LAST NIGHT WAS a busy one at The Currach pub on New Zealand’s Great Barrier Island. On the eve of Ireland’s second match at the Rugby World Cup, the locals packed in for the unveiling of the latest gift from the one of the island’s favorite sons.
The Currach already have a couple of jerseys from Jamison Gibson-Park proudly on display but the newest addition holds special significance, as it was the shirt the scrum-half wore in Dunedin last year on the night Ireland won a Test match on New Zealand soil for the first time.
“Oh we had great fun here tonight, we had all of Jamison’s cousins in,” explains Orla Cumisky, the Dubliner who runs the popular Irish pub on the south of the island.
“We’re about 100 miles off the coast of Auckland, and we’re a completely self-sustainable Island. We have no mains power, water or septic, so everybody generates their own power. Our little pub is 92% run on solar.
“The island has 1,000 people, but we’re two and a half times bigger than Singapore, so we’re quite a big, decent landmass, but everybody knows everybody here. It’s that kind of a place, real small Irish village stuff.
“Jamison’s a real hero here, he’s a huge success on the international stage and everybody’s very proud of him.”
Gibson-Park isn’t the only Ireland player to have friends and family cheering him on from the other side of the world, whether it be Finlay Bealham’s parents back in Queensland or Rob Herring’s family in South Africa.
This week, The 42 spoke to some former coaches and teammates of three players who began their rugby journeys on the other side of the world, but now call Ireland home.
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“If we were down or needed a big play, you’d just give the ball to Mack.”
Tom Ross has been on quite the journey with Mack Hansen, playing together right through the underage grades in Canberra before making their Brumbies debut on the same day.
“I first really met Mack when we started in U10s/U11s on a rep team together,” says the former Brumbies tighthead. “The next year we went to school together at Daramalan College so our friendship kind of started there.”
It’s not surprising to hear that Ross’ first impressions of Hansen were that of an outgoing, adventurous spirit.
“He had this long blonde hair… He was always very outgoing and loved spending time with his mates. Wasn’t really one for schoolwork or anything like that, he just wanted to play footy and have a footy in his hand. There would be days where I’d be at his place and he just couldn’t sit still for longer than 20 minutes. We’d watch a TV show and he’d be ‘Righto, we need to go kick the footy or something.’ He just couldn’t stay still, he needed to be doing something.
“At Daramalan he was actually a fly-half, mainly just because he saw a lot more ball. We had a pretty good side growing up, made plenty of finals, and he’d just find freakish ways to get through the defensive line. If we were down or needed a big play, you’d just give the ball to Mack; you didn’t need to create anything for him, he’d just do it himself.
“There was one game around U16s, we’re in our own 10-metre line and he does a chip-and-chase and runs the length of the field. That was Mack, a freak of nature.
“And he was competitive. We’d be playing Playstation or something when we were younger, and say I beat him, we’d always have to play multiple games until he won! It was never okay for him to lose.”
The Ross and Hansen families grew close over the years so it was a special day when the two young Australians won their first senior cap for the Brumbies.
“2019 against the Waratahs,” Ross continues. “We had the whole of Gungahlin Eagles rugby club down supporting, about 100 people, so that was a truly special moment to share with him, and I’ll never forget that.
“You know, we kind of joke around that we got to spend every day with our mates at school, and we came into Brumbies and did exactly the same thing. It just felt like being in school again.”
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“Apart from being outstanding on the rugby field, he was obviously a good kid.”
James Lowe grew up in Nelson, on the northern tip on New Zealand’s South Island.
“It’s quite a unique place,” says Karl Jones, who coached Lowe during his days playing for the New Zealand schools team. “It’s a beautiful part of the world. They’re quite a long way from anywhere else; a ferry ride from Wellington, three or four hours in the car down to Christchurch, so they’re quite isolated up there.”
It was on one of those long treks out to Nelson where Lowe left a lasting impression on Jones, who was in town to watch a schools game and scout potential recruits.
“He was quite outstanding as a fullback,” Jones continues. “I wrote in my little notebook here that he never got tackled first time, had a low center of gravity and was quick, had a massive left foot and was a very brave tackler. So from an early stage it was quite apparent we were going to pick James.
“I met with James after that game and what struck me most was all the badges that he had on his blazer – his school blazer was adorned with record badges and prefix badges and all these bloody bits and pieces. I said, look, you’d struggle to walk in a straight line James, one side of your blazer is about 5kgs heavier than the other mate!
“So he was obviously a really good all-rounder. I’d only met him for five minutes before but he came over and shook my hand. You can tell quite a lot about a young fella who’s got those sort of qualities. So apart from being outstanding on the rugby field, he was obviously a good kid.
“And he was very, very good for the New Zealand schools side. The boys from the North Island and the South Island are a little bit different, they’ve got different sense of humour, so sometimes they don’t really gel that well, but James was a really good conduit between the North Island guys and the South Island guys, and very quickly you could see he was very popular and the other boys really liked him.
“People just liked spending time with him. When you’re together for only a short time, people that can do that are pretty special.”
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”Catch the ball and run like hell – he did that a lot.”
Bundee Aki was born in the Auckland suburb of Otahuhu and grew up in Manurewa. It was here, at Manurewa High School, where rugby coach Andrew Talaimanu first came across a talented, if raw, young prospect.
“He would have been 12, 13. Likeable, jovial, passionate – extremely passionate – and a little less focused on schoolwork at times.
“It’s funny, our retired principals and teachers talk about Bundellu with pride, but when he was at school he was a pain in the arse! He never did wrong, he just did a lot of things, unwell. Training in the morning was at 7.15am, and when we’d finish at 8.20am, you’d see Bundellu walking home instead of going to school.”
Talaimanu, who hails from Manurewa himself, describes the town as “lower socio-economic, working class and non-working class, a lot of Pacific Islanders and Maoris.” He explains that Aki’s upbringing was a typical Manurewa life.
Good, loving parents, a good family home. He’s very close to his sisters; so much so that he jumped the fence during a game one day to protect them from some abuse on the sidelines.
“He had reasonable athletic ability, fairly good ball skills, not great vision as a youngster, but he had speed. Then as he grew to 13 or 14, he also had a very, very deep determination defensively.
“And he would do anything to get people going. It’s funny, there’s a photo of when the team first won the championship. Bundee didn’t start that game, but he’s right in the middle of the photo at the front like he was one of the key players – that was Bundee, always right up there. He didn’t lead our school haka but he’d often edge to the front, as he was a most assertive, vigorous and demonstrative performer.
“Then at 15/16, as he grew, he had forthright opinions on different things, which was quite interesting because when you’re telling the first 15 coach how to coach the team, well, that didn’t go down too well… So his team had a split and I had a talk to the players, and then I sacked the first 15 coach, so Bundee won that battle.
“Then in his first year out of high school he scored seven tries in one game, breaking our club’s try-scoring record. Catch the ball and run like hell – he did that a lot.”
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“We knew he was a freak of nature, but never knew how quickly this would happen.”
Mack Hansen was working as an apprentice electrician when he joined the Brumbies Academy. A senior contract followed and he made 21 appearances for the Canberra side before the chance to join Connacht arrived in 2021. With a strong family connection to Ireland – his mother, Diana is from Castlemartyr – it proved too good an opportunity to turn down.
Hansen was an instant hit at The Sportsground and he debuted for Ireland against Wales in February 2022, a 2.15pm kick-off time in Dublin meaning a late night for those in Australia who wanted to see their old mate line up for the anthems.
“There was a lot mumbling, wasn’t there?” Ross laughs. “Ah no, it was a very proud moment. Most of the mates he’d made in Canberra stayed up for that game and to watch him run out, man of the match on debut, just incredible.
“I always thought he had the potential. The skill and talent has always been there. It was just whether he’d gel in a different climate. He’d always talked about playing overseas, whether that was 10 years down the track or the next year, but that was always the goal of his, to play overseas and travel the world playing footy. We knew he was a freak of nature but never knew how quickly this would happen. We’re just so stoked for him.”
So much so, that if the Wallabies fall short in France, Ross reckons Canberra will be cheering on Hansen and his Ireland teammates.
“Here in Canberra, Ireland are definitely everyone’s second team at the moment. Obviously we want the Wallabies to win, but you know, we wouldn’t be devastated if Ireland were to lift the trophy, for Mack’s sake.
“It’s funny, Mack used to play for our local club Gungahlin Eagles, who I still play for, and a couple of weeks ago we won our first Premiership in 20 years. I called Mack up after the game and he was filthy. He was like, ‘I wanted to be a part of that! I wanted to win a Premiership with Eagles!’ and I was like, mate, you’ve just won the Six Nations and you’ve beaten the All Blacks in New Zealand… Like, winning a competition here doesn’t even compare to what he’s achieved. For him to add a World Cup trophy to that list would be incredible.”
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“When he left New Zealand, you knew there was more to come.”
James Lowe impressed playing for the New Zealand schools side and began climbing the pro rugby ladder, first playing for Tasman in 2012. Around the same time, the Super Rugby franchises were circling, and as they weighed up signing this promising young back from Nelson, Karl Jones’ phone lit up. On the other end was the new Chiefs coaching team of Dave Rennie, Tom Coventry and Wayne Smith.
“Tom said look, ‘We’re all on the speaker mate, we’ve got a bit of a problem.’
“They had had a couple of All Blacks wingers leave, and so he said: ‘Look, we really want to pick your brains and see who were the best backs you coached in your time with the schools team?’
“We started going through the list and most of the guys were already contracted to other franchises, and when it came around to James I thought wrongly that the Crusaders would have snapped him up, but they hadn’t. I said look, if you get the opportunity to contract James, just do it, because he could play Super Rugby at centre, winger of fullback. He was playing for the (Tasman) Mako at the time, so he was in Nelson, and so really the Chiefs pinched him from under the Crusaders’ nose.”
Lowe played over 50 games for the Chiefs but in 2017, with his path to the All Blacks squad congested, Leinster came calling.
“I think if James had stuck around he would have been an All Black. But that’s the great what if,” Jones adds.
“As I said, when we had him in, he was brilliant. He hadn’t had a lot of rep rugby experience and he hadn’t had a lot of people blowing smoke up his arse like some of the big city boys had, he was just a good kid from Nelson that was really quick and really talented.
“But James was somebody that you could see was going to get a lot better, and I think when he left New Zealand, we could all see that. We knew he hadn’t played his best rugby when he signed with Leinster, you knew there was more to come.”
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“When he told me about going to Ireland, I said to him, send me a postcard, get on that plane and go.”
Bundee Aki’s tricky path to the top of the sport has been well documented. For a while, he took a job in a bank to help support his young family while still trying to make it in rugby.
Aki moved from senior club to NPC side Counties Manukau before earning a place in a Chiefs development team, going on to sign a pro contract and debuting for the Super Rugby side in 2013. Talaimanu, who helped the Chiefs identify upcoming young talent, recalls the conversations he was having with the clubs’ coaches about Aki’s potential at the time.
“I said to Wayne Smith, he can defend, he’ll learn to attack but he needs to get a training ethic. So they paired him up in the summer with Sonny Bill Williams, and he trained his arse off. Everything Sonny Bill would do, Bundellu tried to do it, plus more.
“The Chiefs had won the championship (2012 and 2013), and the number one 12 in New Zealand was Sonny Bill. Then you’ve got Ma’a Nonu and Conrad Smith, so Bundee was down that chain, and also down the chain a little bit at the Chiefs, but he played a lot for the Chiefs in rotation and continued to be prominent through strong carries and unusually massive defence from a number 12. He was just a very determined player and he stood out.
“Wayne said to me that it’s really unfortunate, he’s that close to being an All Black if he can just wait, and I said young guys can’t keep waiting, they’ve got to take their opportunity. So when Bundee told me about going to Ireland, I said to him, send me a postcard, get on that plane and go.
“Now, I was worried about how he would be accepted by some traditional Irish supporters as a qualifying player, but he made a huge impression at Connacht, winning the Pro12. I remember seeing videos on Facebook of him singing rebel songs and leading the charge, so he was accepted by his peers.
“The last time I saw him was a couple of years ago, but I speak to him quite a bit. He’s still far too respectful to me… But he’s a good family-oriented guy, and I think he brings that to any rugby team he’s with. So when I see him in Ireland doing the clip-claps and all the Samoan things, I’m thinking – Wow, he’s taken that all the way across the world, and I think that’s fantastic. For Bundellu Aki from South Auckland to qualify for Ireland… There’s immense pride here.”
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Back on Great Barrier Island, The Currach will be opening its doors bright and early ahead of every Ireland match in France.
“It’s seven o’clock in the morning kind of stuff,” explains Cumisky, “but at the same time, everybody turns out and there’s a lot of green around the pub. You’d certainly have 100 people in here all cramming in to watch the game, so about 10% of the island.
“There’s a real following, and all of Jamison’s family are shouting for Ireland anyway, that’s for sure. It’s extraordinary to have a little island off New Zealand cheering for Ireland at the World Cup.”
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