Inside the Wallabies: The real story, the players, the politics and the games from 1908 to today

by Greg Growden

Overview

Dally Messenger, Ken Catchpole, Dick Thornett, David Campese, John Eales, Nick Farr-Jones, Cyril Towers, Mark Ella, George Smith, Dave Brockhoff, Andrew Slack, Ray Price, John Hipwell, Jason Little, Phil Kearns, Will Genia...

Herbert 'Paddy' Moran was mesmerised by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. He was also the first captain of a strange, disparate bunch who called themselves the Wallabies. One hundred years on, the Wallabies of today are as outlandish, cocksure and eccentric as their forebears. It is the spirit and soul of this group of remarkable sportsmen that is captured in Inside the Wallabies.

This is the real story of the Wallabies from their first games in 1908 to today. It is about the players, the coaches, the politics and the games. It is about the soaring highs of World Cup success and the years when they truly deserved the moniker of Woeful Wallabies. It is about going on Tour, about enmities and friendships, about moments of national elation and player shame.

As fast paced as a Mark Ella backline play, as solid as Phil Kearns' front row and as controversial as a Robbie Deans selection, Inside the Wallabies is a fascinating, passionate and insightful history of the world of the Australian Rugby Union. It is a book no rugby fan can be without.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781742690810
Publisher:	Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited
Publication date:	01/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Greg Growden is the Sydney Morning Herald's senior rugby writer. He has been reporting on the game for over thirty years. He is also the author of nine books including A Wayward Genius, which was described by The Guardian's Frank Keating as being among the 100 best sporting books of the twentieth century. His most recent book is Jack Fingleton: The man who stood up to Bradman.

Read an Excerpt

Inside the Wallabies

The Real Story the Players, the Politics, the Games from 1908 to Today

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By Greg Growden

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2010 Greg Growden
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-081-0

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CHAPTER 1

ONCE WERE RABBITS

Herbert 'Paddy' Moran was mesmerised by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. He was fascinated with medicine and the written word, but late in life admitted that he could not find peace. He was also the first captain of a strange, disparate bunch who called themselves the Wallabies.

Moran set the tone for what was to come. From day one, the Wallabies became a haven for odd bods, the free spirited, the hungry and not so hungry, and those who pursued sport for its simple ideals. Moran described his players as: 'A curious people, these Australians, with their rude virtues and glaring faults. Cocksure yet shy, hyper-critical yet childlike in their belief in what a newspaper says. Humorous, but quick to resent anything unfair, hating the shirker terribly. Their one test is virility.'

One hundred years on nothing much has changed. The Wallabies of the twenty-first century are like the twentieth century brand — the team continues to attract and encourage the eccentric, the outlandish, the cocksure, the shy, the childlike and most certainly the virile. The brand is green and gold, but their real colours are many. Who else but those on the fringes would be attracted to a somewhat silly game whose origins lie in the dubious story of an English schoolboy called William Webb Ellis picking up the ball and running with it to create a new football code.

The 1988 Wallabies trained on the same paddock where Webb Ellis was supposed to have created havoc in the middle of a football match. A plaque at the ground read: 'This stone commemorates the exploit of William Webb Ellis who, with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game. A.D. 1823.'

Unlike the Webb Ellis fairytale, the origins of the Wallabies are far better defined. The facts are there, even if some of them are decidedly odd.

* * *

The Wallabies were born in 1908 when the Australian rugby team, which had been participating in Test football for almost a decade, decided to embark on its first extensive tour of Great Britain. A name of note was required for the inaugural northern hemisphere adventure. Vigorous, emotional debate followed, not surprising given the name had to satisfy a most diverse group of sportsmen. There was a pastoralist from Wellington, a Sydney clerk, a Newcastle surgeon, a university layabout, a Queensland station owner, a humble miner, a train driver, a Condobolin bank clerk, a 'gentleman of leisure', a rough-as-guts waterfront warehousemen, a Glebe butcher, a public servant, a clay potter, an insurance broker, a grazier, a cattle salesman and an inner city plumber who tried to con the Fleet Street press into believing he was the owner of 'a large station in Woolloomooloo'. They boasted such nicknames as 'Big Dog', 'Giraffe', 'Emu', 'Banger', 'Bull', 'Daisy McIntyre', 'Bowser', 'Monkey', 'Boneta', 'Parky' and 'Possum'.

Giving the captaincy to Paddy Moran was an odd choice. He described himself as a 'miserable, stooped, boring, introspective sort of fellow'. Of Irish Roman Catholic background, he wasn't a standout player — until then, he had not even been considered for Australian Test selection. He didn't seem suited to this game for ruffians, appearing too pale, too sickly. As one British pressman later wrote: 'Surely that delicate-looking man does not play Rugby football?'

But clearly those selecting the side wanted someone with intellect and good sense to keep the ratbags in the touring party in line and to provide the right message in the Mother Country. An upright, correct, standoffish leader was required. Here was the moment when Australia could show that the colonials were civilised, and who better to do that than a bespectacled figure who looked like he was a Cambridge don.

Moran's more assertive teammates wanted to find a distinctive team name that would give them an identity during a mind-bogglingly long itinerary that would see them crisscross Great Britain and play a never-ending schedule of thirty-one matches, including internationals against England and Wales. Eight days before the team left, during a farewell dinner at the Sydney Town Hall, the subject of what they should actually call themselves was first broached. The name 'Rabbits' was suggested, and was apparently popular, but the more cautious among the team recommended they not make a rash decision and instead put it to the vote on arrival in England.

The suggestion of 'Rabbits' nevertheless prompted spirited conversation by the rural members of the team who were already overwhelmed by the pomp and ceremony of the function. In one meandering speech, the Honourable C.W. Oakes MLA babbled on about his old friend the Australian captain, but couldn't remember the skipper's name. Turning to his offsider, he mumbled into the microphone: 'Now, what's his name again?', the words echoing around the Town Hall.

'What's his name' later attempted to blame the English press for trying to force the dreaded 'Rabbits' tag on the team. 'When we arrived at Plymouth a pack of journalists fell upon us,' Moran wrote in his autobiography Viewless Winds. 'They were very anxious to give us some distinctive name, but their first suggestion of "Rabbits" we indignantly rejected. It really was going a little too far to palm off on us the name of a pest their ancestors had foisted on our country! Ultimately we became the "Wallabies", although we wore for emblem on our jerseys not the figure of this marsupial but the floral design of a waratah.'

Moran's telling is not exactly correct. The Rabbits remained the name of choice for some players, with the Manchester Weekly Times even going so far as reporting that the Australians had been officially christened the 'Rabbits' at the Sydney Town Hall dinner. Postcards of the Australian team were even issued in England showing the name 'The Rabbits'. On the day of the team's arrival in England F.B. Wilson wrote in the Daily Mirror that the Australians 'have been already called the Rabbits, but that won't do. They do not like it, and naturally so, for a rabbit in Australia is not only vermin, it's a curse and no death is too bad for it.'

As agreed before they left Sydney, shortly after the team arrived in England, Moran organised a vote among the players. Suggestions included the Kangaroos, the Kookaburras, the Waratahs, the Wallaroos, even the Convicts. The Wallabies won by a couple of votes. Officials in Australia agreed to the name with the proviso that it would only be used when Australian teams were touring other countries. At home when playing Tests the team would continue to be called Australia. That edict stood until the 1980s. It was lucky the team wasn't called the Snakes, in honour of its first team mascot.

These days the Wallabies carry around a stuffed toy kangaroo, Wally. As team mascot, Wally must be placed on the halfway line facing the way the team is running. Tradition has it that the youngest player in the team has the job of looking after the mascot, which includes never leaving it alone. It is an onerous task, especially as a prime objective of the more easily bored members of the team is to pinch Wally. Some novice players have used this to their advantage, including eighteen-year-old James O'Connor who said just before the 2008 Wallaby northern hemisphere tour that Wally would help him 'pick up' women in France because they apparently are attracted to men carrying stuffed toys.

The 1908 tourists took the significance of the mascot to an extreme when the team's comedian Bob Craig snuck a carpet snake called Bertie into his luggage, believing Bertie's appearance at grounds would strike fear into the English opposition. After forty-two days at sea, the team's first problem was how to sneak Bertie into England without being sighted by English officials. The big, swarthy Queensland forward Tom Richards agreed to sling Bertie inside his singlet and tie him loosely around his stomach. He would stick the snake's head inside a sock, and its tail down the front of his pants. A large overcoat would hide any bulge. Even though Richards grew exceedingly uncomfortable when Bertie started to wriggle during the official speeches, the plan worked. Richards later found a wooden box and hid the snake in a bunch of waratahs that had earlier been sent by the New South Wales Rugby Union.

Sadly Bertie did not last long. He died before the first match. Several British newspapers ran photographs of a limp Bertie. Craig blamed the local fare for Bertie's death, explaining that England was 'an exceedingly poor country, considering that my esteemed snake Bertie died after taking the risk of eating an English mouse for his first meal here. He had survived such ordeals as bushfires, droughts and starvation. To a great extent no doubt, if it had been his good fortune to survive until the advent of the Llannelly versus Australian match, it would have benefited him greatly, as the wild and cannibalistic conditions that prevail there would no doubt have revived him.'

It was because of such boisterous and larrikin behaviour that rugby made its mark in Australia, becoming the country's main winter sport and convincing those in authority that it deserved national representative prominence.

* * *

Rugby in a proper form had been played in Australia — although primarily New South Wales — for well over fifty years before the Wallabies showed off the national colours overseas. The game, brought across from England by those who had taken the long trip to the new colony, was immediately recognised as a brutal affair. Its primary aim, as described in Tom Brown's Schooldays, was to 'try the muscle of the men's bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, to make them rejoice in their strength'. It also involved trying to knock each other's head off.

Even if rugby was the domain of the aristocratic amateur, with a history steeped in the English public school system, in the rough and tumble outpost of Sydney it appealed to the wild men of the colony. The laws of the game encouraged a mixture of flair and fight, artistry and aggression.

Not even calls in the New South Wales Parliament in the 1860s to have the game outlawed could quell the beast. It only inflamed passions. But there was deep concern that if Australia became serious about rugby, it would court disaster if it ever played New Zealand at it. New Zealand had embraced rugby as its lifeblood, prompting the Sydney Morning Herald to editorialise in 1884: 'Rugby isn't our game ... we'll always court defeat if we play the New Zealanders.' To soften the pain of that possibility, there was even a push for the rugby colonies of New Zealand, New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria to amalgamate as a single union. The success of the 1905 All Blacks ended that, and instead Australia had to go it alone.

Rugby kept its footing in the colony, even if sometimes slipping and sliding, and a club competition was formed. Australia made its first appearance on the international stage in 1899 when it played a touring British side over a four Test series (winning the first game, and losing the next three).

Sydney rugby was not a place for shirkers. When Australia's first Test captain Frank 'Banger' Row, who led the team onto the field against the British Isles at the Sydney Cricket Ground, took his father to watch his first rugby match, he was surprised when he left at half-time. When Banger returned home he asked his father why. Banger Senior replied: 'Never seen such a lot of ruffians.'

Wild play and unruly spectators were so common at the grade games that the New South Wales Inspector General of Police agreed to provide plainclothes constables at most grounds. One player was attacked by a spectator swinging a two-metre paling. On the field it was not unusual for players to be knocked out cold in back play, often with a gutless king hit. At one game, a referee who had been heckled by players and spectators produced a pistol out of the pocket of his shorts, waved it above his head and threatened to use it if he suffered any more abuse. Forwards would fill their pockets with pepper and fling it in the eyes of their opponents as soon as a scrum was set.

It was just as fierce on the other side of the field markings. Club officials kept the rabble on the sideline off the field by hitting them with small pieces of sapling that doubled as canes. Not surprisingly, The Bulletin described rugby at that time as 'the undertaker's friend'.

Judiciary hearings were also dangerous affairs. Police escorts were often required to get the rugby counsellors safely through the angry crowds waiting for hours outside the meeting room to hear a verdict.

For introspective coves like Paddy Moran, the experience was horrible. He described the grade competition as a 'form of local warfare'. 'When you sank on the ball to stop a dribbling rush, half-a-dozen feet rattled on you like heavy knocks at a door which would not open. Sometimes in a distant suburb when you fell out of bounds the local partisans affectionately trod on you. Both sides, indeed, were accorded the status of belligerents.'

Moran recalled how front-row forwards would grow beards before games and 'thus armed at all points would rub their faces against the newly shaven cheeks of their opposite numbers ... Sometimes they added onions to their luncheon diet, so what with the sour smell of unwashed jerseys, that had been lying all the week in a locker, and the heavy odour of men's sweaty bodies, the atmosphere of the scrums was pungent.'

Among the rogues was one of Australia's original forwards, Jim O'Donnell. Some years before playing for Australia in 1899 he had travelled with a touring New Zealand team but opted against returning home with them, instead hiding away in Sydney — for good reason, as just before leaving New Zealand he had been arrested in Invercargill as a con man. O'Donnell fled before the case went to court.

Others were handed Test jerseys for just being in the right place at the right time. Queenslander Jack Fihelly found himself in the 1907 Test against New Zealand in Brisbane primarily to avoid the expense of bringing too many better credentialled New South Wales players up from Sydney. Earlier that year, Fihelly ran on as a replacement during a New Zealand–Queensland match after a Queensland forward broke his ankle in the opening minutes. There wasn't enough time to properly kit him out, so he took to the field in his civvies — grey trousers and white business shirt. At the first break of play his teammates formed a ring to enable Fihelly to get his jersey, shorts and boots on.

One of the most notorious players of that time was Blair Swannell. This English-born forward, who had toured Australia twice with British Isles teams before settling in Sydney at the turn of the century, had the unenviable reputation of being the ugliest man to ever play the game. His face was like a battered prune. Swannell's personal hygiene was also an area of serious concern. His prized possession was a once-white pair of football breeches that he wore in every match and refused to wash. An incessant bore who boasted about his military conquests, including fighting among the insurrectionists in the Republic of Uruguay, Swannell would arrive on game day wearing a filthy cream sweater bearing on it the badges and dates of all the countries he had represented.

And on the field, he was an absolute mongrel.

Moran, like many others, clearly had no time for Swannell, describing him as a 'bad influence in Sydney football and also incidentally a greatly over-estimated player. His conception of Rugby was one of trained violence. In appearance, he was extremely ugly, but he could talk his face away in half an hour. He was popular with the fair sex; men, generally, disliked him.' This did not stop him being selected as one of Australia's early representative players.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Inside the Wallabies by Greg Growden. Copyright © 2010 Greg Growden. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction,
1 Once were rabbits,
2 Wild men and weirdos,
3 Flying pies and milk-soaked ears,
4 It's just a tea party,
5 Growing up,
6 Rodin meets Campo,
7 The Jones takeover,
8 The Grand Slam and the big cup,
9 Decay and recovery,
10 World champions,
11 Political pawns,
12 Innocence lost,
13 The best of vintages,
14 Fame and farewells,
15 Fast Eddie,
16 Lost highway,
17 Future hope,
Wallaby tops,
Bibliography,