Paul McLean was an uncommonly gifted Rugby Union player who represented Australia over the period 1974 to 1982. A long career by Australian Rugby standards, McLean’s period at the top coincided with the emergence of Australian Rugby from a period in the doldrums. He played his first Test at a time when the Australian Rugby team had an ordinary international record; talented and entertaining it was, but Australia was not quite one of the great Ruby nations. By the time McLean retired, Australian Rugby had been transformed. It had won series at home against Wales, France and New Zealand. And it had completed an impressive and successful tour of the UK, marred only by a poor record in the Tests.

Paralleling these great strides at the national level was an even more dramatic revolution in interstate rugby competition. A premier winter sport in Queensland and N.S.W. only, the annual clashes between the two States rival Test matches as the focal point of the season. For decades, McLean’s home state of Queensland had regularly been thrashed in these encounters. From the mid-seventies onwards this pattern was abruptly reversed, and Queensland has dominated the interstate competition ever since.