Last Day of School

Jack Gibson’s Fur Coat: Rugby League Oddities and Artefacts
$29.99
Gelding Street Press
August 2023

Get it at Dymocks, Collins, Booktopia and even Big W

About Jack Gibson’s Fur Coat
If rugby league buried a time capsule Jack Gibson’s fur coat would be the first item placed inside – if you could solve the mystery of its whereabouts.
League’s precious artefacts include Thurston’s headgear, Langland’s white boots, Reggie the Rabbit’s tail and a snag from the Dragon’s season-ending BBQ. Or you could fill it with stories of players who were poisoned, didn’t show for the grand final or took the field drunk.
In Jack Gibson’s Fur Coat, Glen Humphries tells the stories that live on the margins. You simply couldn’t make up rugby league’s best yarns.

Read the introduction to Jack Gibson’s Fur Coat

If you’re of a certain age, you remember Jack Gibson’s fur coat. It was a brown coat made of kangaroo pelts that he sported for the 1983 grand final. He loved that coat, even though the sheer weight of the thing aggravated a back complaint; that was why he spent much of the game watching his Eels play Manly from the stands, his arms and chin resting on the railing in front of him. His back ached less that way.

But he wasn’t going to take it off. And so there are photos of him on the field after the game, celebrating Parramatta’s 18-6 win over the minor premiers – a threepeat. There he is with his arm around Peter Sterling, the halfback with a Sea Eagles jersey tied across his shoulders. There’s Jack and the coat again, in between Eric Grothe and Stan Jurd – both wearing Manly jerseys (something which has to be explained every time some outlet runs that image). He’s also there with a hand on the Winfield Cup; he’s grasping Norm Provan by the thigh while Eels boss Dennis Fitzgerald on the other side, holds Arthur Summons around the waist. And he’s there next to newly elected Prime Minister Bob Hawke, the latter hoping for some of the Gibson magic to rub off on him. That fur coat is there in every photo.

Whatever happened to that legendary coat is a mystery. Gibson’s wife Judy told his biographer Andrew Webster that it was lost forever. “That bloody coat,” Judy told him. “It weighed a tonne. I could barely pick it up. Jack lost it in transit when we were going through LAX [Los Angeles International Airport] in the 1980s. He was very upset – but I couldn’t have been happier.”

But 2000 premiership winner Harvey Howard says different. In 2021 Howard told the Telegraph Gibson gave it to him. Howard, who was on the bench for Brisbane’s 14-6 grand final win over the Roosters, had played most of his six seasons with Wests but his first year in the top grade was at Easts, where he became friends with Gibson.

After the 2000 grand final, the England-born forward was heading home to play in the Super League.

‘So I called around to see Jack, say my goodbyes,’ Howard remembered. ‘But as I’m leaving he says ‘I’ve got something for you, something to keep you warm in the UK’.

‘Then he brought out the coat. I said ‘Oh, Jack. I can’t take that’. But he said ‘it’ll keep you warm’.’ And so he took it, but not before getting Gibson to autograph it on the inside.

But Howard said the coat never made it to the UK. Along with some other valuables, he had placed it inside a new Mitsubishi Pajero that he was shipping over to the UK. The car was stolen from the shipping container before it made it off the docks in Sydney. A few weeks later, police spotted the car and gave chase, causing the thief to crash. Upon arrest, the thief said he had chucked away the coat that was in the car.

Still, Howard wasn’t so sure, which is why he will occasionally cast an eye over the racks at op shops and antique stores just in case it turns up.

Rugby league is full of stories like Gibson’s coat. Stories that live on the margins, have fallen through the cracks or simply gone unnoticed. This book captures a number of those tales. Some of them mark significant moments, such as the start of a women’s rugby league competition in 1921, to early moves to create an entirely new code of football by merging league and Australian rules.

There are also the unusual tales, like the time several Canterbury-Bankstown players took to the field drunk in 1947, the very same year the NSW representative team was kicked out of a Queensland hotel after trashing a few rooms.

There are also some on-field moments, such as coaches making a mess of replacement rules and costing their team a finals spot, claims Newtown threw the 1944 premiership decider and the first night football match, which occurred a lot earlier than you might expect.

So relax and enjoy some of the stories that contribute to the rich and vivid tapestry of rugby league.