Getting to know Queensland
I think if you want to understand Australian rugby league, it helps to have a vague understanding of Sydney’s layout and history.1 Even so, often the assumption seems to be I would naturally understand why having a team north of the Harbour is critical (wait, what’s Newcastle then?), or that I’m supposed to know the difference between the Macarthur region and the Hills District, or that there’s space on the Central Coast for a new team and that it’s definitely different to putting a new team in Sydney proper. I have to work to understand that perspective because I haven’t lived it. But then those same people who place those expectations and create those assumptions couldn’t point to the Sunshine Coast on a map and think the Gold Coast is just Surfers Paradise.
It follows that if you want to get a grip on Queensland rugby league - that is, the engine of the entire sport - then you need to have some understanding of Queensland.
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Queensland often gets tagged as the Florida or Texas or Alabama of Australia. While I think parallels between the Sun Belt and modern Queensland might be interesting, this tagging is generally done by people whose understanding of those places is definitely less complete, let alone nuanced, than it should be to be making that comparison.
The differences between here and the rest of the nation start with the population of Queensland being distributed differently to the other states, with a far lower proportion in the capital. It continues with Brisbane being neither the beachhead of white civilisation on the continent, nor the epitome of living standards in the late 19th century due to the gold rush. It is a bit of both but also neither. Finally, Queensland is generally pretty warm.
Cliches are also easy and they disengage the brain from engaging in any further understanding. “Queensland politics is INSANE” is a Buzzfeed headline that’s stuck with me over the years, mostly because it sat atop an article describing the pretty ordinary machinations of a place like this. State parliament is unicameral and some politicians are attention-grabbing, conservative lunatics - whoa, look out!
There are no number of newsletters to be written that can fully redress that particular imbalance but we can make a start by treating Queensland and its places and its sport as worthy topics of discussion.
The parts of Queensland
Queensland is one of six states of Australia, the second largest by area and third largest by population, occupying the north-east of the continent.
About 70% of Queensland’s population lives in the south-east corner of the state, a squished t-shape2 of sub-tropical flood plains and river catchments, farms replaced by sprawling suburbs, glass-encased high rises, theme parks and beaches, and the occassional international sporting event wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the corderilla of the Great Dividing Range. It is, like most urban congolmerations around the world, a place where ordinary people live and go about their lives.
SEQ comprises three major metropolitan hubs:
Brisbane in the middle and to the west, the third largest city in Australia (2.6m). Known for its river.
Gold Coast to the south, the sixth largest (715k). Known for its beaches.
Sunshine Coast to the north, the ninth largest (400k). Known for its beaches.
Brisbane, in this context, is the metropolitan area (or Significant Urban Area to use the parlance of the ABS), which comprises the contiguous local government areas3 of Brisbane, Moreton Bay, Ipswich, Logan, Redland (not to be confused with Redcliffe or Redbank) and, depending on where you consider a city to stop, parts of the Scenic Rim, Somerset and Lockyer Valley. The Gold Coast urban area stretches from the Albert River, where the speed limit increases to 110km/h, south into New South Wales and west to its mountainous and day-trip touristy interior. The Sunshine Coast includes Noosa and its former logging rurality and presently hippiefied hinterlands.
SEQ continues to grow rapidly, especially in the aftermath the covid pandemic. Wikipedia lists Australia’s largest 102 urban areas by population and of those areas, between 2011 and 2022, the Sunshine Coast experienced the fifth highest growth in Australia, the Gold Coast the tenth and Brisbane the eleventh, eaching adding between one-fifth and one-quarter of their respective populations.
Another 650,000 people, or about 12% of Queensland’s population, are distributed in the coastal regional centres of Bundaberg, Gladstone, Rockhampton, Mackay, Townsville and Cairns, a drive of about 1350 kilometres from to Bundy to Cairns, or about half the length of the Great Barrier Reef. Another couple of percent live at the top of the Range in Toowoomba, Australia’s second largest inland city. These cities are propped up by a varying mix of resources, agriculture and tourism and it gets hotter and more humid as you travel from south to north.
The remaining 15% are distributed across approximately 1% of the planet’s total land surface, an area larger than all but 14 countries (which includes the one in which it is located). It is a big place, full of small towns, apples, peanuts, bananas, wheat, strawberries, sugar, rum, cattle, horses, coal, gas, solar, rainforests, scrubland, deserts, beaches, rivers, creeks, mountains, plateaus, plains, crocodiles, snakes, spiders, bull sharks, lungfish, koalas, kangaroos, stingers, mosquitoes and flies, but not many people.
As there are no formal political entities between the layer of local government, the areas of which roughly conform to actual towns and regions, and the state itself, how the rest of the state can be divided up depends on the context. North Queensland is traditionally everything from Mackay north (or Sarina, depending on the person) and far north Queensland is Cairns and up (or maybe Innisfail or Cardwell). The QRL has three divisions that sit over the leagues - North, Central and South-east - and in the interests of balance, parts of “Central” include parts of the south-east, like the Sunshine Coast, as well as the south-west. Energex services the south-east Queensland, including parts of Gympie and Toowoomba, and Ergon the rest. Queensland Health has 15 geographical health boards. According to Lech Blaine in The Monthly4, former Prime Minister, Nambourite and guy I once blanked at my local polling booth, Kevin Rudd, “says there are at least five Queenslands: ‘Brisvegas’, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, the region west of the Great Dividing Range, and the one north of Noosa encompassing big country towns such as Bundaberg, Gladstone, Rockhampton, Mackay, Townsville and Cairns.”
Here’s a video I made5:
A brief history of the Queensland Cup
Historically, Queensland rugby leagues have entered representative teams in inter-city competitions. The most notable of these are the Bulimba Cup (Brisbane, Ipswich and Toowoomba, 1925 to 1972) and the Foley Shield (North Queensland, 1948 to 1995 and 2000 to present).
In an effort to conquer the tyranny of distance and unite Queensland’s disparate rugby leagues into a single competition, the Winfield State League was played from 1982 to 1995. The format was never settled, with a fluctuating fixture list and a changing mix of representative teams and established clubs. The passage of the Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act 1992 ended Winfield’s involvement in rugby league after the 1995 season.
The competition was revamped into the Queensland Cup, playing a shorter 15 round campaign in 1996 before becoming the state’s premier rugby league competition from 1997 onwards. The Queensland Cup took the shape we are familiar with today in 2008, in particular the formalisation and universality of feeder arrangements with the NRL clubs. While the league has existed in the shade created by the Queensland NRL clubs, Cup provides a valuable stepping stone for players, coaches and administrators in their development while maintaining a balanced representation of the state as a whole.
Here’s a video I made6:
Some notes for the pedantic:
I mostly used Wikipedia as a source, which has started to fill out its QCup content nicely. Thanks to whoever that was.
That said, the history of NRL affiliations, the club articles and the QCup season articles don’t precisely agree on which club affiliated with who and when. Except where I had other sources (e.g. this post), I mostly went with the clubs then the seasons. Post-2008, only the type F affiliations are shown but prior to that, it’s difficult to assess the kinds of relationships NRL and QCup clubs had, so some shown are probably type Ds.
I used the current NRL logos and the modern colour schemes for the QCup clubs instead of what they were at the time (with a couple of exceptions). Trying to sort that out would have been too tedious.
The future Maroons
It is almost inevitable that there will be a Maroon with a yellow and red sleeve sponsorship bearing the postcode 4207 or 4306. To not put too fine a point on it, rugby league draws much of its talent from the suburbs. Those of a lower socio-economic bent tend to be more prolific in producing the rugby league millionaires of the future than the higher socio-economic areas that have traditionally sent their boys to play union or, more recently, Australian rules.
This has largely been true since 1908 but the nature of the suburbs underneath our feet have changed massively in the intervening 12 decades. The once working class neighbourhoods of West End and Coorparoo and Nundah are gentrified, pushing the working class further out into the greater metropolitan sprawl. The home grounds of Souths and Easts and Norths are legacies of a prior age.
What then of the suburbs in south-east Queensland and their future?
These are the Priority Development Areas. A PDA is a mechanism the state government uses to bypass traditional local government planning restrictions in an effort to drive economic growth. Queen’s Wharf, the future Brisbane Live at Roma Street station, the Sunshine Coast Airport and Cross River Rail are all PDAs, as is the Mackay Waterfront, parts of the Maroochydore and Southport CBDs, Northshore Hamilton, and several areas marked for suburban development outside Queensland’s larger regional cities. The three of interest to us are at the southernmost extreme of Brisbane: Greater Flagstone, Yarrabilba and the Ripley Valley.
For at least the last two decades and over the coming decades, the state government wants tens of thousands of people to move into new suburbs that will be built on the farmland and forests that currently occupy the land within those orange borders.
It’s only really in undertaking this exercise that I now understand what people are talking about when they say the Western Corridor. It doesn’t really exist yet but it will. Perhaps unless you actually live in the area (or are a crank in an ivory tower obsessively poring over maps), you might not have known about this coalescing of suburbs, previously separated by bush and the Greenbank military base. That’s partly because the name is confusing: the “Western Corridor” is as west of the M1, as it is south of the M6/M2.
But that’s where we will find future Maroons7. It’s not me that thinks that, it is the Brisbane Tigers.
I’ve long said that applying Sydney’s Risk-style mentality to juniors and catchments and the NRL, to Brisbane, and Queensland more widely, is a flawed approach. The Q4 prefer to play Monopoly. While that’s true, it’s also partly wrong because the QRL clubs have very much been playing Risk.
A few years ago, the Tigers presented a strategic plan and highlighted that Flagstone and Yarrabilba were important to their future. It was sensible, as new areas with a disposition to rugby league would need clubs and if the Tigers were there first, then why not? It also didn’t make a lot of sense because Coorparoo is a long way from the outskirts of Logan. Then I roughly mapped out Appendix 1 of the QRL Operations Manual (2023).
Easts have traditionally been on the eastern side of the highway, with Souths on the other, a boundary set nearly a century ago, before the highway was even built.
The Magpies’ sphere of influence extends down the western side of the Pacific Motorway and into the south-western suburbs of Brisbane proper and through what I’m going to call Old Logan. The (relatively new, by comparison) Seagulls’ sphere extends through the southern bayside suburbs to Cleveland and then jags inland to Beenleigh. The Jets have their historic Ipswich Rugby League core established in 1909. Thanks to the endless growth of Brisbane, all of those territories abut each other, forming flashpoints in Wacol and around Springwood.
But the Tigers have stolen a march on the rest of the QRL. Bypassing the fronts in Logan, they have secured greener pastures in Flagstone and Yarrabilba. They will wait for the suburbs to fill in, the newly minted citizens of Logan City to move in and the boys and girls to play rugby league and become Tigers. Eventually, a very small number of them will pull on maroon jumpers in front of 52,000 at Suncorp.
While Ripley does not yet have a rugby league club, Swifts (formerly of Booval) were slated to move there at one point, although they seem to be operating a wandering lifestyle currently anchored at the Cecil Hotel in Goodna. Irrespective, that will almost certainly fall under Ipswich’s mandate and fulfill a similar role as a generator of junior rugby league players.
We haven’t yet considered the Gold Coast (clubs denoted in the maroon of Burleigh and black of Tweed in the above) or how long it will take for sprawl to rip through the length of the Ripley Valley, conurbanate with Greater Flagstone at Kagaru and spill down the Mount Lindsey Highway towards Beaudesert. Jimboomba Thunder and Ormeau Shearers are the vanguard of that particular imperium and the former looks a tempting target to flip to the orange and black.
I get why people in Sydney talk this way about their juniors, because it’s fun but it’s also incredibly stupid. This is rugby league, it’s can’t possibly be that serious.
But it’s also our city and our state and how we live our lives. One reflects the other but it happens so slowly that we never stop to appreciate it.
Likewise, If you want to understand the British game, knowing the difference between Yorkshire and Lancashire is important, and why those terms do and don’t reflect current political and geographical nomenclature, and how the late Industrial Revolution economy of England functioned, and that will lead you to some understanding of the modern political picture. See: Tony Collins.
It’s not hard to work out why when you look at a topographical map:
Queensland local government areas are generally larger than in other states, a legacy of a continuous program of amalgamating smaller shires into bigger regions in the interests of efficiency. Five of the top ten LGAs by population in Australia are in Queensland.
I could extensively block quote from it but it’s a good piece, worth a read, and interesting to look back on that with five more years’ of hindsight, a federal Labor government and three Brisbane Greens MPs running on NIMBYism, and his coverage of the 2022 election.
This is the first video I’ve made since high school and it shows.
This is the second video I’ve made since high school. I have an itch to do more, and have some ideas, but we’ll have to see when I find time to actually follow through.
There’s a similar development at the south end of Caloundra that will function as a northern SEQ version of this but that will just fall into the lap of the Falcons, until Caboolture extends further north into the pine forest and then the Dolphins will be on their doorstep.