Rugby League is a fast-moving, sometimes physically brutal game born in the working-class communities of northern England.
Now it is at the centre of an even higher-stakes geopolitical competition on the other side of the world.
Anthony Albanese and James Marape, the prime ministers of Australia and Papua New Guinea, this month announced Australia would spend A$600 million (£298 million) over 10 years to set up a Papua New Guinea team to play in the Australian league.
But it comes hand in hand with another pact that makes clear Australia will remain Papua New Guinea’s main security partner. In other words, China will not be.
Competing for influence
For more than a decade, China and the West – particularly Australia and the US – have been in an escalating competition for influence in the region.
From Washington and Canberra, Beijing’s ambitions for ever greater control is an alarming prospect.
Many of these new diplomatic battlegrounds – New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Philippines – loom large in national memories of the Second World War.
The prospect of a potentially hostile power once again building air and naval bases on the islands and atolls of the region fills Australians in particular with unease.
American allies, in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, have equal reason for concern.
The view from Beijing – or from the Yulin naval base on Hainan island, the home of the Chinese navy – is quite different.
“They look out at the Pacific, and they see tens of thousands of US military personnel in South Korea, tens more thousands in Japan. They see Taiwan, and they see America not faithfully living up to its commitment – from their point of view – to respect the status quo there,” says Philip Shetler-Jones, an expert on Indo-Pacific security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK-based think-tank.
