By Patrick Skene
In February 2026, rugby league lost Terry Williams, author, teacher, Newtown Jets stalwart and official historian of the New South Wales Rugby League, only hours after he hosted the Jets season launch. He was 62. Seven months later, the game’s history community gathered at Petersham RSL for the annual Tom Brock Memorial Lecture, an evening devoted to his memory and titled History, Bluebags and Memory: The Legacy of Terry Williams. This is the story of that night, told through the family who lived with him and the historians and friends he spent a lifetime helping.
It is the winter of 2017, and I am camped at the Rugby League Museum at Moore Park in Sydney, researching my first book, The Big O, on my childhood hero, the Balmain Tigers, North Sydney Bears and Kiwis legend Olsen Filipaina.
My plan is to be comprehensive and go through every Rugby League Week and Big League and various Rugby League Annuals to dig up everything on Olsen.
And by my side on the journey, like an enthusiastic cattle dog looking for work, is Terry Williams, the Museum’s curator, excited at my passion to tell a new rugby league story.
I would set Terry some ridiculous challenge, an obscure name and a half-remembered match, and he would trot off to the archives at pace like Sherlock Holmes on the scent of a criminal.
He would disappear into the rows of shelving and, after some shuffling, I would hear his unmistakable voice - “Gotcha!” or “Here we go!”
Terry would then triumphantly return, smiling, with an old yellowing copy of Big League, ready for the next one.
That is the picture of Terry Williams I will carry to the grave.
I know I am one of hundreds of people in this game who could stand here and tell you a version of that same story. That is the measure of the man.
Terry Williams - author, essayist, teacher, Newtown Jets stalwart, curator of the Rugby League Museum and official historian of the New South Wales Rugby League - died on 25 February 2026, aged 62.
He went out on his shield only a few hours after he had finished hosting the Newtown Jets 2026 season launch.
He was born in Marrickville in 1963, the son of former Bluebags lower-grade player Warren Williams, and raised in Ashcroft in south-west Sydney with six siblings in a large and devout Catholic family.
He was the ground zero of rugby league knowledge in New South Wales and the game will not see his like again.
There is a cruel irony in his passing that Terry, of all people, would have savoured.
For decades, when the game needed someone to write an obituary, to get the dates right and to find the photograph, it rang Terry Williams.
And now here I am, corralling together an obituary of the man who used to write the obituaries.
This one is for Terry, from all of us who loved him.
In September 2026, the rugby league history community gathered at Petersham RSL for the 27th annual Tom Brock Memorial Lecture, which each year features a historical topic in rugby league.
The night is a reward for the historians, academics, storytellers and lovers of the games history who have devoted tens of thousands of hours to keeping the stories alive.
The Tom Brock Memorial Lecture is named after the devoted and beloved Souths historian who left part of his estate to the Australian Society for Sports History to support scholarly study of the game.
Since the first lecture in 1999, the Tom Brock Bequest Committee has spent more than a quarter of a century doing the unglamorous and unfunded work of taking rugby league history seriously.
The topics over the years have been gloriously diverse, from the great Fibros v Silvertails wars, to Penrith’s Chocolate Soldiers to the history of PNG rugby league.
This special night was titled History, Bluebags and Memory: The Legacy of Terry Williams.
The MC for the night was historian and author Dr Andrew Moore, the man who delivered the very first Tom Brock lecture, on the Yorkshire influence on Australian culture, titled ‘Jimmy Devereux’s Yorkshire Pudding: Reflections on the Origins of Rugby League in New South Wales and Queensland’.
Moore also wrote The Mighty Bears! A Social History of North Sydney Rugby League, a compelling social history of the North Sydney Bears. He has been a lifelong rugby league tragic and a prized, rarely spotted, rugby league academic.
When he first heard the shocking news of Terry’s passing, Moore confessed that he assumed the Tom Brock Bequest Committee would simply have to fold.
Terry, he said, was its most active and most influential member, its MC and moderator, and the one who knew everyone in rugby league.
The group did not fold and Terry would be horrified if it did. We will do our best but it will never again be what it was with Terry in the room.
For Terry’s sake, the show had to go on, and, as per the annual tradition, Moore announced the latest Tom Brock Scholar.
It was Andrew Kelly, a Senior Lecturer with a PhD in History and a scholar of rugby league from Edith Cowan University in Perth. His project is titled ‘Bad News Bears: Media, Politics and the Fight for a National Rugby League Team in Western Australia, 1995 to 2027’.
I was given the honour of steering the panel on the first Tom Brock night without Terry.
And I opened with the truth - I am only standing here because of Terry.
Before questions for the panel, I shared some of the tributes that poured in after Terry passed, and they told the same story in different voices: a recurring theme of gratitude for the help they had received from him.
They came from everywhere, and showed for the first time the combined breadth of his rugby league kingdom.
Nic Carroll, our cameraman for the night, recalled how much help Terry gave him on his two documentaries, on the Clovelly Crocodiles and supercoach Jack Gibson. For Carroll, Terry’s legacy lives on through every project he ever touched, and there have been hundreds.
From the State Library of New South Wales came a story from Andy Carr, a veteran librarian and Terry’s colleague on the Tom Brock Bequest Committee.
In late 2025, the Library uncovered a batch of photographs taken by the famous Indigenous news photographer Mervyn Bishop, including images of players in Newtown jerseys.
Andy recognised a couple of familiar faces, like Phil Gould and Phil Sigsworth. But who were the others, Carr wondered?
He emailed Terry, of course.
Carr recalled Terry emailing back within eight minutes with a complete list of all twenty-one players, and pinpointing the date to 1981. For good measure, he also told Andy which players were missing from the photographs taken that day.
“Nobody else in the world could have done this,” Andy said.
Queensland historian Greg Mallory remembered being shown around the museum by Terry, and being astonished by his knowledge of Queenslanders like Barry Muir and Brian Davies, hardly household names south of the Tweed.
That was Terry. He didn’t care about the border. He just loved rugby league and the people who played it.
From England, historian Tom Mather recalled landing in Australia to research his book on the old Northern Union.
Tom was jet-lagged and fresh off the plane, only for Terry to greet him with “Let’s get a coffee first, mate,” and a beautiful friendship began.
All that mattered to Terry was that someone who had travelled so far to talk rugby league had to be taken care of.
“There was nothing too much trouble,” Tom wrote.
“He was my go-to when my research hit an impasse, and he was always delighted that someone was researching the game in depth.”
That summed up Terry precisely. That someone could match his passion for the game was a real thrill to him.
Andrew Ferguson of the Rugby League Information Project, the ultimate stats man, said that Terry belonged in the NRL Hall of Fame alongside author and journalist Ian Heads.
“He was an absolute wealth of knowledge,” Ferguson wrote.
“A mentor, and never did he treat me like I was his junior.”
The most poignant tribute came from one of the people Terry respected the most.
Prominent Australian historian Dr Richard Cashman is a pioneer of Australian sports history who organised the first national sports conference in 1977.
He was an Associate Professor and lecturer at the School of History at UNSW, and later became Adjunct Professor and Director of the Australian Centre for Olympic Studies at UTS.
Cashman was the co-founder and Executive Officer of the Tom Brock Bequest Committee, and said he will always appreciate the effort Terry took in framing the selection of topics for the Tom Brock lectures.
“With his superb contacts in league, Terry identified the best people for a panel and invited them to participate in the event,” Cashman said.
“Terry then proved to be a skilled chairman of proceedings on the night, drawing out each panellist and ensuring that the discussion flowed seamlessly.”
Cashman admired Terry’s passion for rugby league and its history.
“He valued the stories and anecdotes that were a core part of the rich tapestry of the sport,” Cashman said.
“And he recognised what the stories added to league’s brand, and for him it was what made the game superior to rival codes.”
For Cashman, Terry’s passing leaves the game poorer.
“He was a rich repository of rugby league knowledge, which is impossible to replace.”
I wrote my own tribute on LinkedIn the week he died, and one line of it stood above all.
There is an old saying that you should judge a person by the way they treat people who can do nothing for them.
By that measure, Terry Williams was a true king.
He was a teacher by profession, and he taught us all something about how a life should be lived: how a working-class kid from Ashcroft could carry and radiate values of reliability, excellence and respect.
Like most larger-than-life figures, I assumed he would live forever, immune to the decay of time. It wasn’t to be.
Fittingly, the biggest crowd for any Tom Brock Memorial lecture had turned up to pay tribute to Terry.
But before we could focus on the historian, it was important to hear from the family who lived with him and loved him.
Denise Williams, Terry’s wife of almost thirty-seven years, stood where Terry once stood and spoke about memory.
What do we remember, she asked? Birthdays, weddings, smells, anniversaries. Where we were when Elvis died, and when Princess Diana died.
The 8th of January stood out - Elvis’s birthday, and also Newtown’s, a date over which Terry and his great friend Glen Dwyer would happily argue for the rest of their lives.
And now two more dates are burned into the family’s memory forever: the 24th of February 2026, the Newtown season launch and their last normal day; and the 25th of February, the day everything changed.
Denise met Terry forty years ago at teachers’ college.
“He was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, and had a wit that was mesmerising.” Denise recalled.
Terry was studying to be a history and English teacher, she a science teacher.
“He was an excellent teacher, and his students loved him,” Denise said.
“He could add a fun sports fact to any history or English lesson, and it didn’t take long for the students to realise they could derail any lesson by bringing up football or cricket.”
Denise and Terry came from the same world - large Catholic families with the same values. Sport was the one thing they did not have in common, she said, and yet that did not stop them getting married.
Over the years she became a Jets fan by osmosis. Their three children were, in her words, “indoctrinated.”
At school, being a Jets fan was tough work for the Williams brood, a barren place where no other eight-year-old had heard of Newtown.
Like all kids wanting to fit in, they hedged and defected, barracking for the Roosters and Souths, wandering across tribal boundaries before coming home to be Bluebags at heart.
The family dog is named Jet.
Denise can, to this day, name the North Sydney wingers from the 1922 grand final: Harold Horder and Cecil Blinkhorn.
“The things we remember,” she said with a smile.
Terry, she confirmed, was excellent in the classroom and hopeless with the paperwork.
“Teaching was a way of Terry combining his love of history and words and making a living, but it was never his life’s work.”
“His life’s work was the game.”
His love of Newtown and history converged in his making the leap from historian to author, writing Out of the Blue, his 1993 history of the club.
It was “totally a project of love,” she said, and one of his proudest achievements.
There would be a second book, Through Blue Eyes, published for the club’s centenary in 2008, and he played a central role in selecting the Newtown Team of the Century.
In his role as historian, he served as MC at many Newtown Jets functions and contributed numerous articles to the club’s website.
There was his venture into the publishing world, Sydney Rugby League News, which he built from nothing and which Denise notes, “never made us money - for all his intelligence, Terry was not a businessman.”
“He worked hard and got it off the ground,” Denise recalled.
“And he loved the challenge and the contribution he could make to the lower grades of rugby league.”
She shared fond recollections of Terry’s decade as historian and communications manager at the New South Wales Rugby League.
Another highlight was the book Terry wrote celebrating the most maligned cohort in the game.
In 2008, he wrote a history of referees for the NSWRL Referees Association’s 100th birthday.
“Despite his issues with referees,” Denise said with a smile, “he took this on and worked closely with Denis Spagarino, who became a close colleague.”
There was also the acclaimed 2018 documentary film Headgear to Helmets, on the rugby league men who went to the First World War.
Beyond the projects he completed was his free information service to his friends.
She recalled long phone calls with Glen Dwyer, “as they discussed, argued and debated various rugby league issues and solved the world’s problems.”
Calls would come at all hours of the night to access Terry’s storehouse of knowledge.
“People in this room have rung Terry, usually drunk, and asked him to settle an argument,” Denise said.
“He would be able to give them an answer quicker than Google, then tell them a 15-minute story to go with the facts.”
“He could remember games he watched and played with surprising detail - scores, who was there, fun facts, interesting anecdotes.”
Denise also acknowledged Terry’s band of close friends, who were his equals in the ability to remember inane rugby league facts.
“Before Google and mobile phones, they were known in some circles as the trivia terrorists.”
And there was his time as curator of the Rugby League Museum at Rugby League Central at Moore Park - the place where rugby league and its stories finally came together.
Terry worked tirelessly to get the project off the ground, and as the Museum’s curator was incredibly proud of it.
“Terry felt it was important to know who came before and set the stage for the modern game,” Denise said.
“This was his contribution to preserving all that he held sacred.”
“This should have been his legacy.”
She did not flinch from addressing the wound Terry carried to the grave.
“In 2018, for reasons that made no sense to anyone, Terry was let go from the museum he had built,” Denise said.
“The shutting of the museum and the lack of support nearly broke him.”
“For Terry, the museum was a testament to the importance of the history of the greatest game.”
The impact on Terry was brutal.
“He was so disappointed that the NRL didn’t value their rich history. He was at his lowest and never the same. He never really recovered.”
“Newtown and the Men & Family of League were his saviours.” she added.
For Denise, the opportunity cost was the biggest blow for Terry.
“He was not interested in glory; he just loved the game and the history.”
“But the great tragedy for him was the stories that won’t be told and the history that won’t be acknowledged.”
Henson Park, she said, was like a church to him, his spiritual home. He always said he was “more comfortable working with the old and the dead.”
“At Henson you can feel the ghosts of the past, and Terry is now among them.”
Denise sadly noted that Terry won’t be there for the dream trip they had planned for ten years.
A tour of the Western Front battlefields in France, the itinerary interspersed with visits to French rugby league grounds and historical sporting places.
He would have worn a Newtown jersey in every photograph, and placed Newtown stickers where he could - and, she added, where he shouldn’t.
“That responsibility now falls to me,” Denise said.
While she was the practical one in the relationship, she was grateful for her complementary life partner: “Terry brought the colour, the energy, the music and the comedy into our world.”
“He was lost in his own wonderful universe, and the rest of us were privileged to live in it.”
“Our world,” Denise said, “has a lot less colour in it now.”
There was not a dry eye in the room after Denise’s bittersweet recollections.
And then, channelling her perennially cheeky husband, she landed a joke he would have loved, announcing that ticket sales for the night had reached 8,972 - a reference to the crowd number announced at every Newtown game.
A nod to Newtown’s last-ever top-flight game in 1983, before they were locked out of the NSWRL competition.
She concluded her memorial in true Bluebag spirit.
“We have to say good luck to Newtown for the finals.”
After Denise completed her speech, the panel assembled on stage.
The format for the panel was built around the three words in the lecture’s title - History, Bluebags and Memory.
The History section was kicked off by Mat Hunt, who was keen to share with us Terry’s personal rugby league history, and his love of everyone else’s.
Mat is a Catholic schoolteacher, as Terry was, and also his partner in crime on the podcast Rugby League Rookwood.
“Terry Williams,” Mat said, “is the epitome of the Catholic values of that era: Father, Son, Holy Spirit and rugby league.”
Terry was first blooded in rugby league on the tough fields of Patrician Brothers Liverpool, which Mat called “an oasis of asphalt.”
It was, he said, “a no-frills school that punched above its weight, the fibros against the silvertails, unpretentious and down to earth - and Terry was all of that.”
Mat said rugby league in those days was so much more than a recreational hobby: “it was massive.”
For the leading Catholic footy schools in Western Sydney, it transcended the game itself and was, he said, “a whole way of belonging.”
Terry loved playing for Patrician Brothers Liverpool and was proud of the school’s rugby league alumni, which included the Minichiello brothers, Graham Murray and Mark Levy.
From year eleven, Terry was sent down the line to St Gregory’s in Campbelltown, the greatest rugby league nursery in the country, where his football career quietly gave way to a first-XI cricket career.
Terry the teacher and Terry the historian, Mat said, were the same man.
Sometimes roll call turned into a quiz: “Harry Ambrum - are you any relation to George Ambrum, who played for Norths in 1969?”
Every geography lesson bent back towards the game; ask him for a latitude and a longitude and you would somehow end up at Leichhardt Oval.
There were, Mat said, “a lot of Henson Park answers.”
He coached rugby league at every school he taught at, and at university.
According to Mat, for Terry: “it was always about giving, always about community.”
The Rugby League Rookwood podcast was the perfect vessel for that spirit.
Terry rang Mat in 2024 with the idea. He wasn’t tech-savvy, so he leaned on his mate.
The roles and responsibilities were clear from the outset.
“You ask the questions,” he told Mat, “and I’ll be the Rain Man.”
He was, as Mat put it, “AI before AI.”
The podcast filled a hole for Terry.
“Rugby League Rookwood was an avenue for his passion, particularly after leaving the museum,” Mat said.
“Basically, it is a podcast that looks at the human side of rugby league, so each episode we’d look at a famous game, a famous player.”
Of all we have left of Terry, the podcast remains the most personal.
“It’s like having a beer with Terry.”
“Listen to episode 4,” Mat said.
“Pour yourself a Cooper’s Red, never a Green - Terry once called me blasphemous for that - and just sit with the sound of him.”
Mat recalled that Terry called himself the Doris Stokes of rugby league, a comparison to the famous British psychic medium.
“I want to exhume stories from the past,” he said - which is why they named the show after a cemetery, and why the logo, Terry’s own idea, is a football in a graveyard.
Doing the podcast with Terry brought Mat directly into the cluttered world of the historian. His “rugby league den” in his house was according to Mat controlled chaos, symbolic of a true historian that can’t let go of anything.
I read out a line from the Rugby League Rookwood podcast in Terry’s own voice, recorded above the Newtown scoreboard, on why a day at Henson Park matters.
“One of the things a lot of people don’t like about modern rugby league,” Terry said,
“Is the way you’re treated as a consumer. You go to a stadium, you sit in a plastic chair, your beer’s in a plastic cup, mid-strength at best, you get a pie in a plastic bag. It’s the sanitised, corporatised version you’re forced to endure these days.”
“You come here to Henson, you get a can of beer and you sit on the hill with your dog and a sausage sandwich, and it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.”
The Newtown Jets, he said, had absorbed every wave of different groups that had moved in and out of the area, a broad group united by footy. That eclectic, inclusive crowd was, for Terry, the best part of Newtown.
Although Terry loved that Newtown embraced all of the suburb’s diverse residents, according to Mat he was still a meat-and-potatoes traditionalist who liked to keep it simple.
When Mat once asked Terry what he thought of the trailblazing new range of Newtown supporters’ gear and merchandise, he dismissed it as “male lingerie.”
And there was nobody who dealt in obscure rugby league trivia quite like his mate Terry.
Who knew Tim Sheens is the only premiership-winning coach to have worn a beard?
And that there is a link between rugby league and Jaws.
A deleted scene features a stuntman named Ted Grossman being pulled from the water - the same Ted Grossman who ran the ball at halfback for the American All Stars on their 1953 tour of Australia.
“Only Terry knew that,” Mat said.
“Only Terry ever would. He was a truly authentic man.”
The Bluebags component of the evening was to be steered by Glen Dwyer - author, media manager and unofficial historian of the modern-day version of the Newtown Jets.
Glen had read and admired Terry’s work long before he met him.
He had seen Terry’s name attached to stories in inner-west newspapers, writing passionately and knowledgeably about the return of Newtown to active rugby league.
They met formally in 1991, both joyous at the Jets’ rebirth in the Metropolitan Cup after eight years in exile following their brutal exclusion from the NSWRL.
They hit it off immediately, and also found their first great disagreement - the true foundation date of the Newtown club - a running joke that would flow happily between them for more than thirty years, right up until Terry’s final night.
Newtown is the club that died after expulsion from first grade but refused to stay dead. Glen wrote the book on its afterlife, Taking It to the Streets, continuing Terry’s work on the club’s proud history dating back to 1908.
Why does Newtown endure, I asked him, when other clubs simply vanish?
Glen said he and Terry both agreed that Newtown was a mirror of the country: working-class roots, new migrants, diverse communities, all bound by stubborn community spirit. He loved that it had survived at all.
In the foreword Terry wrote for Glen’s book, he had set down exactly why Newtown mattered - and, in doing so, was quietly passing the torch to Glen.
Terry captured that royal-blue devotion best himself, in the introduction to his book Through Blue Eyes.
“There is something special about the royal blue jersey and what it represents. The names that have worn it, and the games in which it featured, add up to a century of tradition, pride and passion that can match, if not surpass, any other club.”
One memory Glen cherished was the time he brought Terry to meet Vince Karalius, the Wild Bull of the Pampas and one of the toughest forwards Great Britain ever produced.
Karalius was in Sydney in 1997 for a number of engagements, and Glen introduced them over coffee in Darling Harbour.
Terry asked Karalius who his first coach at St Helens had been. The answer was Jim Sullivan, the phenomenal Welshman whose rugby league career spanned from the age of nineteen to forty-five, including a stint serving in the war.
When Terry revealed just how much he knew about Jim Sullivan, according to Glen, “Karalius nearly fell off his chair.”
The two of them talked for two hours.
At the end of it, Karalius turned to Glen and said: “This young man should be running rugby league in Australia.”
Terry was, Glen said, a great one for “taking the piss.”
On the night Glen was made a life member of the New South Wales Rugby League, his phone rang.
It was Terry, his voice grave.
“All I can say,” Terry intoned, “is that the New South Wales Rugby League are really scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
“Terry’s memory will stay with us forever,” Glen said in his closing remarks.
“He was one of my best friends. I miss him greatly.”
The Memory section of the night belonged to Brad Ryder, author and the official historian of the South Sydney Rabbitohs since 1997.
Brad was Tom Brock’s own successor in the role, and one of Terry’s earliest protégés.
Brad first met Terry in early 1998, when Newtown had an office at the old Souths Leagues Club in Redfern.
Tony Reid, the Newtown boss at the time, introduced Terry to Brad, mentioning their common ground as schoolteachers.
Terry asked Brad what he taught, to which Brad answered mathematics and computers.
When Brad asked Terry what he taught, Terry replied dryly: “Morons and cretins!”
Brad recalled: “I immediately knew he had a great sense of humour, and our friendship started.”
“Terry was second to none as a mentor,” Brad said.
Brad recalled his early, uncertain days as a historian, and Terry taking him down to the State Library to show him how to use the microfiche.
Terry gave him encouragement and advice and put him on the right track, because there is nowhere you can go to study to be a club historian.
“The position just falls into your lap, and then you spend your life keeping the memory of your club alive,” Brad said.
Brad walked us through the mysterious craft of keeping the cultural memory alive, the centrepiece in his case being the first-grade player register.
Every South Sydney first-grader is given a sequential number, from Arthur Hennessy at number one, to Clive Churchill at 365, all the way to the most recent, young Dane Jennings at 1222.
There are three grade registers now at Souths - some three and a half thousand players - all published on the club’s website under the heading ‘Tradition’.
Beyond the player registers is the recording of stories: turning up to every reunion and coaxing the precious tales out of the old blokes, because when someone passes, the unrecorded stories pass with them.
Brad and Terry shared something deeper than historian method and process.
Both had watched their clubs cast out of the top flight, and both had watched them claw their way back.
On the very day South Sydney were cut from the competition in 1999, a weeping Brad was interviewed by Channel Ten news, and he said it plainly through the tears:
“Rugby league will die without South Sydney. Mark my words. Could you imagine English soccer cutting Manchester United?”
When someone tries to erase your history, that history becomes the very thing worth fighting for. Souths marched, and Souths came back.
Brad shared the quote that most inspired his work, from South Sydney’s co-founder Samuel George (SG) Ball, secretary of the club until his death in 1965:
“Let those who drink the water remember those who dug the well.”
Which brings us to Terry’s greatest passion project - the Rugby League Museum that remains closed in NRL headquarters.
The Rugby League Museum opened in 2012 and was received with joy by rugby league fans. In 2021 it was closed, with a simple message on the NRL website:
“The NRL Museum will be closed until further notice. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. - NRL Museum Manager.”
When the NRL shut down its museum, it was an act of cultural vandalism, severing the modern game from its own memory.
One of the wealthiest sports in the country decided that its history was not worth a staff member and the cost of maintaining and adding to the collections.
The NRL is not alone, according to Australian Society for Sports History historian Greg Blood.
“Wealthy sports love their awards nights and their gala dinners,” he said.
“but too many of them do not respect the far harder, less glamorous work of collecting and caring for their past.”
This phenomenon of apathetic amnesia is a form of self-sabotage of rugby league’s greatest strength and source of meaning: its incredible history.
A game born in the furnace of working-class revolution, that survived a century of class-warfare attempts to consign it to memory.
Its history means more than that of other sports.
Rugby league is not like newer sports scrambling for a foothold. It has 130 years of continuous, unbroken story, a spine-tingling narrative stretching back to the 1895 split from rugby union.
In an ever-changing world, following a rugby league team is the one thing you can share, almost unchanged, with your grandparents.
Squander that, and you become an empty husk - a competition with a scoreboard and stats and no soul.
The tragedy of the closed Rugby League Museum is more than the boxes languishing in storage.
It is the opportunity cost - the stories that will now never be told, the histories that will never be dug up.
Historians have always known this.
English historian E.H. Carr wrote in What Is History? that “the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless.”
Jamaican working-class leader Marcus Garvey understood the importance of historical connection saying: “A people without knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”
Terry’s son Steven said it perfectly at Terry’s funeral service, in words that stayed with me.
Rugby league historians, Steven said, are a rare breed: “these happy few, this band of brothers,”
“who breathe rarefied air. Rarefied, but not exclusive. Not inaccessible.”
Steven said that if you needed to know whether your great-grandfather played second grade in rural Newcastle, not only could his dad give you the answer.
“He would find the match report, the team photo and maybe even a period-accurate pin.”
Steven called his father a “boots-to-the-ground historian,” a man of the microfiche and the dusty shelves of the State Library. He did the work.
At the museum they nicknamed him “the Moth,” because he would only come out when an old box was opened.
And then Steven offered the sentence that summarised his father’s role in rugby league history.
“History may be in the past, but it is always talking to us - and all my father had to do was pay attention.”
Closing the night on behalf of the Tom Brock Bequest Committee, Committee member Michael Adams reached for the fourth word hidden in the title: Legacy.
Terry’s legacy, he said, is one that outlives him and will survive all of us.
“It lives on in his books and his films,” said Adams, “but more importantly it lives on in his conviction that the game’s single most important asset is its history.”
Adams said that anyone who ever visited the museum at Rugby League Central, or trawled its archive under Terry’s expert care, can testify to the goldmine the NRL is sitting on.
“Terry devoted his life to making sure rugby league never forgot where it came from.”
“The greatest tribute the game could pay him,” Michael said, “would be to prove that it cares about its history as deeply as he did.”
Michael then thanked Denise and her family, and announced a small bar tab for attendees to have a beer to celebrate Terry in the main bar.
I often think about Terry, and like to imagine him where Denise placed him.
Among the ghosts at a Henson Park home game, standing alongside Tommy Raudonikis and Bumper Farrell and of course his dog Jet, sidemouth cursing at the referee’s obvious bias, a can of beer in one hand, sausage sandwich in the other, a few raffle tickets in his pocket, ‘Trady’ doing laps of the ground on his mini penny farthing after a Jets try.
Farewell Terry Williams: historian, storyteller, curator, author, Bluebag, Good Samaritan, good bloke and the essence of rugby league.
Thank you for your humility, kindness, passion and brilliance.
And let those who drink the water remember those who dug the well.
