11

AUSTRALIA: WALLAROOS AND KANGAROOS

It took 252 days for the 11 ships of the ‘First Fleet’ to reach Botany Bay from Great Britain in January 1788. En route, they suffered chronic infestation and water-rationing, encountered raging seas and freak storms, and witnessed the deaths of 48 of their number and the births of 20 babies.¹ Their arrival marked the beginning of modern white Australia.

One hundred years later, in April 1888, the ‘first fleet’ of touring rugby players arrived on Australian soil, having taken just 42 days to complete the journey. In stark contrast to their predecessors, the rugby tourists’ ship, the Kaikoura, was equipped with electric lights, a smokers’ lounge, a piano and a library.² Sea-sickness and occasional rough weather were the only threats to their wellbeing. Their arrival would ensure that rugby became Australia’s pre-eminent international winter sport.

Of the 22 tourists who made the trip, 14 were from the north of England and played for clubs that after 1895 would become rugby league clubs. Three came from the small industrial town of Hawick in the Scottish Borders, one each from Edinburgh and Cambridge universities, one was described as an unattached gentleman and one came from Douglas in the Isle of Man. The final tourist was Andrew Stoddart, the future England cricket and rugby captain who also played his rugby for Blackheath.

The side offered an insight into where the strength of British rugby lay in the late 1880s. At their head stood Bob Seddon. Born in Salford, he captained Broughton Rangers before moving to Swinton. Seddon was a warehouseman whose rugby talent had seen him rise to the highest levels of the game. Now he had reached the pinnacle of rugby: he was captain of the first British touring team to Australia and New Zealand.

Seddon had earned his position: a skilful forward of some brilliance, he possessed all the qualities of a natural leader. Shrewd, smart and brave, he was able to stay calm in a crisis. ‘I don’t think I was born to be drowned,’ he wrote home after the Kaikoura had encountered especially stormy seas en route and he had almost been swept overboard.³ Sadly, he was to be proved wrong.

As the team made its way across the big cities and country towns of Australia and New Zealand, Seddon was their spokesman, leader and inspiration. But, while spending an afternoon rowing on the Hunter River in Maitland, New South Wales, his boat overturned and he was unable to free his feet from the boat’s stirrups. And there, alone and trapped by a simple, everyday mistake, Bob Seddon drowned. He would never know the extent of his importance to the game that he graced.⁴

The clash of the codes

In the century that separated the arrival of the two pioneering groups, three million people, mainly from Britain but also from Europe and the Far East, had flocked to Terra Australis. Initially a penal colony and then a magnet for those seeking to make their fortunes in the mid-century gold rushes, Australia became a land for those British immigrants who wanted to build a ‘New Britannia’, a better version of what most of them called the ‘Mother Country. The same would be said about their attitude to rugby.

Nineteenth-century Australia was nothing if not British. Until 1901, when it became a unified nation, it was a continent of independent colonies linked only by geography and a shared sense of Britishness. One historian has even remarked that it was a ‘suburb of Britain’.⁵ Australians ate British food, read British newspapers and played British sports. The first recorded cricket match took place in 1803 in Sydney, athletics meetings were staged as early as 1810 and by the 1830s horse racing was taking place regularly throughout New South Wales, the first colony to be established by British settlers in 1788. And, just as in Britain, Tom Brown’s Schooldays became both an Australian bestseller and a guide to the moral importance of games.

It was no surprise when, in July 1858, Tom Wills, a young Australian who had been educated at Rugby School, placed an advertisement in the weekly Bell’s Life in Victoria (itself based on London’s Bell’s Life) calling for the formation of a ‘foot-ball club’ to help keep cricketers fit during the winter. Less than a year later, in May 1859, he chaired a meeting of the Melbourne Football Club in the city’s Parade Hotel that drew up the first set of rules for ‘foot-ball’ in Australia. The rugby version of football had been established Down Under.

Or had it? Although Wills had been a keen player of rugby at school, he believed that improvements could be made to the game’s rules. Some of his fellow committee members thought that even more radical changes were needed. So, although the Melbourne game began as a version of rugby, it quickly evolved into something quite different.

First to go was the offside rule. Melbourne FC saw nothing wrong with players standing yards in front of the ball-carrier waiting for him to kick it to them. And because the quickest way to get the ball to a downfield player was a long, high kick, the ability to jump above opposing players to catch the ball on the full – known as a ‘mark’ – became a vital skill.

The Melburnians also didn’t like players being allowed to run with the ball in their hands, so they insisted that the player had to bounce the ball every five or six yards when running with it. And, for reasons that have never been clear, passing the ball from the hands was frowned upon. Instead, the ball had to be held in one hand and punched with the other to a teammate.

There were other differences, too. The crossbar was removed from the goalposts and the shape of the pitch shifted from rectangular to oval. Very quickly, the new game was seen as a uniquely Australian version of football, one that reflected Australia’s special character. Tom Wills, it was later claimed, had told the 1859 meeting that ‘we shall have a game of our own’.

As with so much in the history of sport, this was simply another case of inventing a ‘tradition’. All of the elements of Melbourne game could be found in the versions of football played at the same time in the English-speaking world. The mark was a feature of RFU and Football Association rules. Sheffield football rules originally did not have an offside rule. Bouncing the ball while running was a rule that could be found in the types of football played by some private schools, such as Bramham College in Yorkshire, not to mention across the Atlantic Ocean at Princeton University, whose rules of football also shared the Melbourne penchant for punching the ball instead of passing it.⁶

But if the rules of Melbourne football were not as distinctive as its supporters believed, the game was unique in one very important way: it was the first type of football to become a mass spectator sport anywhere in the world. Melbourne was part of Victoria, the colony to the south of NSW that had been founded in 1851. In the same year it became a colony, gold was discovered in Victoria and Melbourne’s population grew from 23,000 to 268,000 in just 30 years.⁷ As the gold rush brought people flooding into the city, their appetite for amusement and recreation was voracious. As early as the 1860s, when rugby and soccer in England were still largely pastimes for the privately educated, thousands of people were going to ‘Victorian Rules’ (later known as Australian Rules) football matches in Melbourne. Football fever was first diagnosed Down Under.

In contrast, the original version of rugby in Australia was very much the sickly cousin of Australian sport. Rugby was the leading winter sport in Sydney but still very much the preserve of the elite. The first recorded game of any type of football in Australia took place in 1829 when the Sydney Monitor reported that soldiers at Sydney Barracks had been playing football, a game that the newspaper for some reason felt compelled to point out was ‘much played in Leicestershire’.⁸ But little else was heard of the game for the next 35 years.

It wasn’t until the middle of 1865 that the first rugby clubs were started in Sydney. In 1859 and 1863 Sydney’s Albert Cricket Club had published Rugby School’s rules in its handbook, and members of the club led the way in founding Sydney Football Club on 30 May 1865. They played a team from the Australian Cricket Club in July and then against Sydney University, destined to become one the central powers of Australian rugby, in August.

Frustrated by their lack of opponents, in June the following year Sydney FC decided to switch to Victorian Rules and hoped to arrange matches with Melbourne clubs. Sydney University’s team had to content itself with matches against the Military and Civil Cricket Club. But by 1869 no rugby, nor football of any sort, seems to have been played in Sydney, apart from a couple of matches between the university and the crew of the visiting HMS Rosario. The game appeared to be all but dead.

It was a man called Monty Arnold who administered the kiss of life to the ailing sport. Monty and his brother Richard (who had attended Rugby School) were the sons of William Arnold, later speaker of the New South Wales’ parliament, and both were passionate about rugby. In 1870 they helped to found the Wallaroo Football Club, named after an indigenous animal closely related, as the name suggests, to the wallaby and the kangaroo.

As might be expected, Wallaroo players were drawn from young men who had attended Sydney’s elite schools. The formation of the club coincided with a number of these schools taking up rugby. Newington College, Sydney Grammar and King’s School, Parramatta, were among those that played early inter-school matches and which would over subsequent decades become pillars of Sydney’s ‘Great Public Schools’ (GPS) rugby.

The Wallaroos also appear to have been the first side in Australia to switch from the traditional 20-a-side rugby to 15-a-side when they played the Volunteer Artillery’s 10th Battery in 1871. As early as 1870 Sydney’s Town and Country Journal had complained about the number of ‘mauls and scrimmages’ in the game, an early indication of an Antipodean preference for open, running rugby. By 1873, 15-a-side had become the norm in Sydney.⁹

The following year, the Wallaroos called a meeting of clubs around Sydney to decide on a common set of rules and establish a governing body for the game. Supported primarily by Sydney University and the city’s elite schools, ten clubs came together and in June 1874 announced the formation of the Southern Rugby Football Union, rugby’s first governing body to be formed outside England and Scotland. The fact that they chose to be the ‘Southern’ RFU was an indication that they saw themselves as the southern hemisphere branch of the English RFU.

Progress was slow. By May 1877 only three other clubs had joined the original ten members of the SRFU. Crowds were sparse and the game was still the preserve of the privately educated. In contrast, Victorian Rules football in Melbourne was booming. Thousands of people from all classes attended matches, dozens of clubs had been formed and the code was spreading to Tasmania and South Australia. Not surprisingly, many in Sydney looked enviously at the vitality and excitement of the rival code to their south.

In 1877 the dissatisfaction with the state of rugby felt by many in Sydney was matched by the growing desire of Melburnians to expand their game. Carlton FC, arguably Melbourne’s leading Victorian Rules club, agreed to play two matches against Waratahs FC, Sydney’s most vocal critic of rugby’s rules. The first match between the two sides was played under rugby rules. The second used the Victorian version of football rules. Unsurprisingly, each club won the match played under its own code, but the interest in Victorian Rules led the SRFU to discuss switching codes. However, loyalty to rugby’s British links and a shared suspicion of the southern upstart meant that the Sydney clubs narrowly rejected the proposal. Shocked into action by this threat to its very existence, rugby in Sydney shook off its torpor and began to grow.

A similar story can be told of rugby in Queensland, the colony immediately to the north of NSW. A football club had been formed in Brisbane, the state capital, in 1866 that had played a loose form of Victorian Rules. It was another decade before two more teams were set up. They opted for rugby and Brisbane FC switched to rugby rules to enable matches with the newcomers. But isolated from other rugby teams – Sydney was more than 450 miles away – the Brisbane clubs only tinkered with the rules and by 1880 were back playing the Victorian game.¹⁰

The turning point came in 1882 when, in an attempt to develop links between Queensland and NSW, the captain of Brisbane FC, Pring Roberts, wrote to the Wallaroo club in Sydney suggesting a game between the two sides. Many in Brisbane also wanted to play against the Victorian Rules clubs in Sydney, but the SRFU made the Queenslanders an offer they couldn’t refuse. If the visitors only played rugby, the SRFU would pay all the costs of the tour.¹¹

From that moment, rugby in Queensland never looked back. Four thousand spectators watched them lose to NSW at the Sydney Cricket Ground but the visitors then shocked the Sydney sporting scene by winning their next two matches, the last against the Wallaroos themselves. The Queenslanders invited NSW to Brisbane in 1883 and triumphed over their rivals by a single point. The match also happened to be the first time in the southern hemisphere that a whistle had been used by a referee, Sydney’s Monty Arnold.¹²

A few months later Queensland clubs formed a Northern Rugby Football Union to be rugby’s governing body in their colony. Regular inter-state matches followed and victory over NSW in Sydney for the first time in 1886 further boosted rugby’s fortunes. By 1889, 25 clubs were playing the game. Rugby’s status as Queensland’s number one football code had been sealed.

Triumph of the tourists

As the growth of the game in Queensland demonstrated, nothing stimulated interest in rugby as much as matches against touring teams. Rivalries between the Australian colonies could be played out on the rugby field. But the early and rapid development of Victorian Rules in Melbourne actually hampered its ability to gain support in NSW and Queensland. Melbourne teams were so good there was no chance that any team from outside Victoria could defeat them, which made the game rather pointless as a way of celebrating colonial pride for anyone other than the Victorians.

Once they had realised the popularity of tours, rugby administrators in NSW were quick to capitalise on this. In 1882 they despatched a team to New Zealand to become the first ever rugby tourists to the ‘Shaky Isles’, so-called because of the earthquake activity. Captained by Sydney University’s Edward Raper, the tourists were as much ambassadors for Australia as they were rugby evangelists. The tour ended equitably with NSW winning four matches and the New Zealanders triumphing in three. Another rugby rivalry had been established.

Inter-colonial matches between NSW, Queensland and New Zealand became major public events and rugby quickly became the dominant winter sport in Australia’s eastern states. The size of crowds now watching the battles between NSW and Queensland had not gone unnoticed by sports promoters and in 1887 the cricketing entrepreneurs Alfred Shaw and Arthur Shrewsbury started to investigate the possibility of organising a tour of British rugby players to Australia and New Zealand.

It was to be a strictly money-making venture. The team would play rugby in New South Wales and Victorian Rules in Victoria, thus maximising their appeal to Australian sports fans. When Shaw and Shrewsbury approached RFU secretary Rowland Hill for official backing, he refused to ‘support or approve’ the tour but would not forbid players from taking part. He also warned ‘players must not be compensated for loss of time’.¹³ This was to be a strictly unofficial tour.

Although Shaw and Shrewsbury would have preferred the RFU’s backing, its firm insistence on amateurism also served their business interests. ‘If the rugby union can get players to come out without paying them anything, all the better for us,’ noted Shrewsbury.¹⁴ But there was no doubt that each British tourist was being paid to play. W. H. Thomas of Cambridge University was paid £90. Andrew Stoddart, who was appointed captain after Seddon’s tragic death, had been ‘bound’ to the tour by an advance payment of £50. The most unfortunate player was Halifax forward Jack Clowes, who naively admitted to an RFU inquiry before the tour that he had been given a £15 advance by the organisers. The RFU promptly declared him a professional, but he had already set sail for Australia and could not play in any rugby games on tour. He can perhaps be seen as the symbolic convict on the trip to Australia.¹⁵

The team arrived in New Zealand for the first leg of the tour on 23 April 1888. Over the course of the next month they won six out of nine matches, drawing with Wellington and losing to the powerful Auckland and Taranaki sides. The New Zealanders were taken aback by the way in which the tourists heeled the ball out of the scrum and the speed with which they passed the ball among the backs. These were lessons they would take to heart and which would eventually become hallmarks of New Zealand rugby.

The tourists then went back across the Tasman Sea to Sydney to embark on the first half of the NSW leg of the tour, winning four matches and drawing one. Three days after a 10-10 draw with a King’s School ‘Past and Present’ side they took to the field in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton to play their first ever game of Victorian Rules football. It was not a success. Carlton FC, one of the biggest names in the Victorian game, run amok, scoring 14 goals to the tourists’ three. As to be expected from a team of talented athletes, however, the more the tourists played Victorian Rules the better they became. They eventually won seven of their 19 matches in the unfamiliar code.¹⁶

Reinvigorated by their non-rugby interlude, the tourists then went through NSW, Queensland and a second leg in New Zealand without losing a match. They returned home in November, having won 27 of their 35 rugby matches. But their impact could not be measured simply by a win-loss ledger. As they wound their way down Australia’s eastern seaboard, they attracted bigger crowds than had ever been seen before for rugby matches.

The tourists had established rugby as the game of NSW, Victorian Rules was the sport of choice of Victoria, and henceforth never the twain would meet. The tour also had a deeper cultural impact. As the Australian press noted, the majority of the British tourists, including their captain, were men from the industrial working classes in the north of England. Rugby in Sydney and Brisbane had traditionally been the preserve of the upper and middle classes, but the tourists demonstrated that it was equally a game for those who earned their living with their hands. To compete successfully against overseas visitors, wrote The Referee, ‘I should like to see … the working-man element introduced into our clubs’.¹⁷

This could not have come at a more propitious time. Australia was in the midst of an industrial boom. Sydney and Brisbane both doubled their populations in the 1880s. Legislation to reduce the standard working day in Australia now meant that manual workers had leisure time to fill – and few activities could match the excitement and involvement provided by rugby. The game rapidly became popular in the industrial heartlands of NSW and Queensland. And, just as in England’s northern counties, the coming of the working-class player to the game brought new and intractable problems.

The great rugby rebellion

Although it deferred to the RFU for leadership and inspiration, Australian rugby had never fully shared that body’s outlook on the game. Rugby players and supporters Down Under preferred an open, passing game rather than the heavy scrummaging of the English. Cup and league competitions, frowned upon by the RFU as harbingers of professionalism and foul play, were commonplace. And amateurism in Australian sport was less rigid than in England.

Despite the growth in the number of clubs in Sydney, the sport was still dominated by upper-class gentlemen’s clubs like the Wallaroos and Sydney University. Such clubs were based on social networks and had no ties to local communities. In contrast, more and more clubs began to be formed to represent local, and especially working-class, areas such as Balmain, Newtown and South Sydney.

Just as had happened in northern England, rumours soon began to circulate that the best working-class players were being paid to play for certain clubs. In early 1898 the New South Wales RFU investigated claims that NSW players Billy Howe and George Outram had received payments to play in the previous season’s series with Queensland. Yet calls for NSW’s working-class players to be properly compensated for travel and other expenses could be read regularly in the Sydney sporting press. The clash between rugby’s past and its emerging future was symbolically highlighted in 1898 when the Wallaroos played the recently formed Sydney FC, composed of working-class Sydneysiders. In a vicious, spiteful and bloody match, Sydney FC emerged victorious by 15-5. The writing was on the wall.

The rigorous amateurism favoured by the RFU and the NSWRU seemed unfair to the average Australian. More to the point, it seemed downright hypocritical. The British tours of 1899 and 1904, and New Zealand’s numerous visits, brought money pouring into rugby’s coffers thanks to the huge attendances that touring sides attracted: for example, 34,000 saw the first Test match between Australia and Great Britain at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1904. Major club matches in the early 1900s could also pull in crowds of up to 20,000. Yet none of that cash found its way to players – indeed, they often found themselves out of pocket because of the distances they had to travel and the (unpaid) time they had to take off work to play.

Things came to a head at the start of the 1907 season when rugby authorities decided to discontinue the official medical insurance scheme for injured players, despite income from matches almost trebling between 1902 and 1906. This meant players had to arrange their own insurance. At the same meeting the Metropolitan Rugby Union, which ran the club game in Sydney, voted to increase its secretary’s salary to £250, roughly twice a manual worker’s average wage.¹⁸

In July the All Blacks played NSW at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Fifty-two thousand spectators, an Australian record, saw the visitors triumph 11-3, but while the game brought more than £2,500 into rugby union coffers, dockworker Alec Burdon, one of rugby’s star forwards, was left unable to work after damaging his arm and shoulder a few weeks earlier. The ending of rugby’s insurance meant that he received no money while injured.

Players’ resentment at their treatment at the hands of the rugby union hierarchy now reached boiling point. Blair Swannell, a tourist to Australia with the 1899 and 1904 British sides now living in Sydney, warned that ‘the players will take the matter into their own hands, and go from one extreme to another, electing to office officials pledged to what every lover of Rugby football should strive to prevent – professionalism’.¹⁹ His prediction was about to be proved correct.

In 1906 the Auckland City team visited Sydney. In the side were four members of the triumphant 1905 All Black tourists to Britain, including George Smith and Charlie Seeling. There is strong evidence that Smith met with disgruntled Sydney rugby players and discussed the possibility of starting a Northern Union rugby league competition. Smith’s athletics and rugby careers had taken him to England and he was well aware of the success of the Northern Union in England. He may even have secretly met English NU officials.²⁰

While this was going on, Victor Trumper, arguably Australia’s greatest batsman before the arrival of Don Bradman, and Labour Party politician Harry Hoyle were also actively seeking to channel players’ discontentment towards a new deal for Sydney rugby. Regular meetings began to be held at Trumper’s sports shop in Sydney’s Market Street. Shortly after the Northern Union had accepted Albert Baskerville’s proposal for a professional New Zealand team to tour Britain to play rugby league, Glebe forward Peter Moir turned up to one of Trumper’s meeting with a telegram from George Smith, by now one of Baskerville’s closest collaborators. It asked if the group would be prepared to organise a team to play the New Zealand team in Sydney on its way to the UK. They agreed unanimously, aware that the next steps they took would be momentous ones.

In late June a Sydney newspaper warned that Baskerville’s side – known as the Professional All Blacks – could include Australian players. By the start of August the trickle of rumours of a breakaway rugby league had become a torrent and Sydney held its breath for the arrival of the rugby rebels. On 8 August 1907, 50 people, including representatives of eight clubs and five first-grade team captains, met in the centre of Sydney at Bateman’s Crystal Hotel on George Street.

Chaired by Harry Hoyle, the meeting voted to set up the New South Wales Rugby Football League (NSWRFL) and organise a committee to select a team to play against Baskerville’s team. Four days later, ‘Dally’ Messenger, the Eastern Suburbs three-quarter and the biggest name in Australian rugby, announced that he was joining the NSWRFL. He was just one of 138 players who had signed up with the new organisation.

Shortly after, the Professional All Blacks arrived in Sydney. Dubbed the ‘All Golds’ by their opponents in the press in reference to their allegedly mercenary instincts – although the team’s profits would be divided between the players, as happened on Australian cricket tours – they drew 20,000 to the first of three matches against NSW on 17 August. The series was played under rugby union rules as the Northern Union rule books had yet to arrive. A week later, Messenger announced he would be joining Baskerville’s men as a guest player on their British tour. In mid-September, the rugby union authorities banned all those players who had turned out against the All Golds, once more highlighting the unfairness of the old game. Rugby league was up and running, and the NSWRFL was confident of its success.

As the tumultuous season ended, frenzied activity continued behind the scenes. In January 1908, rugby league clubs were founded in all of the major districts of Sydney. The first to be formed on 9 January was Glebe, at the heart of working-class Sydney. ‘The league was formed because it was believed that the set of conditions controlling the [rugby] football unions were not suitable for the democracy and social conditions of the Australian people,’ Harry Hoyle told the meeting.²¹ Nine clubs were admitted to the first NSWRFL premiership which kicked off on 20 April.

The previous month in Brisbane, the Queensland Rugby Association had been founded and immediately affiliated with the NSWRFL. Bolstered by the tremendous success of the All Golds tour of Britain, the Northern Union agreed to an Australian side touring for the 1908–09 season. In May the inaugural rugby league Test match was played between Australia and New Zealand. For the first time, the Australian players wore a kangaroo on their jerseys. Henceforth, ‘the Kangaroos’ would be the name by which the national rugby league would be known.

Now the warehousemen, wharfies and manual workers of NSW and Queensland had a ‘game of their own’. Australian rugby had come a long way since the days of the Wallaroos.