New South Wales Country Cockatoos

New South Wales Country

Union	New South Wales Rugby Union
Branch	NSW Country Rugby Union
Founded	1895 (NSW Country team) 1996 (NSW Country Cockatoos)
Region	NSW, excl. Sydney & Southern Regions

The New South Wales Country Cockatoos is an amateur representative rugby union football team. Players in the team are selected by the New South Wales Country Rugby Union from regions of New South Wales excluding Sydney and Southern NSW. New South Wales Country plays regular fixtures with other representative sides including City-Country matches with New South Wales Suburban for the Maher-Ross Cup, and the "Battle of the Borders" Cup against the Queensland Country Heelers.

The NSW Country team adopted a logo featuring a Cockatoo in 1996. These native birds are common throughout regional areas of New South Wales. The team colours are orange (amber) and black.

The New South Wales Country Under 20 team competes in the Southern States Championship and also plays occasional matches against other representative sides. Prior to 2008, country colts teams at under 21 and under 19 age levels were fielded in national and state competitions.

The New South Wales Country team first played the Metropolitan Sydney side when the New South Wales Rugby Union inaugurated the Country Week carnivals in 1895. Sydney won in the first two years by 14–11 and 23–8, but in 1897 the Country team won by 16–3. The Country Week matches continued until 1914 with just two drought-affected years missed.

The onset of the First World War in 1914, and the growth of rugby league brought rugby union to a halt in New South Wales. Rugby league took many of the ground tenures and, as the only football code played during the war, the majority of young men that left school. Although rugby union survived, the game languished in country parts of the state for many decades.

Country Week matches were re-established in 1929, after a 15-year gap. New Zealand's All Blacks also toured in 1929, playing the NSW Country team in Armidale and winning 27–8. However, the 1930s Depression years had a debilitating effect on amateur sports including rugby, particularly in country areas with reduced prices for rural products. At the outset of the Second World War, the NSWRU decided that some club rugby would be maintained. A few matches were arranged and country teams managed their own games of mostly reserve team fixtures. Schoolboy matches were played, but representative rugby was discontinued.