But here's the paradox. While Aussie Rules had the wider reach, rugby league was the more tolerant code, including Indigenous Australians from the start. There has been no equivalent scandals in rugby league to the
booing of Sydney Swans player Adam Goodes that reached its apotheosis in 2015.
The absence of overt racism from the stands is a surprising legacy of rugby league's foundation at the time of the White Australia Policy. National Rugby League commissioner Professor Megan Davis explains that the largest urban populations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today live in rugby league territory. And in the working-class and underclass regions of western Sydney and south-east Queensland, "rugby league's core fan base live alongside the mob". Unlike football in Victoria, rugby league has an unbroken link to the Aboriginal people of NSW and Queensland because the game became an immediate tool of inclusion for the men who were forced into racially segregated missions and reserves at Federation.
"This is often how Aboriginal men were able to leave the reserves and missions: with permission to play in local rugby league games, alongside white Australians," says Davis, a law professor and pro vice-chancellor Indigenous at the University of NSW. "Rugby league played an emancipatory role for many men during the brutal era of Australia's own apartheid, and it facilitated a fellowship between many Indigenous and non-Indigenous rugby league players."
Another factor is the example of
generations of Aboriginal players who represented Australia in rugby league. Arthur Beetson was captain of the national team, the Kangaroos, in the 1970s, at a time when only a handful of Aboriginal people played Aussie Rules. She notes that in 2015, the year
Goodes was driven out of AFL, rugby league had a counter-story of unity between black and white Australia, in the example of the North Queensland Cowboys.
The club's territory covers the sites of some of the most brutal frontier wars between the locals and settlers, and simultaneously has "the richest native-title footprint in the nation". The Cowboys captain,
Johnathan Thurston, a proud Aboriginal man, is regarded as one of the greatest players in the game's history. On grand final day, he won the game for his team with a thrilling field goal kicked in extra time. Davis says the photo of him after the game, "exhausted, with his daughter Frankie and her black Aboriginal doll", is destined to be remembered as one of rugby league's iconic images.