It was around 1am on Tuesday when a few police cars circled South Sydney players down at the Botany foreshore.
The police had received a tip-off a group of about 50 men were about to form a picket line at the wharves.
“They thought we were protestors,” Souths coach Jason Demetriou tells the Herald.
“Because we weren’t dressed in our traditional colours, we weren’t easy to identify as an actual NRL club.”
The wharf was one of 12 destinations the Souths players visited at the start of the week as they completed a gruelling 28km trip, which started at Redfern Oval and finished 15 hours later at their new multi-million dollar training facility at Heffron Park.
South Sydney’s magical mystery tour
- 6pm: Around 50 players and staff gather at Redfern Oval and are greeted by club legend Bob McCarthy
- 7.15pm: Darren Brown addresses the group up the road at Waterloo Oval
- 8.15pm: Buddy Gordon is the guest at Erskineville Oval
- 9.45pm: Frank Cookson and skipper Cameron Murray speak at Mascot Oval
- 11.15pm: Henry Morris and Steve Mavin chat to the group at Booralee Park, Botany’s home ground
- 12.45am: The group stop at Port Botany to hear what the club meant to the local wharfies
- 2.30am: Sean Garlick chats about his La Perouse roots at Yarra Oval
- 4.15am: Beau Champion pops up at Pioneers Park, home of the South Eastern Seagulls
- 6.45am: The sun starts to rise as they arrive at Snape Park
- 8am: John Sutton takes time to discuss Coogee Wombats at Marcellin Fields
- 8.45am: Daniel Suluka-Fifita and Dean Hawkins, Matraville Tigers juniors, near Heffron Park
- 9.30am: The team finish their march at nearby at their soon-to-be-completed training complex
Souths will move from their spiritual base at Redfern in the new year, and Demetriou decided to make all the players carry memorabilia, much of it heavy and packed in boxes, while stopping to hear stories about the junior clubs in Rabbitohs’ heartland.
Four players were spotted carrying the giant George Piggins Medal honour board. Some had heavy ropes flung over their shoulders. An army drill sergeant barked orders at the players throughout the night as they marched along the streets with torches on their heads and a safety car behind them.
Former Bunnies captain Sean Garlick was nervous he would sleep through his alarm and tossed and turned before driving past the players just and meeting them at Yarra Oval around 2am to talk about what it meant to play for La Perouse.
Current captain Cameron Murray, who cut short his post-season holiday to complete the march, was one of the speakers at Mascot Oval.
Souths players during their 28km march.Credit:Bunnies TV
John Sutton, the longest-serving Rabbitoh, who is now on the coaching staff, completed the journey and spoke at Marcellin Field about the year he won a premiership with the Coogee Wombats.
Sutton won 10 straight junior premierships with Kensington, and was initially upset Demetriou had not added Kensington Oval to the itinerary.
“Then I realised how much further it would have been to walk, it would have added another hour to the trip, so I kept quiet,” Sutton said.
“It was an awesome idea by ‘JD’ [Demetriou], and it was great to see all the local junior clubs and hear from people who had been around their clubs for such a long time, and how much they love Souths.
“All the boys got the chance to buy into the history and who they would be playing for every weekend.”
Sutton said the stop at the wharves was special given they listened to what the club had meant to all the blue-collar wharfies over the years.
Demetriou said he wanted to make sure the Redfern history was never forgotten.
“We’re moving to our new high-performance centre, but it was really important to appreciate what our Redfern roots had given us – we wanted to make it known we were taking our Redfern culture with us,” Demetriou said.
The players marched all through the night.Credit:Bunnies TV
“By stopping at all the junior clubs so we could understand that when we move into our new facility, we’re taking the whole community with us. I felt like that message got across well.
“The journey was also meant to replicate how long the NRL season is.”
One Souths staffer could not resist pointing out that had their bitter rivals the Roosters completed the same journey through all their junior clubs, it would have lasted about an hour.
“Actually the Roosters wouldn’t have had to walk – they could have just jumped on the 339 [bus] from Clovelly to Moore Park,” he said.
Demetriou had initially predicted the walk to have taken 16 hours, but the players showed no signs of slowing down.
Henry Morris, the ‘Botany Battler’ who was the long-serving president of Souths Juniors, Beau Champion, Steve Mavin, Buddy Gordon and Darren Brown were some of the speakers who took part, while the legendary Bob McCarthy greeted the group at Redfern before they set off down Elizabeth St.
It has been a big few weeks for Souths with Latrell Mitchell, Cody Walker and Damien Cook re-committing to the club, including Mitchell who will remain in red and green until the end of 2027.
