Nearly a decade after their final competition game, the Wallaroo Football Club was denied lasting immortality as the name of Australia’s rugby union team—and with it an Olympic gold medal—thanks in part to a long-retired Randwick fullback still instinctively fighting the Wallaroo colours. “If only the Australian team of footballers had been Christened Wallaroo, instead of Wallaby,…

In the 1860s club football in Sydney was the domain of Melbourne rules and other strange combinations. Rules for the day were at the whim of the opposing captains. It was football by pub crawl: enjoy whatever the host had on tap. This era of shifting rules dissolved with the 1870 arrival of Wallaroo FC,…

Was playing Rugby in 19th-century Australia an outlaw game that could have had you arrested and put in gaol? Or is this merely a jest? The trial below may best be cited as ‘King Henry VIII versus Wallaroo Football Club‘. The verdict remains open. Can a gathering of rain-soaked Wallaroo FC players past and present—and…

The Wallaroo Football Club and two of its co-founders, the brothers Richard and Monty Arnold, were pivotal to why today NSW and Queensland are dominated by the Rugby codes. This is the story of some of their most famous battles, told in their own words, and by friends and foes. “If the Melbourne and Carlton…

The Wallaroo FC was essentially patented Rugby prestige in the late 1800s. Its high reputation served as a blueprint for a score of new brother-marsupials to rise up across the Rugby-playing colonies and call themselves “the Wallaroo Football Club”. From Goulburn’s Sunday photo sins and Brisbane’s escape from Melbourne rules, to Maryborough’s rough side of…

Kicking-off a Rugby club in 1870 required not just 20 willing young men as footballers. The pioneer Wallaroo FC players had to lug their own goalposts through Sydney and hide their precious Rugby ball from the police just to avoid a night in the lock-up. “Almost as soon as the football club was formed, the…

It was the oddest Rugby goal ever witnessed in the NSW colony. The ball fell to earth in front of the Wallaroo posts, struck the ground, then bounced merrily over the crossbar. Did it count? This is the story of how one errant-minded football and the Rugby-disciples of the Wallaroo FC founded today’s NSWRU. “In…

A timeless sentinel modelled on the first Wallaroos stands silently over the Australia’s birthplace as a nation. “It is estimated there were more than 150,000…from the footballer’s statue, which is so prominent a landmark in the park…the area was commencing to be thickly covered with humanity.” Physical traces of Sydney’s pioneering football age have nearly…

A broken leg, a break in play and a hurried break-in created a Wallaroo legend. Well, we fought the friendly game out, but I couldn’t say who won; We were all stretched out on shutters when the glorious day was done. Every long-established Rugby club celebrates its most cherished stories, handed down through generations in…

This is the story of the “monstrous injustice” that wiped out Wallaroo FC. The long campaign for “electorate football”—a system of strict residential rules driven by a mantra demanding that all the traditional clubs, drawing players from hither and thither, must be destroyed. The fact that the Wallaroos had founded Rugby in Sydney in 1870,…

The remarkable story of a Rugby prodigy, from the Wallaroos to the England XV, collecting eight international caps a quarter of a century before the first Wallabies sailed. His off-field deeds were equally illustrious, ultimately bestowed a knighthood by King George V. The first Wallaroo Knight. “A veritable Hercules in stature, and having trained here…

This is the story of the “Manhattan Purchase” of Australian sport—how the Arnold brothers of Wallaroo FC seized Queensland for Rugby with a train ride through the mountains and a mysteriously lost letter that swung the football wars in their favour. It was the Great Wallaroo Land Swindle of 1882, the cleverest Rugby zig-zagging dodge…

In the pioneering first years of Wallaroo, they made it the ‘Grand Football Match’ era, where ‘First Fifteens’ weren’t anywhere near enough – these ‘Bigside’ games needed ‘First Twenties’, each featuring a pack of up to 16 bulwark forwards, leaving just four backs behind to patrol the field. In 20-a-side the best part was the…

The first football game in Sydney under Rugby rules came in 1870 with the arrival of the Wallaroo FC. Incredibly, this match against ‘Army and Navy’ at the SCG went on for two afternoons until a winning goal was kicked, all while a spectator looking on was accidentally shot by musket fire. SYDNEY, SATURDAY, JUNE…

It is an oft-repeated myth that Northern Suburbs Rugby Football Club (North Sydney) was born in 1900 from a merger of Wallaroo and Pirates clubs. This claim fundamentally fails to understand the 1900 “district club scheme.” There is little evidence to support the merger theory and the origin of the “Shoremen” nickname. A look at…

Found! The original set of Rugby rules used in Australia. Only those held by Blackheath FC and Rugby School itself are older anywhere in the world. The Wallaroo FC rules of 1871. THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE OF RUGBY IN AUSTRALIADiscovered hidden deep within the back-room archives of the National Library of Australia, were the true holy…

The NSWRU declared Wallaroo the 1894 premiers and inscribed the winning team’s medals with each player’s name. However, on presentation night the Union dramatically reversed its decision and awarded the title to Randwick. Wallaroo protested vigorously, even seeking to appeal to England’s RFU, but all avenues were denied. The club never accepted the decision and…

The Sydney University FC undeniably played an important role in Rugby, but its status as being founded as a club in 1863 and the birthplace of Australian Rugby are doubtful. Wallaroo FC has a stronger claim as Sydney’s first true Rugby club. While newspapers show that in 1865 the students at the University of Sydney…