|
2007 9TH TOM BROOK LECTURE
The 9th Annual Tom Brock
Lecture
was delivered
by
Mr Sean Fagan, whose
presentation was entitled ”Nothing
But a Nine-Day Wonder”: The founding of rugby league—Australia’s first
professional code.
Abstract
Rather than being a
‘Nine-Day Wonder’ as one journalist described it, rugby league and the NSWRL
is about to celebrate its centenary. By just its third season, rugby league
had not only survived, but gained domination of winter sport in Sydney, in
the nation’s largest metropolis. How did it all happen so quickly? While the
League’s opponents were decrying professional football as an abhorrent evil,
what was it that made the ‘new rugby’ code so immediately popular with the
public and footballers alike? After a decade of simmering discontent, a
heady mix of star footballers, private speculators, player payments, profit
sharing, club structures, 13-a-side rugby, internal bickering, and public
sentiment, all combined to bring about the founding of Australia’s first
professional football code: rugby league.
Biography
Sean Fagan is a sports
historian and writer, specialising in rugby league and 19th
century rugby union. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book The
Rugby Rebellion—The Divide of League and Union (2005) and has just
completed writing The Master: The Life and Times of Dally Messenger—a
biography on Australia’s greatest rugby league player. His work can be found
on the internet at RL1908.com and ColonialRugby.com.au. He is a member of
the NRL and ARL Historians Committee, helping to plan for the code’s
centenary in 2007 and 2008.
2006 8TH TOM BROCK LECTURE
The
8th Annual Tom Brock Lecture was delivered by Professor
David Rowe, whose presentation was entitled: The
Stuff of Dreams, or the Dream Stuffed? Rugby League, Media Empires, Sex
Scandals, and Global Plays.
Abstract
It is now over a decade since the Super League War
confirmed all the worst fears of those who see contemporary sport as a wholly
owned subsidiary of corporate commercial media. Rugby league has recovered on the surface with a unified
league, open competition, and respectable crowds, television ratings and
sponsorships in the usual places.
It loudly asserts that the house rent in twain in the last century is
in good order for the current one.
But is such optimism justified? Despite official assertions that the
Super League cataclysm is a thing of the past, it continues to stalk the code
like Banquo’s Ghost at a Macbeth family dinner. The scars of the Murdoch-Packer collision are still
visible, a constant reminder that the ‘people’s game’ can be turned upside
down if media capital with big ego so decrees. Frequent sexual misconduct scandals have required the code
to resort to gender re-education, and financial improprieties commend similar
courses in business ethics. The
iconic South Sydney club has been re-instated to the competition, but on public
relations rather than firm legal grounds, and is subject to internecine
warfare, with few of its ‘big day out’ demonstrators now witnessing their
frequent losses. The ‘world
game’ of (association) football once known as soccer is resurgent, with Frank
Lowy as a Packer for the new millennium, a ticket to the 2006 World Cup
finals and the Asian Football Confederation, and a shiny new pay TV
contract. Professionalised rugby
union, with abundant cash and impeccable city connections, raids the ranks of
League’s best players, promising serious international competitions that make
a mockery of League’s claim to be of much significance beyond eastern
Australasia and northern England.
The now genuinely national Australian Rules Football, with even less
of an international presence than League, successfully brandishes its
socialistic draft and massive $780 million, five-year TV rights contract. Rugby
league in Australia and a small number of places, then, is alive and kicking,
but confronting a diminished place in the hierarchy of Australian sport. It is not so much threatened with
extinction as sporting subordination.
Does its trumpeted dream seek to conceal the recurring nightmare of
the permanent wooden spoon among the four football codes?
Biography
Professor David Rowe is Director of the Centre for Cultural Research
(CCR) at the University of Western Sydney, which he joined in March 2006 from the Cultural Industries and Practices
Research Centre (CIPS) at the University of Newcastle. He is a
frequent commentator in print, electronic and online media. He has many academic publications on the subject
of sport and media, including Sport, Culture and the Media:
The Unruly Trinity (second edition, 2004)
and the co-authored Globalization
and Sport: Playing the World (2001).
2005 7TH TOM BROCK LECTURE
The 7th Tom Brock Lecture was delivered by Mr
Roy Masters. The lecture was titled ‘The Great Fibro versus Silvertail Wars’
Biography
Following careers as a schoolteacher and coach of leading
rugby league teams, Wests and St George, Roy Masters became a journalist with
the Sydney Morning Herald and a
television and radio commentator. He was the first coach of the Australian
Schoolboys’ team, which was undefeated on its 1972 tour of England. Masters
is also an inaugural member of the Board of the Australian Sports Commission.
2004 6TH
TOM BROCK LECTURE
Novelist
Tom Keneally delivered the 6th Tom Brock Lecture in 2004. The
lecture was titled "No more bloody bundles for Britain: The Post-World
War II tours of the British and French Allies."
2003 5TH TOM BROCK LECTURE
Tony Collins delivered the Tom Brock Lecture on the
subject of '"Ahr Waggy": Harold Wagstaff and the making of
Anglo-Australian rugby league culture', on 4 July 2003.
Abstract:
Why has rugby league been such an enduring link between Britain and
Australia? The 1914 'Rorke's Drift' test match set the tone for all
subsequent Anglo-Australian rugby league clashes; at the centre stood British
captain Harold Wagstaff. More than anyone else Wagstaff embodied rugby
league's self-image: working-class, democratic, antagonistic to authority and
convinced of its superiority to all other codes of football. It is this
cultural link, and Wagstaff's role in creating it, which is responsible for
the sporting bond that exists between Keighley and Kogarah.
Biography:
Tony Collins is a Research Fellow at International Centre for Sports History
and Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester and is the archivist of the Rugby
Football League. His publications include Rugby's Great Split, a
social history of the origins of rugby league. He is currently working on a
history of league and union in the twentieth century.
|