Rugby Union In Australia
Rugby union is a popular winter sport in Australia with a history dating back to 1864. It is traditionally most popular in Australia's rugby football strongholds of New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT, though it is played throughout the nation.
The principal competition in Australian rugby union is Super Rugby, which is a multi-regional competition across the southern hemisphere. With the competition expanding from 14 teams to 15 for 2011, Australia entered five teams—the Reds of Queensland, the Waratahs of New South Wales, the Brumbies of the Australian Capital Territory, the Force of Western Australia and the Australian conference's newest team, the Melbourne Rebels of Victoria. The Australian Rugby Championship was introduced as the next level below the Super 14 in 2007, before its demise due to financial reasons. Traditional capital city competitions, such as the Shute Shield of Sydney and the Queensland Premier Rugby of Brisbane are currently the highest level of domestic competition.
The national team are the Wallabies, who have won the Rugby World Cup twice, in 1991 and in 1999. The Wallabies play in Australia's traditional sporting colours of green and gold. They are considered one of the top rugby nations in the world, due to their success at the World Cup, and consistently high world ranking.
Read more about Rugby Union In Australia: History, Organisation, Participation, Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the words union and/or australia:
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“It is very considerably smaller than Australia and British Somaliland put together. As things stand at present there is nothing much the Texans can do about this, and ... they are inclined to shy away from the subject in ordinary conversation, muttering defensively about the size of oranges.”
—Alex Atkinson, British humor writer. repr. In Present Laughter, ed. Alan Coren (1982)