The Call

This adaptation of Martin Flanagan's novel about Tom Wills, one of Australia's great sportsmen and arguably the inventor of Australian rules football, is a significant historical recuperation. ... It is imbued with reconciliatory goodwill and sympathetically captures the damage to both whites and blacks in the wars that accompanied settlement. Tom Wills grew up with Aboriginal playmates, but was to lose his family in a Queensland massacre, a retaliatory strike from tribes who were being cleared like vermin from their land.