THE RUGBY REBELLION

Reviewed by
Robert Messenger

Saturday 6th August 2005

Professional rugby did not arrive in Australia with the breakaway of rugby union players - led by the example and inspiration of Dally Messenger - in 1907.

A new book reveals it was rife in Sydney at least 10 years earlier. And Alec Burdon's injury was not the catalyst for players demanding to be compensated from the massive profits then being made by NSW rugby union.

The final decision to form a NSW Rugby League was made at least two months before Burdon was injured, according to Sean Fagan's groundbreaking The Rugby Rebellion: The Divide of League and Union, published this week.

Fagan, 41, has gone where other Australian sports historians have previously feared to go with his self-published but enormously rewarding work. The Sydneysider has long impressed students of the rugby codes with his websites RL1908 and ColonialRugby.

Now he has put years of exhausting research to startling effect with a book which, for thoroughness and revelation, has left all competitors behind.

Fagan has, as promised, not taken the breakaway of rugby league in complete isolation, and in avoiding the easy way of simply following the established path of Messenger and Burdon, Victor Trumper and James Giltinan, has presented the arrival of rugby league in its true, full light.

What starts out as seemingly a work attempting to argue an entrenched, preconceived notion about the ills of amateur rugby union finishes up as an utterly convincing story of bitter in-fighting, deception and disloyalty, of over-indulgent and short-sighted officialdom, and of rampant greed.

In the end, Fagan succeeds brilliantly, largely because of the breadth of his research, but also because of his straightforward language. He has not allowed himself to get bogged down in academic theory and gobbledy-gook.

He allows the actual reports of the day to make his points for him, and who could know better what happened 100 years ago than the people who were there, the players, officials and journalists? Fagan points out, compellingly, that Sydney rugby union was beset by accusations of professionalism from its earliest days, and that at least from 1897 there is evidence that NSW representatives were being paid to play.

These concerns had spread well beyond Sydney, and when the first British team to tour here arrived in 1899, it was an event seen by its "missionary" captain, the Reverend Matthew Mullineux, as an attempt by the Rugby Football Union in England to "clean up" NSW rugby of its variances from RFU law. These not only centred on suggestions NSW was headed the same way as the North of England, where the professional Northern Union (rugby league) had been founded in 1895, but on unsavoury on-field tactics.

Fagan reveals the extent to which Australian and New Zealand rugby union authorities, for many years, felt aggrieved by being restricted under RFU affiliation, especially in relation to laws of amateurism and play which was losing the interest of paying customers.

As befits a book which takes such a fresh and fascinating look at events of a century ago, The Rugby Rebellion is full of astonishing "news".

For example, Messenger was a paid rugby union representative before he switched codes. And, Fagan implies, Messenger's decision to join the rugby league ranks was made before the romantic and hitherto long-accepted version that his mother, Annie, was asked to intervene on his behalf.

There is nothing romantic in what Fagan reveals. His book's beauty is the matter-of-fact way the whole saga is told. It is more often than not a grubby tale, particularly since it unfolded in an era when promoters were able to get involved, motivated by nothing more than money-grabbing openings.

There is some pathos, and a hint of tragedy, too, in the death in Brisbane at just 25 of Albert Baskerville, the New Zealand "hound" who brought the first professional All Blacks (called later the "All-Golds" because of their "avarice") to Australia and, with Messenger, took them to England. It is also sad to read of the way the first two Maori teams to tour here were treated by entrepreneurial opportunists.

Fagan covers the costly way rugby union tried to counter the league challenge with a more "international" image, bringing an American Universities team out in 1910.

One is tempted to say this is a book that is long overdue. Perhaps, however, it has arrived on our bookshelves too late, and that, like the unspeakably stupid William Webb Ellis myth, the long-held versions of how rugby league came to Australia and was firmly established will prevail.

Yet the centenary of Australian rugby league will be celebrated in two years' time, and thus Fagan's work could be said to be very timely. He has got in ahead of many other planned works, and hopefully he will make all other historians now rethink their approach.

Given the theory about those not knowing history being in danger of repeating it, this book is extremely important for other reasons. Professionalism has, for the past 10 years, officially embraced both codes of rugby, and both league and union need to face the fact their futures are anything but certain.

Looking closely at what happened 100 years ago, as Fagan has done so tellingly, is now absolutely vital for the rugbys to continue on as they are.