to the games' similarities, such as drop punting the ball and leaping, catching feats. Academics Jenny Hocking and Nell Reidy write that Wills, in adapting football to Melbourne's parklands, wanted a game that kept the players off the ground and the ball in the air. "It is here", they argue, "in the interstices between rugby and Australian football, that the influence of [Marngrook] can be seen most clearly". Historian John Hirst countered that early Australian football was aligned with rugby-style roots, and bore little resemblance to Marngrook. According to de Moore, Wills was "almost solely influenced" by Rugby School football, with local conditions also having an effect. Flanagan promoted the Marngrook theory in his novel The Call (1996), an historical imagining into Wills' life, and argued in an essay addressed to Wills that he must have known Aboriginal games as it was in his nature to play: "There's two things about you everybody seems to have agreed on—you'd drink with anyone and you'd play with anyone." He quotes Lawton Wills Cooke, a descendant of Horace Wills (Tom's brother), who said a family story had been passed down about Tom playing Marngrook as a boy. Family historian T. S. Wills Cooke disputed that such a story existed, calling the Marngrook link "a bridge too far" and an example of historical revisionism motivated by political correctness. Despite lacking in hard evidence, the theory is often presented as factual. In Moyston, the self-proclaimed birthplace of Australian football, stands an AFL-endorsed monument, unveiled by historian Col Hutchinson, commemorating Wills' childhood in the area playing Marngrook. The "father of football" The role that Wills and others played in pioneering Australian football went largely unrecognised in their lifetimes, as the sport had yet to develop a historical perspective. By the late 1870s, Wills' 1858 letter calling for the organisation and codification of football was singled out as a seminal document. He wrote at this time that he attempted to promote football in Victoria as early as 1857, "but it was not taken to kindly until the following year". By 1908, the year of Australian football's jubilee celebrations, H. C. A. Harrison had become known as the "father of football" on account of his substantial reputation on and off the field. Wills was the next most often recalled pioneer during this period, and Harrison credited him with initiating the sport when he "recommended that we Australians should