Roy Hay can be found on both fronts. A Scottish emigre, he is an honorary fellow at Deakin, an author and historian. Now he and Athas Zafiris, a writer and researcher, have taken to the trenches again to argue that there is minimal connection between marngrook and what we now call AFL. Their article in The Conversation foreshadows a more elaborate exploration in a forthcoming issue of Meanjin.

It is not a new thesis. It bitterly divided academics at the time of the publication of The Australian Game of Football in 2008, an official history coinciding with the game's sesquicentenary, which also was sceptical of an Indigenous influence on the game's origins.

Hay's twist is to say that the insistence on an Indigenous motif in the game from the start obscures an even better story, about the way Indigenous players managed to "infiltrate" an avowedly Anglo game in the decades afterwards, and shape it, and in at least one instance dominate it. "It is more powerful, more persuasive and more noble," Hay writes. "It has the potential to give an indication that those people who tried to break into the white man's game before 1900 are the real heroes - not Tom Wills."

Hay says that by the mid-1800s, Victoria's Indigenous population had been reduced to a rump, mostly living in "protection" on stations and reservations far from Melbourne, out of sight and mind, and excluded from the activities of "settler societies". Hay does not deny Wills' exposure to marngrook when growing up in Victoria's western districts. But he says there is nothing in his "voluminous" writings to suggest that it was his inspiration when it came to codifying the Australian game in 1859.

The game he helped to found owed much more to their British antecedents. "It was a very low-scoring, low-level kicking and scrummaging game," says Hay. Of what we would now recognise as as distinctly Indigenous way of playing, there was no sign. Before 1880, Hay can find only one reference to a high mark. Tactically, it did change, but not in a way that reflected any aspect of marngrook. Others aver that the game was re-invented by Geelong.

Indigenous Victorians "would have been involved if they had been allowed", says Hay. Instead, they played their own game. Notably, they included women.

But as Australian rules grew and flourished, Indigenous players and teams began to make a mark, not in Melbourne, where they were too few, but in the bush. Hay cites an account in the Bendigo Independent in 1900 of a game between South Bendigo and a team from the Cummeragunja Aboriginal mission, near Barmah: "Here ... was to be witnessed the sight of (Bendigo's) best team of footballers having rings run round them (and those very literal ones) by the despised and fast-dying Aboriginal."

Hay deduces from this that Indigenous players brought special skills to the game, not that the game was modelled on their special skills.

That Cummeragunja team must have been something. The next year, they played a Ballarat team. The Star said their play was an education: "There was no waiting or delay. They ... recognised that the ball was made to kick, not to nurse - and kick it they did. Our local players have a great habit of attempting to break through two or three opponents in preference to kicking the ball, and thereby frequently do more harm than good."

Hmmm!

Between wars, Cummeragunja was so good that it was handicapped by the local league, which restricted them to players younger than 25. There were other Cummeragunjas elsewhere in the state.

"Our interpretation may help explain why to this day, Indigenous people believe Australian football is their game," writes Hay. "Not because they invented it, or contributed to its origins, but because they forced their way into it, despite all the obstacles, in the second half of the 19th century."

Hay calls his thesis a "provocation", used in academia in the sense of argument-starter. That it certainly is. Between black and white, there is axiomatically much grey. It is beyond this column's space or remit to go on with the argument. This weekend, as the Indigenous strain in the game is celebrated unreservedly, you might say that it is, well, academic anyway. But what would footy be without one?