On GAA: The most animated man you could come across in Perth last week was the Greek taxi driver who ferried a couple of us back from the Australian practice session in Subiaco.

Conversation began unpromisingly with his enthusiastic support for the IRA - "Ees only thing the Poms understand" - which succeeded in nearly starting a row among his passengers but was steered to less contentious issues.

"Ehh, would you see youreself as Greek or Australian?" ventured one anthropologist. Derision. "Hiiii. I am Greek. I am here nearly 40 years but I am Greek of course. Look, this is what I read." He brandished a collection of Plutarch's Lives of Greek Heroes. "You know what they have here?" he demanded. "No culture. I tell you culture here is footy, pies and beer."

We left him in his twilight zone between the ancient texts of a Delphic priest and the unedifying landscapes of Pokie Bars and all-night casinos.

Yet the cultural exchange at the heart of International Rules has been one of its most compelling features. Despite the biggest division that separates the GAA and the AFL - the faultline between professionalism and amateurism - the two games have learned something from each other even in terms of meeting different challenges in the international series, as has spectacularly been the case this time with Australia's resurgence.

Ironically the biggest assumed cultural connection has been in disrepute for some time now, since the publication of Geoffrey Blainey's A Game of Our Own in 1990, which dispels what the author calls "the Gaelic Myth" - that Gaelic football was in some way the progenitor of Australian Rules.

It's hard to be dogmatic when looking at the evolution of football codes in the mid-19th century but in historiographical terms Blainey's case is solid, namely the complete lack of documentary evidence to support the Irish link.

It had been assumed Irish immigrants drawn to the Victoria goldrushes of the early 1850s must have brought their version of football with them and, given the similarities between the games, that Gaelic and Rules were at least from the same gene pool.

Instead the revisionist view is the 1859 meeting under the chair of Tom Wills, a group of cricketers anxious to keep fit over the winter devised the first codified rules for the Australian game and that they were based on English public school games, especially rugby whose eponymous school Wills attended as a teenager.

Similarities have been drawn between those original rules and the rules of rugby, three of which are still largely in operation today: the long kick-out after a "behind" in Rules and rugby's 22-metre drop-out, the right-angle throw-in in both sports and the mark.

Then again most of the football codes that came into being at around the same time have similar provisions for restarts and throw-ins and there is some ambiguity about the mark in that in rugby it is primarily a defensive award, won when the opposing team is on the attack. In Rules it is an attacking play in which the mark can be won from kicks by a player's own team-mates. In rugby the catch is brought firmly to the chest to secure it whereas in Rules it is frequently spectacular, high fielding.

Then there are other elements in the cultural mix. A competing theory about the Australian game is that the Aboriginal version of football, Marn-Grook, featured that very skill of high catching. According to Jim Poulter's essay Marn-Grook - The Original Australian Rules (1993), the word "mark" or "mumarki" means catch in some indigenous dialects.

Again the academic view of this possible influence is that it lacks documentary back-up. Marn-Grook itself is acknowledged but not the theory that it in some way was linked to Rules.

There is circumstantial evidence in that Wills was familiar with the Aboriginal people in Victoria and even coached an indigenous cricket team. There may be no documentary evidence that Wills was influenced by Marn-Grook when helping to codify Rules but it's unlikely he wasn't aware of the game.

It has also been speculated that immigrant goldminers would have seen the indigenous game and blended elements of it with their own versions of football.

In defence of any potential influence that might have come from the goldfields, it's reasonable to point out that the Aboriginal people and Irish immigrant workers in the middle of the 19th century wouldn't have been exactly documentary guys. So there was always going to be a problem with primary sources.

Blainey's argument on the influence of Gaelic games is however strengthened by the inescapable fact that Maurice Davin didn't codify Gaelic football until 1885, nearly 30 years after the Australian game had been formally introduced so there would have been nothing on which to base a connection.

The English were masters at codifying sport and the GAA itself was largely a reaction to that. So it's not altogether surprising that the recorded evidence emphasises the role of English games and their written rules.

There is no historical material to indicate what might have influenced Tom Wills, whose life ended tragically, in his central role in codifying Australian Rules. He could have absorbed other styles of football before putting a formal structure on the new game in 1859 - for which purposes the English public school templates would have been ideal.

Otherwise the roughly contemporaneous phenomena of Marn-Grook, Irish immigrants and the striking similarities of the two indigenous codes in terms of uninhibited, free-flowing, man-to-man football is all a coincidence.

But this year's International Rules is easier to deconstruct. Ireland's mastery last year drove the AFL to review its approach to the game by appointing club coach Kevin Sheedy, who decided to approach the game as Australian Rules with a round ball.

Sheedy, who has worked closely and sympathetically with indigenous players at Essendon, decided to place their skill and pace at the heart of the national team effort.

So after that stunning display last Friday, there'll be no denying the Irish and Aboriginal influence on Australian football's latest achievement - this time fully documented. It mightn't have been The Iliad but in the words Patrick Kavanagh attributed to Homer, "Gods make their own importance."