‘We all realised what we’d achieved’: Inside the Wallabies’ legendary Grand Slam tour

In October 1984, a squad of 30 Wallabies, two coaches and a manager departed for an 18-game tour of the UK and Ireland. They played four Tests, against England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. No Australian team had ever won all four – known as a Grand Slam - but under new coach Alan Jones, the 1984 Wallabies achieved the historic feat, which has not been repeated. Five-eighth Mark Ella scored a try in every Test win – and then shocked the world by retiring at the age of 25.

On its 40th anniversary, the Herald spoke to key figures to relive the tour and Ella’s remarkable farewell.

Andrew Slack, captain: I was on the ’81-82 tour and we were expected to potentially do it [a Grand Slam] then. We had a great team and scored a lot of tries and the other teams didn’t, but we only won one of the four Tests.

Mark Ella: It was disappointing. We thought we had a good side. In fact, at the start, I thought the earlier side, the ’81-82 side, was the better side. So we wanted, to a certain extent, to avenge what happened.

Slack: We had just had the All Black series before we departed. We’d won the first Test and were 12-0 up in the second, but just got pipped there. And then we got beat by a point in the third.

Gordon Bray (ABC commentator): They came away from that [Bledisloe] series feeling that they blew it in the three-Test series. But there was still this quiet degree of confidence. This was a much more balanced team (than 81-82). And also we had a genuine tight five, a very big tight five.

Where Jones was good, he was prepared to blood a lot of young guys. I mean, look at the ages: Nick Farr Jones, 22; David Campese, 21; Steve Tuynman, 20; Tom Lawton, 21; Matt Burke, 19; Michael Lynagh, 20 – so there was a lovely mix.

Nick Farr Jones: I was pretty naive, so the last thing on my mind was winning a Grand Slam. I was playing second division rugby for Sydney Uni in 1983 – I was going out to Liverpool and Campbelltown and Hawkesbury. So I was just delighted to be going over there. I couldn’t believe my luck.

When we got home from New Zealand, Alan Jones ripped strips off me when I said to a journalist, commenting on my first four Tests, “I thought Test rugby was supposed to be harder”. And the reason I said that was because I’d played behind a massive pack, and inside a bloke called Mark Ella, who said, “You do the chucking, I’ll do the catching”.

Ella: I went to the first training session that year and I said, ‘Who’s this guy?’. He introduced himself as Nick Farr-Jones and I said, “Who do you play for?” I just said to him, “Mate, I don’t care what you do, just get the ball to me at a thousand miles an hour. I don’t care if the ball is high, low, behind me or whatever”. And Nick, to his credit, nine times out of ten, the ball was perfect.

Jones had taken over from Bob Dwyer as Wallabies coach earlier in the year and made the call to replace Ella with Slack as captain. It was contentious, but the decision didn’t stop Ella from being tasked with dictating the team’s style.

Ella: And there was only one way to play the game. Growing up at La Perouse and growing up at Randwick, you would play running football. So that’s what we did.

Before the tour began, Ella had resolved to retire at the end of the trip, at the age of 25. The news would shock the world.

Ella: It was my last tour. I knew, I didn’t really tell anybody. A couple of players knew, guys that I’d been playing with for a long time.

ENGLAND TEST

In the opening Test at Twickenham, Australia and England played out a scratchy first half. It was 3-3 in the second half when Ella scored his first try of the tour, from a scrum on England’s line.

Bray: It was a nervous start, but you could feel that they were frustrated in the dressing room and said, hey, come on, we’re better than these guys, let’s play with a bit of adventure. Mark was allowed to call the shots and play instinctively. He was a free spirit.

Ella: A lot of these moves … and a lot of these tries were basically what we do at Randwick. We just transferred them across. It was sort of like a loop and the ball was supposed to sort of go a bit wider, but the English defensive line came up too quick and the gap opened up.

Jim Webster (SMH rugby writer, match report, 1984): Ella scored one try, performing the loop with inside centre Michael Lynagh which Coogee Oval has seen countless times. Incidentally, this loop has been penalised three or four times on tour, the referees claiming it involves shepherding. But as referee Bob Francis is from New Zealand, where the loop has acceptance, the Wallabies thought they would try it here and it worked sensationally.

Michael Hawker (Wallabies centre, in commentary): It’s a move we call “Down Under” which was going to use a flick pass back in to [fullback] Roger (Gould) but it wasn’t needed.

Slack: The lasting memory for me of that is the next day in the English press there was a big diagram of it suggesting that it was a big shepherd – which it wasn’t. I was the decoy, which made sense because I’m not going to beat anybody. They were a bit bamboozled and Mark took advantage of that.

Ella: It’s a big hole so, hey, I’m not going to knock back a big hole in the middle of Twickenham.

Bray: That try released the pressure valve and the Australians had a bit of a picnic in the second half.

The Wallabies won 19-3, after scoring another two tries; the pick of them by Simon Poidevin following a superb low pickup by Ella that Jones later labelled a “Greg Chappell catch”.

Bray: It was brilliant. Cyril Towers always said that Ella ran from the shoulders down, and his arms and his hands and his fingers were totally relaxed.

IRELAND TEST

Ireland weren’t tipped to put up a big fight, but it proved to be the toughest Test of the tour. The Irish led 9-6 with 17 minutes on the clock, and Ella kicked a second field goal for the game to draw level at 9-9.

Trevor Ringland, Ireland winger: They played a lovely style of rugby, and they were a fantastic side to watch and play against. We played quite well and showed what we could do, too. The game was chaotic because every time you got the ball you were trying to score. It was like, “Let’s go for it, guys”.

Farr-Jones: We didn’t play so well. It reminded me a bit of ’91 in the quarter-final there against Ireland. Ireland’s a team that can do that – they can upset you, they can fracture your plans.

Ella: We just needed to get back into the game. When it was 9-6, if Ireland would have scored again, we would have lost the game. There wasn’t a panic but we were tense. And so the field goal brought us back to 9-9 and then we were back to being comfortable.

The Wallabies’ imposing lineout, led by Steve “Skylab” Cutler, proved a major strength all tour, and it was a stolen lineout that led to Ella’s try at Landsdowne Road.

Ella: It was just instinctive. It wasn’t a planned move at all because they were throwing the ball in line-out. So we won the line-out and they were slow coming up, so I just kept on running up to them.

Slack: I got smashed off the ball. I didn’t see that try at the time because I was seeing stars.

Ella: We got the ball out to Campo and I thought, “Oh, he’s not going to pass me the ball”. Campo … that close to the tryline, he doesn’t pass the ball to anybody. But he was going to get tackled, and he threw me the ball.

Farr-Jones: The old line from Bob Dwyer was something like if Mark touched it twice, it’d be a linebreak, if he touched it three times you’d score.

Bray: It was a classic blackboard exercise for any flyhalf today about support lines and the importance of support.

Ella: I was always looping. As No.10, I’d always let the ball go, but I was always aiming to be one pass away in case they needed the ball to continue.

The Wallabies won 16-9, with Ella’s two drop goals and try the difference.

Slack: People always forget the Steve Tuynmans and the Poidos. I could go through them all, whose contributions often get forgotten from that tour. But in that game, no-one was in the same stratosphere as Mark. Potentially we may have won the other three Tests with someone else [at No.10]. But we don’t win the Irish Test without Mark.

Ringland: I would say he’s a talent like Serge Blanco, and to say that is the greatest compliment you could pay. He’s celebrated because he had a vision, he had creativity, he had speed, he was subtle … and out of him came the inspiration for that team to produce some of the fantastic rugby it produced.

WALES TEST

Playing Wales at Cardiff Arms Park was built up as the toughest Test of the tour. Wales coach John Bevan said pre-game that he expected Wales would beat the Wallabies “nine times out of ten”.

Farr-Jones: They were always saying, all tour, wait until you get to Wales.

Ella: We had a lot of respect for them because as a kid we used to watch at school. At Matraville High, our sports master, Geoff Mould, used to put these games on even though we all come from a rugby league background.

Bray: It rained all week, which wasn’t great because I was actually over there on my honeymoon. I convinced Cathy to come and be my scorer. They said there were 300 tons of water on the pitch during the week.

Wales presented as being the big scrummaging test. So the Australians worked very hard there. They had ‘Matilda’ the scrum machine, which Alan Jones had sorted out and they carted around Britain. Australia had a very big forward pack. Tommy Lawton and Andy McIntyre and, of course, Enrique ‘Topo’ Rodriguez. (SMH columnist) Evan Whitton described him as Australia’s greatest immigrant since Captain Cook.

Farr-Jones: It was Topo’s first year with the Wallabies. Two years beforehand, he was with Argentina. He lost mates in the Battle of Malvinas, the Falklands war.

Bray: Twenty-four minutes, in they popped the loosehead prop, Ian Stephens, and they actually broke his ribs. It was a huge psychological moment.

Farr-Jones helped set up two tries for the Wallabies via short-side runs, first to Lawton and then to Lynagh. In the second-half, the Wallabies then silenced the home crowd by scoring a pushover try against the mighty Welsh pack, finished by Tuynman.

Bray: It just hadn’t happened before. There was disbelief from the crowd.

Ella: That was kind of like, holy heck. That doesn’t happen, we’re from Australia.

The game was won when Ella scored his third try of the tour, in extra time, via an intercepted pass from Wales captain Eddie Butler.

Ella: They wanted to keep the ball alive so they can score a try and make their fans a little bit happier. I was just probing, just hovering around. I knew it was coming. I did [call for it]. When I last saw Eddie, it was obviously a long time [ago] now, but the first thing he says is, “You shouldn’t have called for the ball!” I said, “Well, you didn’t have to pass it to me”.

Bray: Poor old Eddie Butler, the late Eddie Butler. He was looking for a shovel to bury himself after that pass. I remember in the call, it was just sheer elation to think “Hey, that’s three tries out of three”. No player in history has scored a try against the four home unions in a Grand Slam so it was, “Wow, this is, this is possible.”

SCOTLAND TEST

Scotland at Murrayfield was the fourth and final Test match and shaped as a banana-skin game. The Scots had won the Five Nations that year.

Slack: I do recall Jonesy giving a speech prior to that game. He said four things never come back: the spent arrow, the spoken word, time passed and the missed opportunity. So we were conscious of what’s at stake.

Ella: It was nervy because it was to win a Grand Slam. It had never happened. Australia had never achieved it.

Bray: Scotland were certainly going to be a very tough nut to crack. And there was a little bit of rain around, so it was greasy. But the Australians just went out there and said, well, regardless of the conditions, we’re going to run the ball. That was Mark Ella’s edict.

Ella: I’d like to say I wasn’t even thinking about [a fourth try] but that I’d be lying. My roommate at the time was Roger Gould and I did offer him a couple of beers if he helped me score a try in the last Test in Scotland.

An Ella cut-out to Gould led to a Campese try, but Scotland stayed in touch via penalty goals. Australia led 18-12 in the second half when Ella scored, following some phase play on the Scottish line that saw the No.10 sweep to the left and find Gould with some space. He had Campese on his left, but Ella loomed up on the inside in support.

Gould: I had Campo on the outside and Mark on the inside. Why would you give it to Campo? He has scored enough. Most of these cases, too, I was never a chance to get to the tryline, so I have to give it to someone else. But it was an easy decision.

Ella: I wanted to give him a kiss, but I couldn’t do it. It was perfect.

Bray: I took a bit of criticism from back home for maybe shouting and getting a bit too excited.

Gould: Either of them would have scored. It was fantastic Mark got tries in all the Test matches. We roomed that week together. I told him, “You stick with me and I will get you your fourth try”. The sad part was it was Mark’s last Test match. That was the worst part of the whole deal.

Farr-Jones: I was so lucky, so privileged to play with the bloke.

The Wallabies scored three more tries and romped home 37-12, securing Australia’s first ever Grand Slam.

Webster, SMH report 1984: This team did not waltz into history; they bolted in, annexing records as they went with astonishing regularity.

Ella: We all realised what we’d achieved. We laughed, and we even cried in the dressing room. It was a very special moment. Not just for us, but we thought it was a very special moment for Australian rugby.

Bray: I got into the dressing room afterwards because I had to get a TV news report back to the ABC, and it had to be on the six o’clock flight to get to London. And Mark was in there swigging a bottle of champagne, we got a quick interview. He said, “I’m as slow as a wet week, I can’t step to save myself. And I’ve just scored four tries”.

Forty years on, the 1984 Wallabies still have annual reunions, and a buzzing chat group between former players is always busy. In recent weeks, back-rower Bill Calcraft has been sharing his diary; he wrote two pages per day of trip.

Farr-Jones: We’re reliving all of this right now through Bill, and people adding their memories. We’re just in Swansea at the moment, when the lights went out (in a midweek game) after 67 minutes.

Slack: When you succeed like that together, it’s a special feeling. They’re all good fellas. We all got on brilliantly. We still get on 40 years later. That’s the stuff that matters.

Ella: People still talk to me about the Grand Slam ’84 side. Nobody can forget it. And I guess in the next 20, 30 years when I’m not around, people will still be talking about the Grand Slam. It’d be nice to think that we can do it again.

The Wallabies returned home from the 18-game tour with 13 wins and one draw. Mark Ella played one more game for the Wallabies against the Barbarians, and then followed through on his decision to retire.

Ella: There were no second thoughts. Apart from World Cups, the Grand Slam, in a rugby sense, was probably the highest achievement you could do. The fact I had scored four tries - I mean I had played 21 Test matches and score one try before that. Then I got four in a row.

I knew I was going to retire. What a way to go out.

Sports news, results and expert commentary. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.