The Game they Play in Heaven
Autumn is when my relationship with rugby resurfaces. Another year, another season: summer slips into fall and the familiar feeling returns. Super Rugby kicks off, local clubs gather registrations, and across Australia - city or country - fields begin to stir. With legends like John Eales and David Campese woven into our sporting folklore, rugby union remains a quiet but enduring thread in Australian identity.
My connection began with my father, a devoted rugby man blessed with four daughters and no sons. He passed the game on to us anyway. We grew up in Kensington in a small cottage near a grass oval where on Saturday afternoons after his real estate rounds, he would take us to throw the ball around. He showed us the footwork he had mastered as a back, and evenings ended on the couch watching matches together.
My Dad playing rugby for Gordon club in Sydney
Rugby, to me, is cold air, crisp white lines, the hush before a lineout, the command to “bind, crouch, set.”. It is physicality and finesse, camaraderie and respect. It is something almost ethereal.
High school marked the end of park kick-arounds with Dad and the beginning of standing on the sidelines of schoolboy rugby watching Waverley and Scots College fight it out. We would gather as St Catherine’s girls, caught somewhere between genuine love of the game and the awkward theatre of teenage attention. In my twenties the ritual endured but deepened—Shute Shield Saturdays, following Randwick Rugby closely and circling Bledisloe Cups and World Cups on the calendar.
Studying journalism, I interned at the Australian Rugby Union, writing Wallabies profiles and learning the rhythms of rugby media. That led me to the NSW Waratahs where I drafted press releases and watched games from the Allianz Stadium media box under the leadership of coach Michael Cheika. Later, I worked briefly in sports PR on Rugby Sevens projects. Yet for all the professional buzz, Saturdays at Coogee Oval with Randwick - ocean nearby, bar after full-time - meant more.
It was fun working for the media team at the NSW Waratahs
When I moved to Jindabyne to focus on my own sport, rugby paused but never disappeared. I’d watch Six Nations replays on a Sunday morning over breakfast before I found it again with the Jindabyne Bushpigs, first knowing no one, then slowly finding community. Summer touch competitions carries the spirit through the off-season.
I’ve never played the game itself, though I came close. Still, I feel its soul. The All-Blacks haka never loses its power. Rugby carries excitement, dignified strength, mutual fairness and togetherness. What makes rugby special is the long passages of play, a winger flying down the sideline, the referee’s call, the bruises earned and beers shared. And it is the voices of rugby carried by renowned commentators that endure.
Saturday will always be rugby day. Wherever you land—new town or old—the heartbeat is the same. Join the local club and you may just understand why they call it the game they play in heaven.