The Western Suburbs Magpies’ iconic Victa-sponsored jersey, worn between 1978-82, is the stuff of rugby league legend, symbolising working-class heroics.
The iconic lawnmower brand has reformed with the Magpies for 2018, as the black and whites go it alone in this year’s NSW Intrust Super Premiership as the Wests Tigers’ “reserve grade” feeder team.
The Western Suburbs Magpies coach back in the ‘78-82 “Victa era” was Roy Masters, widely considered to be the architect of the bash-em-up then beat them on the scoreboard philosophy. Still a sports columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald, Masters is to this day delivering nuanced takes on the politics of modern rugby league to his readers, and analysis as to where the game will shift to next as a whole.
To blokes like Masters, the iconic Victa/Magpies partnership of ‘78-82 seemed like a perfect fit. “It did seem natural; it was just five letters across the chest and a V for ‘victory’, but there was a certain degree of symbolism about it all,” he recently told Inside Sport.
“I remember we played one game at Brookvale Oval around about ’78 or ’79. We won, but it was a pretty violent ol’ game. One of the executives of Victa was there and he came into the dressing room. He lived on the north shore. He wasn’t as disposed to us as we were to ourselves. I said to him, and this was after a televised match, ‘You will have sold quite a few lawnmowers today!’ And he muttered something to the effect of, ‘Yes, but none on the north shore.’ Whereupon I pointed out to him that Silvertails didn’t cut their own lawns. They had gardeners who did it for them.”
Newtown-born Masters was the Magpies’ coach between ‘78-81. He would eventually finish his time in the sport as a 250-game coach for Wests and later St George. His glory years as a mentor marry up with the days in which the toughest of the tough roamed the footy fields of Sydney … to when class warfare was an actual thing fought out on the concrete-hard fields of suburban venues like Lidcombe and Brookvale Ovals.
Image at top: Big men take a breather – John Donnelly and Tom Arber in the dressing room after a tough match. (Image courtesy of Wests Archives; as appeared in the book Clouds Of Dust, Buckets Of Blood, author Gary Lester)
Masters holds very fond memories of the glorious Lidcombe Oval, which still exists today, albeit as if on the wrong end of a heavy set of six, but like the grand warriors of the era – Dallas Donnelly, Les Boyd and Tommy Raudonikis et al - it stands there defiantly, showing off its black-eyes with pride, while displaying no signs of melting away anytime soon.
“It got to the stage where people would turn up to Lidcombe Oval to watch games … I recall a chemist who had a fairly successful pharmacy practice not too far away. He’d change out of his coat and tie and come and stand on the hill at Lidcombe Oval dressed in a boiler suit,” Masters recalls. “He wanted to be seen to be a fibro. He’d get two bits of actual fibro, nail them together at the bottom to form a V, and stand there on the hill waving this V about. It just captured the ethos of the people at the time.”
Masters had coached Wests’ under-23s side for a few years prior to taking over the club’s first grade duties. During that time he had closely observed the machinations of the so-called great class divide in which Sydney’s residents lived and worked. After living it for a few years himself following his move to the big smoke from Tamworth where he was a school teacher, he deducted there was a lot of truth in this perception. Indeed the world of Sydney rugby league contained especially strong doses of it.
“There was a view that there was entrenched privilege at certain clubs; that there was in fact a cartel that ran the game, that principally included clubs such as the Bulldogs under Peter Moore, Manly under Ken Arthurson, South Sydney with Terry Parker and even Balmain with Kevin Humphries, who was the chair of the league at the time,” says Masters.
“There were the haves and the have-nots. This was reflected in the appointment of referees and the selection of international and representative teams. It was a view that all was not equal.
“I knew that the Western Suburbs players all came from a certain socio-economic group; if it was about money, they didn’t have much. Many had come from the country: John Donnelly from Gunnedah, Les Boyd from Cootamundra. Tommy Raudonikis, of course, had come up from Wagga via Cowra. Even the players who were Western Suburbs born-and-bred products who lived around Lidcombe and Auburn, suburbs like that, they were all pretty much solid, labor, blue-collar working-class people. So there was this natural match of a philosophy that we were, to some extent, under-privileged people. Certainly economically, and also at the same time we were playing in an environment where the decisions were favouring the privileged.
“So it seemed fairly natural to me that we should take a theme that would gel the players along those lines, and so began the Fibros vs The Silvertails, which was essentially the people of the western suburbs and the poorer country areas, and the rich people of the north shore of Sydney.”
Masters made the most of perceptions of Western Suburbs Magpies players as ogres, dumb, unskilful and beer-gutted Neanderthals who couldn’t really play football. And that if you matched them in the fight, you would soon outclass them in the skill department. “Whereas we knew we were a very skilful team,” Masters says. “And so the opening stages of games were heavily confrontational. Once we believed they were only pre-occupied with fighting, we concentrated on the skill. So we moved the ball about and all they were wanting to do was get square with us in the scrums … by then we had moved on to wanting to win the game with expansive play.”
Be in no doubt this was the era of the biff, but once that initial barrage of strikes and punches was over, the Magpies were capable of playing brilliant rugby league. “When we had the ball, and they were concentrating on trying to knock our heads off, they would be cementing and packing up and fortifying the rucks, which would leave spaces for us to move the ball wide, which we invariably did.
“We had some very quick players such as John Dorahy and Wayne Smith – players of that nature; they were very toey. And don’t forget, too that we had some really good strategists such as Graeme O’Grady and Tommy Raudonikis. Dallas Donnelly and Les Boyd would be in the middle there sucking them into battles, while we’d be moving the ball wide.
“Then in defence, what we would do was pincer-in, so that the wingers would actually come in at an angle to hit the outside centre, and the outside centre would come in to hit the inside centre, and the five-eighth would come in and hit the half, so you could see a sort’ve pincer movement – the outside men were coming in to hit the inside. So we would still concentrate on the middle in defence, but use a contained umbrella, pincer-type defence out wide to stop them moving the ball.”
Towards the end of the first round of home and away matches in the 12-team Sydney rugby league competition of 1978 (Masters’ first year as the Magpies’ first grade coach), Cronulla and Western Suburbs were on equal premiership points. Whoever won the last game of the first round of home and away would start the second round as the leader of the comp. Needless to say their round 11 clash was a pretty important one.
“Unbeknownst to us at the time was a man driving to Lidcombe Oval by the name of Kevin Cashman, who was the boss of Sunbeam, who owned Victa,” Masters recalls. “He had his two daughters in the back seat of his car. He lived at Cronulla. Neither club had a sponsor. Kevin said to his girls, ‘Whoever wins today, I’ll sponsor.’
“The girls wanted Victa to sponsor Cronulla, in so far as Cronulla was their team, but Kevin had a hope that Wests would win. His factory was in Western Suburbs Magpies territory and it would be seen as a way of the factory supporting the local team. Well, it was a very violent and rough game, which Wests eventually won.
“The following Tuesday it was announced we had just picked up Victa as our sponsor. They put on a bit of a party for us after training one night over at their factory to acknowledge the partnership. We turned up and there were chefs with big white hats on and tables with white tablecloths on them in the middle of the factory. There were filet mignon steaks, which Bobby Cooper, unknown to him the quality of the steak, lavished half a bloody bottle of tomato sauce on his steak without knowing how good it was. We saw fruits for the first time such as kiwi fruit, which none of us had seen before, besides our five-eighth Peter Rowles, who had previously played for the Waratahs …
“Anyway, that’s some of the colour and culture of the time, just to give you an introduction to what it was all about.”
Related Articles
Viva Las Vegas: Join Golf Australia magazine's Matt Cleary on a golf and rugby league spectacular
19 Holes With ... Chad Townsend and Val Holmes
