1909 New Zealand Māori rugby league tour of Australia
Open-knowledge reference entry
The 1909 New Zealand Māori rugby league tour of Australia was a tour made by a group of New Zealand Māori rugby footballers who played rugby league matches in Queensland and New South Wales. The tour followed on from another Māori tour of Australia the previous year and a tour by the New Zealand national side a month earlier. The Māori side played the Australian national side four times, winning one of the "test" matches.
The tour
Following the first "test", won by the Māori 16–14, about 5,000 of the 30,000 crowd invaded the pitch, upset with the standard of refereeing. Only about a dozen police were present and it took them almost an hour to assist the referee from the ground.
Before the fourth "test" nine players from the tour were detained, after Robert Jack claimed he was owed money relating to the 1908 tour. The NSWRL paid Jack his claimed debt, rather than risk the match being called off.
The team were awarded the O T Punch Cup for their victories over Sydney teams. The cup had been damaged when the crowd invaded the pitch in the first "test".
Aftermath
The 1909 side was the first to wear a kiwi emblem on their uniforms.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1909 New Zealand Māori rugby league tour of Australia” is open-knowledge reference entry. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Zealand, Māori and rugby, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 4, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q19875375. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1909 and 1908.
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This entry incorporates text from “1909 New Zealand Māori rugby league tour of Australia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.