Did you ever, in your travels, get the chance to rub shoulders with royalty on UK tours?

Q AWe went to Buckingham Palace with the ’75 Wallabies and the Queen was there, so was Prince Charles and Princess Anne. I met with the Queen and said, ‘Maam, what do you watch on TV?’ She said, ‘Telly Savalas and the news’.

Q AAnd there was another particularly interesting piece of the chat, wasn’t there? Yes. We were in Ireland when the IRA were doing their thing and I heard shots from the hotel and said to a security guard, ‘that’s gunshots’. They said it wasn’t. The IRA were rugby people so nothing was going to happen to us. I said to the Queen, ‘I think the only possible way you’re going to fix this problem is if you bring back capital punishment’. She didn’t think that was the answer. There is another story about trying to take some South African gold. What happened? We were at a gold mine and upstairs with the managers and they had these ingots, triangular in

Q Ashape and weighing a fair bit. Some bloke said if anybody could lift one in one hand they could have it. I turned one of them over and lifted it. Steve Finnane said, ‘look, he’s got it above his head, it’s his’. The mine bloke couldn’t believe it but when I put it back I foolishly didn’t turn it back over and the mine bloke said I was cheating, that I couldn’t do that. In your era a lot of the big names were targets of rich Sydney league clubs. Were you ever offered big money to switch codes? I think (Senator) Ron McAuliffe ran it past one of my teammates about Tony Shaw, Mark Loane and myself possibly playing league when we were the back-row for the Wallabies. He was told that we’d probably not be interested. And that was that.

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