Ireland at the time. Australian rules football Australian rules football was codified in 1859 by members of the Melbourne Football Club. The first rules were devised by the Australian-born Tom Wills, who was educated at Rugby School; Englishmen William Hammersley and J. B. Thompson, fellow students at Cambridge's Trinity College; and Irish Australian Thomas H. Smith, who played rugby football at Dublin University. Their knowledge of English public school football games, and the conditions and terrain of Melbourne's parklands, influenced the first rules of Australian football. It has been suggested that Wills was influenced by an Australian Aboriginal game, Marn Grook, as Wills grew up in an area where the game was played by local tribes. Historians such as Geoffrey Blainey have argued that the origins of Australian rules football lie purely with rugby and other English public school games. Traditional Irish football in Australia In 1843, Irish immigrants in South Australia celebrated St Patrick's day by playing a game of caid in Thebarton. Some historians have argued that Gaelic football influenced Australian football. For example, Patrick O'Farrell has pointed out that the Irish sport of hurling, which has similar rules to Gaelic football, was played in Australia as early as the 1840s, and may also have been an influence on the Australian game. B. W. O'Dwyer points out that Australian football has always been differentiated from rugby football by having no limitation on ball or player movement (in the absence of an offside rule), the need to bounce the ball (or toe-kick it, known as a solo in Gaelic football) while running, punching the ball (hand-passing) rather than throwing it, and other traditions. As O'Dwyer says: O'Dwyer's argument relies heavily on the presence of Irish immigrants on the Victorian goldfields during the Victorian gold rushes of the 1850s, and a comparison of the two modern games. There is no archival evidence to prove a direct influence of caid on Australian football. Irish sources in Australia in 1889 state that the old mob football played in Ireland bore very little resemblance to modern Gaelic football which upon first appearance in 1884 was received by the Irish as more a hybrid of English and Scotch football. Australian rules football in Ireland British historian Tony Collins argues strongly that the GAA hybridised Australian rules and soccer to differentiate from rugby, however takes the view that the development of Australian rules in the