The Redfern Oval that Fran Grant remembers is long gone. The old hill into the ground and the cardinal and myrtle grandstand were pulled down years ago and replaced by a schmick $20m redevelopment that’s all clean lines and cool cement.
The South Sydney Rabbitohs are long gone too, of course. Lured away like so many NRL clubs to the cavernous Olympic Stadium, where clubs don’t have to worry about pesky local council fees and instead get paid handsomely to play.
Today the spiritual home of one of rugby league’s foundation clubs matches the profile of the largely gentrified inner-city suburb it has become; populated by designer dog walkers and gym-fit preeners.
It was different when Grant was a kid. Along with her father, a member of the stolen generation, she remembers the raucous crowds, heady atmosphere, and the sense of belonging to something. “It was very working class, a poor area, but that never seemed to bother anyone,” she told the Guardian this week.
The home of Australia’s first Aboriginal-run health and legal centres during the 1970s, the Block, TJ Hickey and Paul Keating’s Redfern speech, the suburb has for a long time been synonymous with Sydney’s Indigenous population. That intersection of politics and culture hasn’t escaped the Rabbitohs either, and the club’s history is over-stuffed with Indigenous icons such as Greg Inglis and Nathan Merritt.
“But the fans were not only from Redfern, we grew up in Maroubra near the beach in public housing, it was just a great feeling being around people who not only loved the Rabbitohs but also our family. For all the Koori people there it was about being around your mob,” Grant remembers.
“There was always a lot of Koori people there, I guess it’s important to keep in mind, Redfern was not an Aboriginal settlement per se, it was just where people came to be together, there was work there in the railways.”
On Sunday night, the Rabbitohs will play the Penrith Panthers in the NRL grand final. It will be an event like no other in rugby league history. Sydney’s long Covid-19 lockdown saw the game shifted out of its heartland and into Queensland, which will play host to its first ever decider.
The fraught relocation has made for a stunted build-up. While Souths’ last grand final appearance in 2014 seemed to prompt a week-long party, Redfern’s main strips, along with the southern beaches where its main fanbase exists, were quiet this week. So too out west, where fans have had to make-do with DIY pageantry, decking out homes in flags and banners.
But beyond the jarring prospect of two Sydney clubs playing to an out-of-state crowd, there is a kind of symmetry in the game. Located at diametrically opposite ends of the stark geographic and class divide that separates Sydney, Souths may represent rugby league’s blue collar past but it is the Panthers who better embody it in 2021.
“It was always a tough area,” 2003 Panthers premiership hero Luke Rooney says of the Penrith he grew up in. “But it was my kind of town. Growing up I didn’t know anything else, but there are a lot of beautiful people there and it’s all about rugby league.”
Located in Sydney’s far west, the Panthers have never been a glamour club. When it joined the NSW rugby league in 1967, the club president owned a butcher’s shop, the vice president was a boiler maker, and one director’s profession was listed simply as “driver”.
While the club may have lacked boardroom heft, its emergence from Sydney’s league obsessed, working class west meant it developed a production line of local talent.
When Penrith won their first premiership in 1991, it was on the back of local products like Greg Alexander and Brad Fittler. So too in 2003, when Penrith juniors like Rooney and Luke Lewis became household names. The same has held in 2021 – much has been made of the fact many of the Panthers stars have played together since they were teenagers.
“That’s the thing, we get this stigma in western Sydney of being bogans and maybe we sometimes live up to that stereotype, but the reality is the team is about locals come good,” life-long Penrith fan Ben Cummings says. “It’s awesome to see these guys who didn’t have everything gifted to them on a silver spoon,” he says.
If a change has occurred, it has been in tandem with the cultural dynamic of the area. As western Sydney has become more diverse, so too has the talent pool of young and eager footballers. That has, in many ways, helped rugby league reflect the culture and background of its fans more effectively than its rival code in Victoria.
While the Age recently reported that a swathe of the starting players in the AFL grand final were products of Melbourne’s elite private schools, many of the Panthers players have spoken at length about the role of rugby league in helping to navigate life in the hardscrabble Penrith suburbs of Mount Druitt and St Marys. Charismatic winger Brian To’o in particular has been open about the challenges in his upbringing. In 2019 he told the Daily Telegraph about his family not being able to pay for a headstone after his sister died of cancer at the age of eight.
In that interview, he told the newspaper about missing out on birthday presents when money was tight. “But you go without,” he said at the time, “so your family can eat”. He used his Panthers contract to buy a headstone for his sister and, more recently, his match fees from State of Origin to help his parents buy a home.
While league has a less than saintly reputation off the field, the presence of To’o and many other prominent Pasifika players among the Panthers means religion has also become a more central theme of the game. It has become common in recent years to see players in prayer huddles after games, and many of the players are open about the role of faith in their lives.
“It is a good thing to see them practising their faith in the public arena, but also to see them on the field because it is inspiring to others,” Siona Vaelaa, the minister at the Samoa Worship Centre Christian Church in St Marys told the Guardian this week. “Especially young people who have no hope, who come from difficult backgrounds, it is very inspiring to see people that came from the same kind of place succeeding.
“They had nothing too once, but they have done this. It really gives people hope that if those guys can do it, anybody can.”
But this is rugby league, and if the game is inextricably linked to the class of its fans and players, it is also, at its core, a capitalist machine. The Panthers’ on-field success may be attributable to its thriving junior nursery, but off the field its financial heft is built on the same thing that most NRL clubs survive on: poker machine revenue.
From the late ‘90s the club began merging with a series of clubs across Sydney and greater NSW. By 2020, the Panthers group reportedly controlled six licensed clubs raking in $150m, including annual poker machine revenue of $66m. It’s an association South Sydney have been one of the few clubs to successfully shed.
Between the club’s last grand final victories in 1971 and 2014, Souths went from rugby league powerhouses to whipping boys, league rejects and then back again. After they successfully gained reinstatement following their ejection from the NRL in 2000, the new ownership of Hollywood actor Russell Crowe and casino mogul James Packer has seen the club attain the kind of cultural cache that other NRL clubs can only dream of.
Crowe, in particular, has made the club fashionable by leaning into its storied history. The site of actress Natalie Portman at a Souths game this year was just the latest in a series of surreal moments for long-time Rabbitohs fans. For long-time fans like Josh Kemp, who was there at the very first meeting of Fightback campaign that saw Souths reinstated to the league, the change in stars still takes some getting used to.
“Put it this way, I went to a school where it was predominantly [Canterbury Bull]Dogs fans and it was really, really unfashionable to support Souths,” he says.
“I mean I was a proud Souths fan and I didn’t really care one way or another but we were getting belted every week and copping it, even in the fightback years it was not fashionable to support Souths. There were plenty of times at games where there were not many of us around.”
But for all the changes to the club and its traditional heartland, Souths has maintained a connection with its roots. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Grant, who works for a major airline, was stood down along with thousands of other employees. Through the Rabbitohs not-for-profit public benevolent institution, Souths Cares, she was able to keep putting food on the table for her three children.
“It obviously meant a pretty big adjustment for our finances, but they have been just fantastic in supporting us with things like produce boxes but just generally supporting the family and our daughter, checking in and making sure she’s doing OK,” she says.
“I think that’s thing that matters most about sport to me, is the community feeling.”
