Known as “the Koori Knockout”, this annual rugby league extravaganza is in its 46th year. The 2016 event will attract up to 3,000 Indigenous players across men’s, women’s and junior categories and will be watched by about 10,000 spectators. This year the tournament will be held on five Council sporting grounds after organisers, the Redfern All Blacks (RABs), offered Leichhardt Council the opportunity to partner as host.

The 2015 Knockout, held in Dubbo, attracted 133 teams and reportedly generated over $6 million for the local economy. Among the players taking part were NRL stars George Rose and Andrew and David Fifita. New Zealand Warriors outside back Jonno Wright (pictured above) scored the winning try in Redfern All Blacks’ win over Newcastle All Blacks in a thrilling extra-time finish.

The Koori Knockout is one of the biggest annual gatherings for Aboriginal people anywhere in Australia. The 2016 version comes hot on the heels of the wildly successful Deadly Choices Arthur Beetson Foundation Murri Rugby League Carnival, held at Dolphin Oval, Redcliffe across September 21-24.

Bidjigal man and rugby league commentator Brad Cooke, who has been tracking the build-up to this year’s Koori tournament via the YouTube series Road To The KO, says on the series’ latest episode that the tournament has proven to be so much more than a footy event. “Over time the knockout, not just for bringing rugby league talent together, has also been used as a really good opportunity to bring Aboriginal communities from all over New South Wales together to discuss other political things and issues,” Cooke says. “You had football on one hand, but they’ve also used that togetherness to get the leadership to talk about other real issues that can be resolved.”

Cooke’s guest on the most recent episode of Road To The KO was Gomeroi descendant and Associate Professor Heidi Norman, who has written extensively on the Knockout’s history and the legacy its founders created many years ago when the tournament was born in the early 1970s. Norman is also part of the RABs’ organising committee for the 2016 tournament.

“The knockout’s founders were Bob Morgan, who was also the director of our centre at the University of Technology, where I’ve worked for many years,” Norman says on Road To The KO. “Dan Rose, Bill Kennedy, or ‘Jeep’, as he’s known via his connections to Walgett, were others. And then also Vic Wright, Bill Smith and the late George Jackson, who was living here in Sydney at the time. They all shared networks; they were part of that mass-migration to the inner city, to South Sydney; to the Redfern area in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

“Back then rural towns were fully segregated; racism was at its peak and to think there were these highly competitive, successful, all-Aboriginal rugby league sides … that in part underpins the power of the Knockout. Those men didn’t invent this incredible history of participation in rugby league, but they pulled something together that obviously had some magic about it then that has endured to today.

“Those founders started out with a sense of making a strategic move; of wanting to make a bit of a push around rugby league. They knew there were so many talented Aboriginal players who were simply overlooked by the talent scouts because of racism and the absence of country-based recruitment. They wanted to create an opportunity to showcase that talent.

“They also wanted to create a sense of belonging and reinforce the coming-together and kinship networks and all those things which were so familiar to their generation and their parents’ generation, that they could see was likely to be lost in the city. They were about activating cultural connection.”

The 2016 Koori Knockout will be broadcast live on NITV across the long weekend. If you love your footy, either check out NITV’s coverage or make it along to Leichhardt Oval yourself for some scintillating rugby league.