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The Newtown Jets, Australia’s oldest rugby league club, haven’t been sighted in the top grade since 1983, when financial issues sadly brought about their demise.
However, they have never stopped competing.
Throughout the rest of the ’80s, the Jets entered teams in junior club competitions and they continued on to play in the Metropolitan Cup with great success throughout the 90s.
Older Roarers may well remember Newtown’s loss to Parramatta in the 1981 grand final. The Eels broke Newtown hearts again in 2008, when their feeder team Wentworthville eventually put a defiant Jets team to the sword in the 104th minute of the NSW Cup Grand Final (the local RSL who sponsors the Jets jumpers received a glorious two-hour gold mine of Channel Nine coverage).
This year the Jets will continue to ply their trade in the NSW Cup, still playing as a proud standalone club and acting as the feeder team to the Sydney Roosters, an arrangement dating back to 2006. The NSW Cup will move up another gear this season, with most of the NRL clubs entering a team, plus Illawarra and a Canberra affiliated team rejoining the competition.
Surrounded by the heavyweight NRL territories of the Dragons, Bulldogs, Rabbitohs and the orange half of the Wests Tigers, Newtown still has a dedicated and rowdy following of supporters turning up to Henson Park, Marrickville, the self-described “jewel in the crown of rugby league”.
Although some modern concessions have been made this year with the renovation of the King George V Grandstand and the addition of an electronic scoreboard, the spirit of yesteryear still remains defiantly strong at Henson Park.
If rugby league has song lines, this is its most sacred site. The blokes at the gate arrive at some arbitrary price for a car load of people. No barcoded tickets or hired goons to check your bags. No flat watery beer sloshing out of plastic cups. Four cans of KB is the standard order, and the closest thing to a corporate box is the blokes up top of the hill who bring their beanbags and deckchairs along.
Even the merchandise stand is a throwback, selling t-shirts of Steve Bowden flooring Manly’s Mark Broadhurst with an uppercut circa 1982 (probably not approved by David Gallop, that one).
Thirty years after that famous uppercut, hipsters now roll through the gate on fixies, but old buggers still zip up their ancient shell jackets and curse the ref. Punters still sit in their cars behind the posts and maniacally beep the horn as the opposition kicker tries to slot a conversion into a nasty southerly.
At half-time, kids still run around the field like herds of cats until the ground announcer shoos them away. The guaranteed attendance of 8972 will be greeted with an ironic cheer and the usual raffle draw will offer meat trays, fruit and veg and “a box of cleaning products for ya missus”.
What year is it again? Who really cares. The Jets are still playing, still winning, and still coming over after the final whistle to shake hands with the good folks at Henson Park. Another season is almost upon us and another chapter in Newtown’s proud history is about to be written.
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