Of course it did, as Woggabaliri places Aboriginal Australia perfectly in sync with the rest of the planet and the vast majority of their indigenous brethren worldwide, in playing a form of football, the world game.

In the recent book by Professor John Maynard, The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe, there is an etching of 1862 by artist Gustav Mutzel, based on the work carried of scientist William Blandowski, which depicts a group of young Aboriginal boys engaged in what is clearly a group activity, one of whom is balancing a round ball perfectly on his foot.

The arms are splayed, the foot raised, the ball nestled in the cradle of leg and foot in a pose as perfect as it is familiar, the same pose of Ronaldinho in his pomp, of Zidane in his day, of every child the world over discovering the secrets of the ball. The etching is the first image of any kind of football in Australia.

That Aborigines were using their feet to strike and control a ball a century-and-a-half ago makes perfect sense, since almost every other indigenous culture did likewise, dating back many centuries.

The earliest forms of ball sport using the feet are attributed to 2BC and 3BC in China, known as ''cuju'' and are replicated very closely across vast divides of geography and culture.

In Mesoamerica, the kicking of rubber balls and the various competitions built around the ball took on religious connotations and became an integral part of the historical record, much like our own dreamtime stories, with more than 1500 ball courts belonging to the Mayan people uncovered and countless figurines, glyphs and carvings depicting the cultural centrality of the ball-kicking game.

Brazil, of course, Central and South America, all of Africa, Asia, you name it, historically the ball was kicked, because that's where the greatest challenge is posed and enjoyment is found.

Medieval Japan played ''kemari'' by keeping the ball in the air, like our own Woggabaliri.

Later, a net came into play around 400 years ago in the Malay Peninsula for ''sepak takraw'', literally ''kick-foot'' in Malay and Thai, where combatants perform feats of incredible dexterity, twisting their inverted bodies in the air to strike the feathered rattan ball over the net and rotating, cat-like, to land on their feet.

Football devotees will notice a striking resemblance to the ''chileno'' or bicycle kick that came to prominence in the early 20th century in South America, for which Pele was most famous.

In such a way, we see similarities between almost every indigenous culture on earth as to how they related to the ball and formed games for recreation and competition, overwhelmingly built on using the foot, not the hand, and all with elements of what later became the world game of association football.

Maynard's book is a wonderful recount of the history of Aboriginal involvement in football, with stories of the evolution of the game with Bondi Neal, the first Aboriginal football star in the early 20th century, followed by the famous names of John Moriarty, Charles Perkins and Harry Williams and onto Jade North, Travis Dodd and today's emerging stars like James Brown and Adam Sarota.

But what is most striking is in a country that has misguidedly viewed football as a foreign game, even while every other code has been imported, it turns out that, like every other culture worldwide dating back centuries, indigenous Australians played football.

So when the FFA announced new initiatives during the week to develop the game in indigenous communities, they weren't talking of introducing football, but of reintroducing it.

Because it has always been here. Not only the world game, but our true indigenous game.