By Tallon Smith

COUNTRY rugby league has been rocked by yet another proud club withdrawing from First Grade competitions for the 2023 season, with the Cowra Magpies this week electing not to field a team in the Peter McDonald Premiership this year.

Bush Footy’s divergence between the rich and the poor has never been more stark than in 2023, with the top grade withdrawals of many proud and historic clubs causing havoc for competitions and jeopardising the future of regional rugby league. Many fans including myself were left reeling following the huge news that both the Helensburgh Tigers and Wagga Brothers had withdrawn from their respective first grade competitions for the season.

Perhaps the greatest shock of all however came with the aforementioned withdrawal of the Cowra Magpies from the Peter McDonald Premiership just this week. The proud and historic club, of which the competition’s namesake was a life member, has been one of the most dominant clubs in Group 10 over the years, with a Grand Final appearance as recent as 2018. 

However in withdrawing, the community, with a population of approximately 10,000 people, will not form a first grade rugby league side for the first time in over a century. This is because, with the new competition forming a conference of the greater third-tier Presidents Cup competition (along with the Newcastle, Illawarra and Ron Massey Cup competitions), Cowra simply cannot compete with the lucrative opposition.

However, this is not a recent phenomenon. Upon the announcement of the new Peter McDonald Premiership (the combined Group 10-Group 11 First Grade competition) last year, the Blayney Bears withdrew to field their premier open men’s team in the still separately run Group 10 Reserve Grade competition. Just a few years prior, Oberon left Group 10 for the Mid West Cup competition, while Lithgow’s second club, the Bears, disbanded in 2021 due in part to the drain caused by the Workies’ participation in the Group 10/Peter McDonald Premiership competition.

This issue expands across the state, with the losses of the Glen Innes Magpies, Guyra Super Spuds, Junee Diesels and Tumbarumba Greens to similar recesses in recent years showing the trend is not localised or insignificant. Further credence is given to this argument by the decline of Group 9, from 14 clubs at the turn of the century to just 8 first grade sides over the past three years. The losses of Adelong-Batlow (disbanded) and the Wagga Magpies and Turvey Park to merger, alongside the continued self-relegation of clubs such as Cootamundra, Harden-Murrumburrah and the aforementioned Tumbarumba to competitions such as the George Tooke Shield and Murray Cup are prime examples of clubs struggling to field competitive sides. But the concern stems from the fact that this problem has never surfaced in a town as large as Cowra.

Many excuses are given by rugby league fans for the decline of these towns. One which is popularly cited is the incursion of Australian Rules Football into New South Wales. Although holding great merit in certain cases, this is not a universally applicable or particularly major factor. When viewed through the lens of Victoria’s grapple with the exact same issues (league aggregation and the persistent struggles of smaller clubs and competitions), although to a lesser and slower extent, it seems that part of the issue is the culture of urbanisation and metropolitan agglomeration, which is a significant threat not only to the future of rugby league but also regional towns as a whole. 

I have seen many a rugby league supporter bemoan the death of bush footy over the years, and while it may battle from time to time (no pun intended), if the game is really on its deathbed, it has truly been a significant and drawn out period of time that the game has refused to give in, even after its many haphazard readings of the last rites. 

The decline of the once burgeoning concept of the regional town, coupled with the reduced commitment of young Australians to sport and the increasing financial and extreme competitive aspects of such competitions, is the single greatest threat to the future of the game in the state. The real question we need to face in the context of this is, is it so bad that teams may have to drop into second-tier local competitions to survive?

Of course in an ideal world every town would pick its seventeen fittest young men to go into battle every weekend for local supremacy, just as it was for many years. But, just like anything, big money has made its way into regional rugby league, leading to top-heavy competitions which smaller towns don’t stand a chance in. 

In an interview with Battlers For Bush Footy just last year, the President of the Rankins springs Dragons, Brent Parsons said the top competition in the region, Group 20, “has been dying for the last 15 years,” after revealing to Battlers For Bush Footy that he knows of a club which spent around $100,000 on players alone for the 2022 season. Rankins Springs’ competition, Group 17, collapsed in 2006 after the towns of 200 to 2000 people that made up the competition struggled to finance playing in an ever more expensive competition with the Millennium Drought crippling the region’s economy at the time. Only Hay, who moved to Group 20, played football the following year, with even the all conquering and 2006 Clayton Cup winning Hillston side gone in 2007. The competition has since reformed as a strictly amateur one, and its level of community support is blowing even what Group 20 can garner out of the water.

The same thing has happened in the Central West, with the Woodbridge Cup and reformed Mid West Cup acting as lower grade competitions, collecting the falling clubs from the Peter McDonald Premiership and keeping footy alive. It’s imperative we remember that it’s not just through a lack of manpower or love for the game that these clubs cannot field first grade sides, it’s simply down to finance.

So perhaps this is the blueprint for the future of football in the regions, which will in the end ironically serve to punish the richer, larger teams as they search wider and further for competition, increasing their travel times and ending many local rivalries. But maybe I would suggest, somewhat controversially, these massive clubs with even bigger budgets fail to fit the definition of grassroots nowadays. In that case, it can only be assumed that it is for the better of all clubs that they are able to play at their level of competition, and keep the rugby league tradition going well into the future.

The greatest irony of the entire situation is that for all the work of the late great Peter ‘Ace’ McDonald which has given him the posthumous honour of a competition named after him, his beloved Cowra Magpies may no longer form a part of what is now a behemoth of regional rugby league.