In the early 1980s in a lower grade Sydney club game for Eastern Suburbs against Western Suburbs at Woollahra Oval in Rose Bay an Easts forward trod on a Wests player’s hand in a ruck and he let out a four-letter expletive. It prompted an Easts supporter with leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket to cry out, “come on chap, you’re not in the western suburbs now you know”.
Is that how rugby truly feels about western Sydney? It’s a pertinent question to ask following news that the Sydney Rugby Union has booted the Penrith Emus out of the Shute Shield competition.
To be sure, the Emus had become intolerably uncompetitive with ridiculously high scores recorded against teams from first grade to colts. Player safety was also a genuine concern and clearly, something had to be done. But culling the Emus was emblematic of rugby’s uneasy relationship with the working class western suburbs and perhaps explains why there are not more Kurtley Beales playing for the Wallabies.
Beale grew up in St Marys, which is part of Greater Penrith, and there are hundreds of talented kids like him running around, but they do not play rugby. If not for an Indigenous scholarship to the great Australian rugby nursery at St Joseph’s College in exclusive Hunters Hill, Beale probably would have ended up playing rugby league for the Penrith Panthers.
There are still two Shute Shield clubs in Sydney’s western suburbs – West Harbour and Parramatta – but Sydney does not end at the headwaters of the Parramatta River, but at the foothills of the Blue Mountains. Penrith is 32km west of Parramatta, which is actually the geographic centre of Sydney.
While Penrith may be situated in rugby league’s heartland, the absence of a Shute Shield club in the far west of Sydney is a wasted opportunity for rugby. One of the fastest-growing regional cities in Australia, Greater Penrith has a population of 196,066, which is expected to reach 223,631 by 2031. This is half of Canberra’s population of 403,468, which supports a Super Rugby franchise.
During the history of the Shute Shield clubs such as Hornsby in Sydney’s north and Drummoyne in the inner-west have come and gone. Even mighty Sydney University spent time in the old Sydney second division. But the cutting of a club like Penrith reinforces rugby’s image as a game for private school toffs from the affluent suburbs of Sydney’s north shore and eastern suburbs.
There is a sense that the demographics of western Sydney do not fit with rugby’s traditional supporter base and that it is not really a rugby area, but if rugby is to succeed as a modern professional sport it needs to be truly inclusive. If Australian rugby is prepared to take on the AFL in Melbourne with a Super Rugby franchise, the Rebels, surely it can try to compete with rugby league in western Sydney.
The cutting of the Emus presents rugby with an opportunity to start afresh in Penrith. If the Emus cannot be reformed, a new Shute Shield club should be created in the city. Junior rugby players in Penrith must have a senior club to aspire to. Maybe Penrith should play in the Sydney sub-district competition or in a regional NSW comp to start with, but the aim should be to restore the Emus or whoever to the Shute Shield.
Over the years many players from the western suburbs have played for the Waratahs; Wycliff Palu, Tatafu Polota-Nau and Israel Folau are among them. The talent is there.
There are ways to make it work. Former Wallabies utility back and Emus coach Julian Huxley had a plan to align the Emus with the University of Western Sydney, which has a campus at Kingswood, but it did not come to fruition. This is a good idea and should be re-visited if there are any attempts to revitalise a Penrith Shute Shield club, which must strive to represent the whole Penrith community, not just a section of it.
Penrith is a challenge, but it is also a chance. How does rugby expect the game to succeed in places like Melbourne if it cannot support a Shute Shield club in a fast growing region just 50km from Rugby Australia HQ at Moore Park?
