Charting the history of Australian rugby league

A meditation on how the sport has changed, also some charts

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Here’s a question: do the Perth Bears get to claim North Sydney’s two premiership titles from 1921 and 1922? American sports franchises have some confusing legacies, e.g. the Cleveland Browns of today have the legacy of, but are not continuous with, the Browns of the past, who are now in Baltimore, trading as the Ravens, but this is not typical for Australian sport. There will be over a century between the North Sydney Bears winning the 1921 premiership with a 7-0-1 record and the entry of the Perth Bears into the NRL.

Here’s another question: when the Fox chyron flashes up under an ex-player, noting that they played so many “premiership” games, which premiership are they referring to? The answer to this one is obvious but leads to a follow-up question: how many premiership games did Wally Lewis, the finest player of his generation and one of the all-time greats of the sport, play? Is the answer 80, 166 or 256? You have to wonder how the vice-captain of the 1982 Invincibles and captain of the 1986 Unbeatables would have been selected without having played a meaningful club game.¹

Here’s a final question: are we sure that Alex Johnston has scored the most tries in the history of Australian rugby league? I didn’t want to ask this question when the record was broken, because it would have come off as churlish, and I am also confident that for any given value of Australian club rugby league, Alex Johnston is the all-time greatest try scorer² but there are a range of values for what constitutes the history of Australian rugby league.

The records set in the first grade premiership of the New South Wales Rugby League and later the National Rugby League, are treated as exclusively synonymous with the records of Australian rugby league. There are four reasons for this:

1. The NSWRL first grade has been the highest quality club competition in the nation since at least the end of the second World War and if not since 1908. It is based in the country’s largest (or second largest, depending on the era and statistical method) city, had the biggest crowds, the richest clubs and most of the best players.

2. The rugby league media in this country predominantly originates in Sydney and is almost entirely based in Sydney. Owing to the inherent parochialism of Australia, rugby league and Australian rugby league, this gives the NSWRL pre-eminence in the minds of the people who are responsible for the sport’s news, history and myth-making, which is then adopted by the audience.

3. The Sydney competition’s record keeping was much better than anywhere else. The availability of records automatically gives the competition more weight than its counterparts that lacked a David Middleton or suffered data-destroying disasters at league offices.

4. It is narratively far less complex than the reality.

These are somewhat valid reasons for Australian rugby league to be Sydney-centric but presents a history of Australian rugby league that is very narrow, restricted to a single metropolis that most of the rest of the country hates on principle. If you read the official works and have a lack of curiosity, it is as if rugby league emerges fully formed in Brisbane, Gold Coast and Newcastle in 1988, a gift of beneficence from our superiors in the imperial capital.

As anyone familiar with my work will be able to guess, I contend that the history - distinct from the mythology required to sell subscriptions to Kayo and unread books bought for Father’s Day - of the sport should have a wider view.

A wider view of the history of Australian rugby league is messy. One thing we can do to address this is to draw lines in the history and treat sections differently. After the line, Australian rugby league occurs and prior to that is pre-history. You may have noticed that this newsletter prefers to work on an NRL-era basis for its statistics. 1998 provides the cleanest delineation between the suburban, amateur and semi-professional club competitions of the 20th century and the international, professional club competitions of the coming 21st century.

Depending on your view, you could shift this back to 1995, when the competition rebranded as the Australian Rugby League (despite adding a team from New Zealand), to 1988, when Queensland teams joined the New South Wales Rugby League, or even 1982, as the Sydney competition expanded beyond its city walls for the first time.

The question then becomes, what to do with everything that happened in pre-history? It is rugby league and it is history and it took place in Australia but the tyranny of distance and other challenges of the times make it difficult to coalesce tens of thousands of matches into a neat concept of the history of Australian rugby league. If you’ve noticed the awkwardness with which the NRL media treats the Dolphins’ history or the Super League split, that dissonance originates here and the preference for simplicity overrides.

The question may seem academic but it is important. Today’s rugby league institutions derive their legitimacy by claiming direct descent from the pioneers of the sport of the 1900s. The early players and administrators that got the sport off the ground in Australia had trophies and awards and cups named after them. Today’s administrators are their rightful heirs, descendant in an unbroken line that even the World Wars could not disrupt, and that is why the Broncos winning the premiership in 2025 is treated the same by our governing bodies and broadcasters as the Bears winning in 1921.

We are not going to overturn a large portion of rugby league’s culture in today’s newsletter but it has been something that has weighed on my mind for the better part of a decade. Happily, we can have a higher quality of discussion thanks to Rugby League Project, in collaboration with Redcap’s BRL, adding the scoreline for every Brisbane Rugby League premiership match to the RLP site.³

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For the purposes of this analysis, we are setting the line of pre-history at 1988. This is contrary to the editor of the Brisbane rugby league premiership Wikipedia article, who writes:

Although the Brisbane Rugby League took a significant financial and competitive downturn, it did not become a second-flight competition when the Brisbane Broncos entered the Sydney Rugby League in 1988. Rather, it officially lost top-tier status after the 1994 season, before the advent of the Australian Rugby League, in 1995.

I do not believe this is a widely held opinion or have any official bearing and I will not support the top flight status of a competition whose 1988 champion was something called the Seagulls-Diehards. The 1987 merger between Fortitude Valley and Tweed Heads is telling in its own right about the strength of Brisbane’s historic but dying rugby league clubs and the forces causing their demise⁴, lending weight to the decision to bring in the Broncos to the NSWRL and set the line accordingly.⁵

In Sydney, Brisbane and elsewhere, there are myriad club cup competitions that accompany the main premiership, whose importance to us now is different to the importance of the people at the time. Largely, we have diminished this silverware in the face of an anachronistic hyperfocus on the premiership, which in turn maintains the unbroken line of inheritance. For example, the second half of the 1921 Sydney season was played as the City Cup, because of the Kangaroo tour, and so has been consigned to the dustbin of history as irrelevant.⁶

To provide some structure to the endless sprawl of rugby league competitions in pre-history, we need a taxonomy. Let’s set a definition that first grade strictly refers to the highest level of competition within a given league which occupies a specific geographical area, whereas first class refers to specific, elite first grade premiership games at specific times. This does have the annoyance of shifting the goal posts to, “What constitutes ‘elite’ or ‘first class’?”

The NRL has attempted to answer this in the Hall of Fame, but seems to be tripping over both its own insistence that the best players have to play in the (singular emphasis) elite rugby league premiership⁷, what it refers to as the “Metrics of Excellence” - no detailed description of these is included on the website - its own lack of records and that it has to retrospectively justify the selection of the first 100 inducted in the centennial of rugby league, while maintaining a sense of consistency with future inductions.

Consider Herb Steinohrt and Eric Weissel. They are both in the Hall of Fame but never played in the elite rugby league premiership. Weissel played 18 seasons in the Riverina as a fixture of country footy. Steinohrt spent his career in Toowoomba, representing that city in at least 70 (according to RLP) and up to 125 (according to the NRL) games.⁸ Both are examples of players who could reach the highest levels of the sport without playing in Sydney or Brisbane. It will surprise no one to learn that all examples of this kind of player in the Hall of Fame pre-date the second World War.

After 1945, every Hall of Famer spent major parts of their careers in Sydney or less often, Brisbane. Only a handful, including Barry Muir and Duncan Hall, never played in Sydney. Most of the best post-war Queensland players either migrated to Sydney clubs or the Sydney competition expanded to create the Queensland clubs they played for. Some, like Lewis, played the best part of their careers in Brisbane and gained selection for the highest representative honours from there, while others, like Beetson or Meninga, set themselves up for future success in the Sydney competition after beginning their club careers in Brisbane.

The outlines of what could constitute a first class club game prior to 1988 start to emerge. Before World War II, you could have a lucrative career in the country and still expect a reasonable, if more difficult, route to representative honours. By the 1970s, with some exceptions, you had to be in Brisbane or Sydney, and preferably Sydney, to have a crack at the summit.

On the 1952-53 Kangaroo tour to Europe, players based in Toowoomba and Newcastle (4 each) outnumbered Brisbane-based players (2). After the 1973 tour, Kerry Boustead in ‘78, then playing for Innisfail South before heading to the Roosters the next season, and Rohan Hancock in ‘82, a Toowoomba stalwart⁹, were the only selections from outside the Brisbane and Sydney competitions. Boustead played in all five tests against England and France (Australia lost both games against les Chanticleers) but Hancock was only selected for the test against Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, en route to Europe.

While the leagues were never at parity in quality¹⁰ or finances¹¹, this suggests any district first grade game prior to 1945 could be considered first class, while after 1945 and before 1988, first class club games in Australia should be restricted to Brisbane and Sydney¹² and after 1988, Sydney (and then the ARL and NRL) alone.

We will set aside whether to include city cup competitions in this definition of first class¹³, or restrict it to premiership games only, but if there’s a first class, there can be a second and third class. We will also set aside the question of whether a first class representative game is strictly an international, as the highest level, or is defined by the quality of the league that the players are selected from (i.e. a first class rep game is one played by first class club players, so could include the Bulimba Cup).

South Sydney’s status as the club with the most premierships in Australian rugby league history comes into question. Naturally, the 2014 NRL title puts Souths on a level pegging with Valleys and given that the resurrected Valleys club plays in the BRL, which is now in the third tier of the sport, it is inevitable that the Rabbitohs will claim that title outright.

Valleys, despite playing fewer games, have the best historical points difference in the table. The Brisbane clubs seem more evenly matched than Sydney’s, with Valleys the clear leader, then Norths, and the next four having between 500 and 600 wins and seven and ten premierships, an observation that has been made and speculated on in previous analysis. Redcliffe and Wynnum, being later additions, have fewer premierships and less time to compile wins.

What is apparent to me is not the unearthing of any statistics that revolutionise our understanding of the game’s historical hierarchy but that the presence of Brisbane clubs in this concept of first class offers a new dimension, another couple of splashes of colour and detail, on the portrait of Australian rugby league. Sydney’s historic marques are one thing but add Brisbane’s Big 8 and we have a more complete, more attractive picture. Were we able to add Ipswich, Toowoomba, Newcastle and other results¹⁴, we would have a more comprehensive picture again.

These tables are not in and of themselves terribly interesting and serve as trivia, rather than history. What to do with 4,500 BRL results and 7,200 NSWRL results? What are the important questions? How would, say, post-War Balmain have stacked up against post-War Southern Suburbs? Or which 1923 champion Eastern Suburbs clubs would be victorious: Coorparoo or Bondi? Or 80s Wynnum against Parramatta? Or Norths’ 6-in-a-row in the 60s against St George’s 11? Is there a way to approximate this?

Let’s start by plotting the class Elo ratings of these clubs. Brisbane’s rugby league history is significantly messier than Sydney’s, so we will focus on the clubs that people are most likely to be familiar with - the four cardinals, Valleys, Brothers, Wynnum and Redcliffe¹⁵ - and their antecedents, alongside Sydney’s traditional dozen and their two late stage expansion teams.¹⁶

Sydney’s wider spectrum of competence becomes very apparent. St George recorded a rating of 1841 at three points in the 1965 season. No Brisbane team eclipsed 1721, set by Brothers in 1957. At the other end of the scale, Parramatta bottomed out at 1274 in 1962 while final rating of the Mud and Bloods, 1337 in 1987, a season in which Wests finished equal last with one win from 16 games, bettered Wynnum’s previous low of 1344, reached twice in 1973 and 1974.

We can theorise why this might be. The structure of the Brisbane season, tending to be shorter than Sydney’s and necessarily involving more repeat fixtures, would have an influence. Having fewer teams would not spread the talent as thinly, and Brisbane would be less prone to the sharp discontinuities caused by the emergence of true superstars, who tended to congregate in the Sydney competition or head overseas. While there is less of a gap between the best and worst, the overall mean would be lower.

This disparity also presents a problem. A 1700-rating in Brisbane is not likely to translate to a 1700-rating in Sydney, on a like-for-like basis. You would expect to have to de-rate Brisbane club ratings to account for the generally lower standard of play. However that is derived, it is not going to close the gap between a Northern Suburbs team rated in the high 1600s in the late 1960s to a St George club rated over 1800. Brisbane’s Norths would likely struggle to compete with Sydney’s Wests at this time, the Magpies serving as the perennial runners-up to the all-conquering Dragons dynasty.

For a single Brisbane club to be competitive with the top end of Sydney, that Brisbane club would have to be substantially better than its compatriots and that never seems to eventuate. Even Lewis’ mid-80s Seagulls never quite kick clear of Meninga’s Magpies or a declining Tigers or a resurgent Brethren.

I had thought that I could use the results of the interstate series as a proxy for the relative strengths of Brisbane’s and Sydney’s competitions but there are two problems with that. The first is obvious.

The two bright spots for Queensland are noted and the rest was a very long descent. There is a reason that Origin rules were brought in after all.

Ironically, the much more successful Queensland Origin sides of the 80s, who won the one-off games in ‘80 and ‘81 before winning the ‘82, ‘83, ‘84 and ‘87 series, were predominantly selected from Brisbane-based clubs. Of the 300 Maroons caps awarded between 1980 and 1987, 59.3% went to players plying their trade in Brisbane. Three out of five of the BRL’s best were capable of competing with Sydney’s best but they needed more help from the other two to close the gap between the states.

The second issue is that Queensland residential selections are not necessarily a proxy for Brisbane’s best talent. While Maroons selections tended to heavily skew towards the southern end of the state, Brisbane was not necessarily the strongest of the three main southern leagues. In 1933, Toowoomba won their first two games of the Bulimba Cup and it was proposed that, ‘the Downsmen [Toowoomba] deserved the honour of meeting the Rest [of Queensland]… if successful, they should go to Sydney intact to play New South Wales.’ Shockingly, this idea was approved and Toowoomba duly beat The Rest, 22-7, before rebadging as Queensland and then being destroyed by New South Wales, 24-zilch. The QRL reverted to a more traditional selection process thereafter and lost the series 3-1. This was only the Blues’ fourth win in 12 years.

If we restrict our analysis to the period from 1960 onwards, after Brisbane has gotten a stranglehold as the strongest league in Queensland, in that period Queensland lost the interstate games by an average of 12 points. We can translate that - very approximately - to a 150 point Elo rating handicap¹⁷. We can then take the end of season ratings for each club, add 75 points to the Sydney ones and deduct another 75 from the Brisbane ones and then rank the teams in a hypothetical combined league.

Unsurprisingly, it is not pretty for the Brisbane teams. The “league” starts with 18 teams in 1960 and grows to 22 by 1982. I’ve marked 4th, 8th, 12th and 16th on the charts as proxies for premiership contention, qualifying for finals, qualifying for an expanded finals series and the competition cellar, respectively.

No Brisbane team ever makes the top four. Norths is highest ranked at fifth in 1963 and 1970. Norths would make finals for a decade, and Valleys, Wynnum and Souths a couple of times each but, unless this hypothetical ARL decided to implement a 12 team finals system, the Brisbane clubs would largely have been also-rans. Given the lack of commercial viability of these clubs as it was, removing any sense of success would have only hastened their demise.

Whether the Brisbane competition could have been strengthened by incorporating the Ipswich league (or Toowoomba) is an interesting thought experiment but one that is unlikely to yield an alteration of the long-run trajectory of the sport in the Southeast. Given one would expect the Bulimba Cup to have provided sufficient iron-sharpening opportunities that rarely seemed to translate to the interstate level, it is unclear if this would have a marked effect at the club level. Notwithstanding Ipswich teams playing in the Brisbane league from time to time, including Langer’s Jets joining the BRL in 1987, the headwinds from demographics and economics would have still been too powerful to overcome.

Mergers of competitions with a consolidation of the number of clubs may have proved a more viable strategy, as Duncan Thompson demonstrated in Toowoomba in the 1950s, but that is two very politically sensitive propositions laid on top of each other. It also starts to look a lot like entering a combined Brisbane team into the NSWRL. As Marx noted:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

1. Putting aside the politics of representative selections, it is well known that Lewis, along with Gene Miles, were considering a move to Manly from Wynnum but the QRL stumped up cash to keep them in Brisbane, invoking a tradition that dates back to Jack Reardon in the 1930s.

2. Because frequent try scorers would have followed the payment incentives through competition hierarchy to arrive in Sydney (or England), because most players did not play as many premiership games in one season or have as long a career, and because I think somebody would have mentioned it by now.

3. When the much larger task of adding lineups and scorers is complete, we can revisit the Alex Johnston question. The answer will still be the same though.

4. Tweed, being the NSW regulated part of Southeast Queensland, had poker machines and lots of people went to the leagues club to give them their money. Valleys, the winningest team in Brisbane history, were broke. The merger did not last into 1989.

5. Earlier positions could also be considered: post-1985 after Souths were ransacked by the Raiders, or post-1976 when the QRL began to be concerned about broadcasts of Sydney footy into Brisbane, a criminally underrated factor in the decline of the BRL.

6. Souths beat Easts in the final, 21-10, in front of 15,000 people. The #7 for Souths that day? One Alex Johnston.

7. This appears to be a newish rule and previous versions have indicated that NSWRL, BRL and top flight English games were all considered equivalent.

8. 73 of these games for Toowoomba, along with 52 appearances for Queensland, 27 for Australia and three miscellaneous representative games make up Steinohrt’s first class resume, according to the NRL. Nary a club game to be seen.

9. Rohan Hancock was the only player selected for the Maroons in Origin that was not playing in Brisbane, Sydney or England. His time in maroon came to an end after the 1982 series. For the Blues, only three players were ever selected from country clubs, all played exactly one game each and none were selected after 1984.

10. Reader Paulmac once wrote to me that he had asked Wally Lewis if any of the 80s BRL champions could have beaten their Sydney counterparts. Lewis’ response is that only the 1984 Seagulls would’ve won and everyone else would have lost. The only other record of a Super Bowl being played that I know of is from 1920, Balmain defeating Western Suburbs, 30-zip. Whether the gap between NSWRL and BRL, or between NRL and European Super League, or between major US sports and their overseas counterparts (NBA/Eurobasket, MLB/NPB, etc) is sufficient to treat them as the same or different classes is left to the reader.

11. Queensland had its own version of pokies, called ‘in-line’ machines. From what I can gather, these were functionally similar to slots but operated more like pinball and paid out vouchers that could be redeemed for drinks, food or other prizes but not cash. In reality, clubs paid cash prizes. This was a lucrative business and payments to police commissioner ex-Sir Terry Lewis, starting in 1978, to protect the in-line racket and keep poker machines out of Queensland, was a significant point in the Fitzgerald Inquiry.

12. Or perhaps including select regional centres, like Newcastle, Illawarra, Ipswich and Toowoomba, until 1960 or so.

13. Another discussion: how to classify competitions like the Amco Cup or Winfield State League that included both club and representative teams?

14. I assume these results exist somewhere but they are not on RLP, where they would be useful.

15. Of which, one is now in the NRL, four in QCup and two in the BRL. Brisbane Brothers is no longer a senior club.

16. Of which, twelve are in the NRL (four were merged into two joint ventures) and two are in NSW Cup, of which one is about to return to the NRL.

17. This could be 100 or 200 points, depending on how you math the math, and the latter was in the first draft. Further, class Elo ratings are not precisely ideal for this kind of hypothesising. Class ratings move slowly and so, for example, St George’s dominance as the top team extends to 1969, which was not what happened in real life, and glosses over the potential for random Cinderella runs of form.