It’s been a year since the Dawn of the Dolphins1.
The Shelbyvillesque experience of going to a Brisbane NRL team’s home game, but not a Broncos home game, and watching the birth of a new fanbase, growing from a hushed uncertainty to chanting Redcliffe! Redcliffe! in full voice in the space of an hour, are two memories that will stay with me for as long as I care to remember. The Dawn of the Dolphins, the first Conflict on Caxton and the Broncos’ demolition of the Warriors in the preliminary final are three of the most meaningful games I’ve attended and all occured within the space of six months.
The Dolphins’ actual on-field record in 2023 belied the extremely positive vibes generated by the NRL’s newest club. In the absence of a competitive Phins lineup, even hardened Broncos fans were willing to allow Redcliffe a modicum of space to establish themselves and extended, in lieu of an anticipated antipathy, a cautious apathy. Instead of the heavily marketed Battle of/for Brisbane, we saw a ceasefire signed, an innocuous handshake over the cricket pitch at the Gabba, with a clear acknowledgement that hostilities will be resumed at some not too distant point in the future when things are different.
The North Queensland Cowboys’ rise to be one of the bigger clubs in the NRL has been stealthy, if only because the media is heavily concentrated 2500km south of Townsville. Even if there was a substantive Brisbane-based rugby league press corps, they still wouldn’t pay attention. See also: any other aspect of Australia’s media and culture. If it is any consolation, this has been an unresolved problem since 1851.
There’s myriad reasons for this ascension. A Newscorp bailout in the early days of the NRL kept the dream alive, despite all of the demographic and geographic obstacles. Johnathan Thurston grew from a fresh-faced kid in 2004 to become one of the faces of the game with a decade of Origin series victories. He and his teammates went on a run of success that bought a lot of goodwill and attention from both deeply connected northern fans and more marginal fans across the rest of the state. The boundary between the territory of the Broncos and that of the Cowboys is more southerly than the traditional geographical definitions would imply, lying somewhere around Rockhampton today.
The Cowboys have also benefitted from a longer term cultural trend of suburbanites wanting to getting a metaphorical patina of rural dust. In a bid to give their identity something real, as if the 20s were loaded with the same sense of white male ennui that predominated in the culture of the late 90s, American truck-utes that never haul anything, oversized novelty 4WDs for getting bogged on K’gari and tickets to the Broncos-Cowboys derby at Suncorp have all been must-haves for listless middle managers and administrative officers. This is intended as less a jab at the Cowboys fanbase than, oh I don’t know, the personality of about a dozen people I’ve worked with over the years.
A lost decade of mediocre-to-good Broncos teams through the 2010s saw fans accumulate around the more successful Storm and the more authentic Cowboys. The 2017 grand final was then something of a big deal in a city whose skin in the game had been notionally eliminated a week earlier.
In conclusion, Brisbane is a land of contrasts.
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It’s with that background that I approached the new season, attending both the Dolphins’ home opener against the Cowboys on Sunday, followed by the Broncos’ home opener against the Rabbitohs on Thursday.
The Dolphins adorn the street light poles at the Normanby Five Ways and a billboard up the hill on Musgrave Road, just past the pub. By Thursday, this has been replaced with an advertisement for Beauty and the Beast, now playing at QPAC. Who says Brisbane is a cultural wasteland? Around the corner, there’s a full wall Broncos mural on the faux-Victorian townhouse at the top of Petrie Terrace, celebrating both men’s and women’s teams appearances in the 2023 finals. Given how both campaigns ended, the painting exudes a mild, but wholly negative, portent given the benefit of hindsight.
Sunday afternoon’s game is missing the frisson of punters being six beers deep and then high tailing it out of the stadium to clog up the queue to Honey Bs, which is, against all expectations, open at 5.30pm. Heading home on Thursday night, I’m made aware of a new club that’s opened on a side street off Caxton where Honey Bs used to be. An all-in brawl between the employees of both establishments is narrowly averted, even though the independent contractors almost certainly have no actual loyalty to their employer. Had the repartee been more venomous, it would have been the biggest violent nuisance in Milton since Beetson-Cronin and that includes a WBO welterweight title fight. Why these reports from Caxton Street always descend into the commercial machinations of strip clubs, I don’t know (I have my theories). For the record, I do not to patronise these venues or engage with the street marketing campaign.
The Caxton Party House has gone all-in, turning the front verandah into a karaoke stage and the occupant has gleefully accepted his place as a touchstone on the fringe of Brisbane’s NRL culture. While the Party House is more subdued than usual, probably because it is Sunday afternoon, it is silent on Thursday night. Make of that what you will. Only God and he knows what he gets up to on the other 342 non-game days of the year.
An announced crowd in excess of 32,000 for the Dolphins was at least 5,000 too many, with the upper bowl barely occupied. The Cowboys fans didn’t turn up for this one in great numbers - the Battle for the Bruce evidently lacks the ennui-reducing juice of The Big Game - so the intersection at The Barracks was for the most part suspiciously and impeccably clean red merchandise. I spotted at least three Broncos jerseys and one, presumably confused, gentleman wearing a Cowboys jersey and a Dolphins cap. Anyone but the Broncos, I guess. I also spotted approximately 4 million brand new Budget Direct neoprene fins and immediately compromised my intentionally-neutral Souths Magpies retro shirt by grabbing one. Despite all these factors conducive to something resembling an atmosphere, it was as if we were back in 2023, with a crowd unsure how much of their dignity they should commit to acting like deranged lunatics in support of their team. It turned out the best bet was to stake very little on the outcome.
The 35,000 announced for the Broncos seemed closer to the mark, with the upper bowl half full, a greater diversity of maroon and gold and cardinal and myrtle, a more belligerent and arrogant approach to making noise from both sides, and girls screaming as the Broncos team list was announced, which was not by ascending order of jersey number but in ascending order of an index based on rugby league talent and physical attractiveness, with the horniest cheers starting at Jordan Riki (about six from last) and culminating with Reece Walsh.
The Dolphins membership, at the low, low rate of $99 for three games for the silver level, gave me reserved seating, a cap and some other knick-knacks. The Broncos gave me nothing except a bronze general admission seat near the opposition fans for four games at two or three times the price.
The Dolphins performed without the spirit and enthusiasm of last year’s debut. Redcliffe were competitive until the first round of pit stops, the dire bench of old men rotated on and the Cowboys powered away. Tesi Niu did his best to further indebt himself to Wayne Bennett, the only man keeping Niu in the NRL, with two errors leading directly to tries and nearly butchering the Dolphins’ third. The Red Fish failed to go right at any point in the afternoon, refusing to challenge Holmes and Tualaigi to take on Farnworth and Isaako. Instead they kicked left and got one Feldt drop out of it. The Dolphins already look like spoon contenders - lacking imagination in attack and willpower in defence - and they’ve played 80 minutes of the season.
The Cowboys played a classic Cowboys hand and won convincingly on a volume of possession without being convincing. The Cows capitalised on the Dolphins first tripping over and then their complete and utter indifference to proceedings to run in a slew of tries. There was 25 minutes left when it was clear that any old effort would do. The Cowboys, too, rarely went right but moreso because Zac Laybutt could fricassee Niu at will, playing a hand in multiple tries. Concerningly, the middle defence gave up the Dolphins’ two tries while the result was still theoretically up for grabs. Worse, the defence was really only tested with a half dozen red zone visits by the Dolphins. That’s a strike rate that will need significant improvement against almost any other team in the competition.
The Broncos were evidently suffering from a horrifying combination of Vegas jet lag and a premiership hangover sans premiership. Fortunately, Souths played with an acute lack of pace in the backs, a chronic lack of respect for the ball and incurred a string of embarrassing penalties, not least for their hapless halfback kicking the ball into the offside backside of one of his teammates and losing a scrum feed in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-four, handing victory to the Broncos. Brisbane looked more like the team of 2023, albeit by a magnitude that was barely perceptible and with a noticeably diminshed pack - yes, it would have been nice to keep Tom Flegler, especially with his showing for his new club, but no, it was not possible to do that. The Ponies were never in any real danger, despite conceding two soft tries minutes apart, and trotted to their first win of the year.
I gave my three year old the Budget Direct fin. She called it a “clown hat”. Besides being a devastating own - the inflatable Broncos goalposts were a bigger hit in this household - there’s still some hearts and minds to be won in the battle in and around Brisbane.
And, at the time of writing, a little over a year of The Maroon Observer.