Petersham RUFC
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| Full name | Petersham Rugby Union Football Club |
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| Nickname(s) | Shammies |
| Founded | 1883 |
| Location | Petersham, Sydney, Australia |
| Ground(s) | Camperdown Oval, Mallett St, Camperdown |
| President | Darren Barlow |
| League(s) | NSWSRU |
| Official website | |
| www |
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Petersham Rugby Union Football Club is a rugby union club based in the inner west of Sydney, New South Wales. The club, also known as "The Shammies", currently field 5 teams in the 1st Grade Division of the New South Wales Suburban Rugby Union competition (Subbies). Petersham RUFC was founded in 1883, making it the oldest surviving suburban rugby club in Australia.
The Sydney rugby institution that is the Petersham Football Club first took to the playing fields in the winter of 1883. At that time, Sydney club rugby was organised on two levels, known simply as Senior and Junior. The Senior club competition had been running since 1874, but Junior contests prior to the mid-1880s were somewhat disorganised. In fact, the Southern Rugby Union only started involving itself in Junior rugby in 1882, and did not get around to establishing a formal competition for Junior clubs until 1886. By that time Petersham had affiliated to the Union, and was a participant in that first official second tier competition.
Over the next few years Junior football continued to grow in popularity, and the new competition had to be regularly expanded to accommodate a rapidly increasing number of clubs. Petersham became entrenched at the top level and contested every First Junior competition from 1886 to 1895, winning it in 1889 and making the semi-finals on four other occasions. During this period the club also boasted an impressive role of Junior representative players and supplied a steady stream of quality footballers to the Senior competition. Two of these, Arthur Braund and Rush Nelson, later went on to play many tests for New South Wales and, in the latter case, Queensland.
By the late 1890s however, the Sydney rugby scene was changing. In 1897 a new body, the Metropolitan Rugby Union, had been formed to oversee the Sydney club competitions. A natural consequence of this was the extinction of a large number of Junior clubs, and indeed by the start of the 1898 season over twenty founding members of the new union, including the entire Fourth Junior competition, had disappeared from its books. Petersham, who had been suffering from a drain of quality players to the Senior competition anyway, was a more significant and probably unintended casualty of this policy.
Fortunately however, the club was strong enough to survive the setback. While most of the Junior clubs disenfranchised by the Metropolitan Rugby Union from 1897 to 1900 simply ceased to exist, a few, including Petersham, continued to play amongst themselves outside the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan and New South Wales Rugby Unions. This competition was formalised in 1901 as the City and Suburban Association, the direct ancestor of modern Subbies rugby. Petersham is the only surviving founding member of that competition - the basis of our claim to be Australia's oldest Subbies club! Petersham played in the new competition from 1901 to 1905, winning it in 1904.
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