Rugby puts Coffs Harbour on the map

By GREG ANSLEY

About the time John Mitchell was pumping the All Blacks through a training session in the chill of a Melbourne spring, George Gregan was leading his Wallaby teammates into sub-tropical surf.

It may say something about the marked differences international sports writers have noticed in the public personas of the opposing sides: the All Blacks, brisk, businesslike and giving nothing away; the Wallabies, open and accommodating, relatively at least.

The All Blacks have based themselves in the heart of a city as notorious as Wellington for its weather, and where the grip of Australian Rules is so complete that many of the most famous faces in world rugby pass without notice.

In Coffs Harbour, you know the Wallabies are in town from the moment you step off the plane, and cross their paths continually - even in the midst of their Cup campaign.

A couple of days from Saturday's game against Romania, they're chatting to reporters at the beach and posing with firemen arriving to compete in a transtasman championship.

All Black selector Mark Shaw grumbles about media "fleas". In Coffs Harbour, Craig McTear, a sports writer with the local Advocate, has no trouble reaching his national team.

"You just ring them up for an interview, they have a lot of open training sessions ... they're very accessible."

The All Blacks are comfortable enough in their Melbourne home, the multistorey, four-star Somerset Botanic Gardens, just a stroll from downtown Melbourne or a couple of minutes by the trams that rumble down St Kilda Rd.

But the Wallabies are living in a resort tailored to their needs, waking every morning to the crash of waves and the wind ruffling through palm leaves, just down from the Bonville International Golf Resort, where they are bound by contract to play a few rounds.

Four years ago, when John Eales was captain, Coffs Harbour mayor Jenny Bonfield was new to the job and mightily impressed with a local business group's proposal to steal the Wallabies from Caloundra, their Queensland base.

"The idea was that the local businessmen would fund the purse and the council would put in the shortfall, because we could see the economic benefits as well," Bonfield said.

Rod MacQueen, coach of both the ACT Brumbies and the Wallabies before Eddie Jones, had started the ball rolling when he pulled the Brumbies together fulltime in a Canberra apartment building. When he moved to the Wallabies he took the idea with him, launching a bidding battle for home basing won by Caloundra.

Watching the Wallabies put the Queensland city on the map, Bonfield and her businessmen could see the potential for their own plans to turn Coffs Harbour into the major population and hi-tech centre on the East Coast north of Newcastle and south of Brisbane.

"You can't buy that sort of publicity," Bonfield said. "A small town can't afford TV and newspaper coverage like it [the exposure generated by the Wallabies]. It stacked up, and the business community was forthcoming."

Local companies put in up to A$50,000 ($58,000) each, in return for appearances by Wallabies at golf days, social events, promotions and the like.

The council added A$75,000 a year. The council keeps its total contribution confidential, but says every A$1 it puts into the kitty is matched by A$4 from business.

The New South Wales Government, always keen to pinch business from Queensland, topped up the pool with A$25,000.

Just north of the town, the languishing Novotel Pacific Bay Resort was brought out of mothballs, refurbished, and turned into Camp Wallaby.

The team was provided with its own spacious accommodation and a A$700,000 training facility, connected to the resort by a tunnel under the Pacific Highway and equipped with a world-class training ground, gymnasium and spa.

From day one the Wallabies' well-oiled public relations machine started scratching Coffs Harbour's back in return: as well as local promotions and spinoff coverage by the national media, "Wallaby TV" pumped out interviews and footage to keep the team and the town on Australia's horizon.

The World Cup has been a dream run for Coffs Harbour. The small port town roughly midway between Sydney and Brisbane has been thoroughly outed through exposure in magazines, newspapers and TV programmes such as the top-rating Great Outdoors travel show and Network Seven's Sunrise breakfast show.

So successful has the venture been that the council set up its own special sports unit to haul in other events. Adding to the A$300 million a year generated by tourism, sports now pumps A$50 million a year into the council's coffers.

Investment has followed."We're flavour of the month with developers," said Bonfield.

The Coffs Harbour retreat has been thoroughly Wallaby-friendly.

Wives, families and girlfriends have been welcome, there have been no curfews or bans on alcohol, and life really is a beach.

Their resort is well off the highway, built around a palm-fringed artificial lake and lawns that run into bush tracked with nature walks, and lead to a small, secluded cove and an ocean where, in the early morning this week, whales broached.

Tans abound, and warmth and blue skies eases the intensity of a Cup campaign. Jones, in a white polo shirt and blue slacks, strolls through the resort with a casual grin on his face.

At nearby Diggers Beach, Gregan, Wendell Sailor and most of the rest of the team are floundering on soft-skinned learners' Malibus to help them come down from an intense training programme the previous evening - and providing a battery of cameras with yet more footage.

"Some of the guys are really keen surfers and others are really keen to learn," Gregan tells reporters. "It's great having this as your backyard."

But life is not all surf and skittles.

Camp Wallaby is a carefully structured environment drawing clear boundaries between free time and rugby, more tense now with the cup underway but built around heavy training early in the week and easing ahead of games, with short breaks built in to allow players a bit of time for mental flossing.

For all the kicks the Wallabies have given Coffs, not everyone has been happy.

"Some of the local rugby people were expecting more from the Wallabies and thought the Australian Rugby Union should be using them more to promote the sport here," McTear said.

Rugby in Coffs has been going through a hard time, competing with dominant league as well as soccer for players and cash in a region that has a population of just 60,000 or so.

Last year its corporate identity, Coffs Harbour Rugby, faced insolvency and the looming collapse of a game that had already seen one club vanish. It was saved by the merger of the two remaining clubs and its resulting domination of mid-and north-NSW coast competition.

Critics who believed that the Wallabies deal had fundamentally betrayed local rugby took their complaints to the national Bulletin magazine, claiming that the deal with the local council revealed the national body to be "greedy, lazy, complacent and self-centred".

ARU chief executive John O'Neill shot back: "Quite frankly I don't understand the motivation of a minority faction who have sought to undo an excellent relationship with an attack that is fundamentally dishonest in every respect."

Added Mayor Bonfield: "I think there was some expectation among some rugby people that people would be flocking to play rugby union [as a result of the Wallabies deal]. That didn't happen. Maybe they've got to look to themselves for the reasons."

But most of Coffs Harbour has taken to the Wallabies. For the Bledisloe playoff in Auckland, a charter plane flew the team, a clutch of former captains and a bevy of supporters to New Zealand. On the return flight it carried vacationing Kiwis, many of whom ended up at the RSL Club to watch the game on big-screen TV.

When the All Blacks appeared, Australians called for a haka from their guests, and as the All Blacks performed on screen, a spontaneous "Ka mate" thundered out in Coffs Harbour.

Around town it is impossible to miss the Wallabies. Their banners, posters and colours are everywhere, and locals are used to rubbing shoulders with the (for the moment) world champions in the street, at restaurants, theatres and social events.

At the Jetty, a restaurant strip near the city's fishing port, staff at Maria's Italian restaurant know them as regulars and tell the story of one un-named towering forward who took a fancy to a waitress.

"He asked for her name and on the way out left a card with 'text me' written on the back. Talk about upfront."

McTear says the town has got used to the Wallabies, as it has to New Zealand-born actor Russell Crowe, who lives nearby and who is regularly seen around town.

"No one fawns over them. They're part of the community."

How long they will stay that way remains to be seen. The team's contract with the city expires at the end of the World Cup and the council fears that if Australia loses the Webb Ellis Cup, Coffs Harbour will lose the Wallabies.

"If they win and Eddie Jones stays there, George Gregan stays there, the whole ethos of where they've gone will probably be revisited," Bonfield said.

"If all that falls in a heap ... well, we'll see."

Full World Cup coverage