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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...012430,00.html
Wayne Smith | January 11, 2008
ONE hundred years after the first Wallabies - or as they very nearly were, the Rabbits - ventured to Britain, the Australian team is set to end its northern hemisphere campaign with a match against the Barbarians.
Australian Rugby Union acting chief executive Matt Carroll said yesterday it was hoped the International Rugby Board's executive committee would approve the fixture at its next meeting early next month.
If that apparent formality is given the rubber stamp, the Wallabies can look forward to a five-match tour in November, starting with the still-to-be-confirmed Test against the All Blacks in Hong Kong followed by internationals against Italy, France and England.
Five matches is a slightly heavier workload than normal but the Wallabies have no grounds for complaint, not when it is considered that the original 1908 team played 31 matches in Britain. They won 25, including the Olympic final - the first team gold medal won by Australia at the Olympic Games.
So pivotal was the 1908 tour to the history of Australian rugby that Carroll said the ARU was examining how the centenary might be celebrated. But while the Wallabies no doubt will enter into the spirit of the occasion, it's a fair bet they will not want to re-enact some of the quirkier aspects of that original campaign.
For starters, they will arrive in Britain bearing one of the more formidable brand names in world rugby. But when the 1908 players landed, they discovered to their dismay that the dastardly British press had taken to dubbing them the Rabbits.
This necessitated a hastily convened team meeting at which a number of alternatives were canvassed, among them Kangaroos (already appropriated by the fledgling rugby league team), Kookaburras and Wallaroos, but eventually "Wallabies" emerged as a narrow winner.
Ironically, one of the many theories surrounding South Sydney's famous Rabbitoh emblem was that the foundation rugby league club proudly picked up the tag the Wallabies so disdainfully had cast aside.
But the 1908 Wallabies were not initially so successful in getting rid of an even more odious piece of baggage, the haka - or rather the pseudo-Aboriginal war cry - that officials had insisted they perform before every match.
Three decades after that tour, captain Herbert Moran still cringed at the memory of being forced to take part in a comic opera so insulting to Aboriginals.
"We were being asked to remind British people of the miserable remnants of a race which they had disposed and we had maltreated or neglected," Moran wrote in his book Viewless Winds.
"We were officially expected to leap up in the air and make foolish gestures which somebody thought Australian natives might have used in similar circumstances and we were also given meaningless words which we were to utter savagely during this pantomine."
Not surprisingly, Moran refused to lead this travesty and attempted to hide himself in the body of the team whenever the war cry was performed.
Some 99 years later, the youngest Australian player at the World Cup, Berrick Barnes, also would squirm with embarrassment at being made to go everywhere in France carrying the team's mascot, a stuffed toy wallaby.
But he might have squirmed even more had he been forced to keep company with the Wallabies' first mascot, a carpet snake named Bertie who was smuggled into Britain wrapped around one of the players, Tom Richards.
What would make modern-day Wallabies recoil in even greater horror would be the thought of the predecessors' pay packet, three shillings a day.
But as paltry as that amount was, it still was enough to convince Scotland and Ireland that the Australians had been stained by the sin of professionalism, prompting both countries to refuse to play the tourists.
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Originally Posted by AndyS
Seriously though, for me it's all about expanding the popularity of the game internationally and I reckon these kinds of games might be a way of doing that, but only if they are targeted properly. An international involving the HK test side wouldn't generate too much interest over there - and they won't be in the World Cup any time soon - but the site of a full house in HK for a match involving two of the game's big guns would generate some great exposure for the game in that region.
