early Australian rules. According to biographer Greg de Moore, Wills "stands alone in all his absurdity, his cracked egalitarian heroism and his fatal self-destructiveness—the finest cricketer and footballer of the age". Family and early years Wills was born on 19 August 1835 on the Molonglo Plain near modern-day Canberra, in the British penal colony (now the Australian state) of New South Wales, as the elder child of Horatio and Elizabeth (née McGuire) Wills. Tom was a third-generation Australian of convict descent: his mother's parents were Irish convicts, and his paternal grandfather Edward was an English highwayman whose death sentence for armed robbery was commuted to transportation, arriving in Botany Bay aboard the "hell ship" in 1799. Granted a conditional pardon in 1803, Edward became rich through mercantile activity in Sydney with his free wife Sarah (née Harding). He died in 1811, five months before Horatio's birth, and Sarah remarried to convict George Howe, owner of Australia's first newspaper, The Sydney Gazette. Mainly self-educated, Horatio worked in the Gazette office from a young age, rising to become editor in 1832, the same year he met Elizabeth, an orphan from Parramatta. They married in December 1833. Seventeen months after his birth, Tom was baptised Thomas Wentworth Wills in St Andrew's, Sydney, after statesman William Wentworth. Drawing on Wentworth's pro-currency writings and the emancipist cause, Horatio, in his nationalist journal The Currency Lad (1832–33), made the first call for an Australian republic. Horatio turned to pastoralism in the mid-1830s and moved with his family to the sheep run Burra Burra on the Molonglo River. Tom was athletic early on but also prone to illness, his parents at one stage in 1839 "almost [despairing] of his recovery". The following year, in light of Thomas Mitchell's account of "Australia Felix", the Willses overlanded south with shepherds and