List of Australian club rugby union competitions
Club Rugby often focuses on the major metropolitan areas of the respective unions, with teams representing various districts and suburbs.The shield was donated to the New South Wales Rugby Union in 1923 by Sydney University Football Club, and was named in honour of Robert Elliott Stewart Shute who died while playing for The Rest v NSW XV on 5 June 1922.It was an annual fund-raising venture for the Brisbane Hospital, but the game fell away during and after WWI, and rugby union was abandoned in Queensland after 1919.It is conducted by the region's governing body, the ACT and Southern NSW Rugby Union.The trophy awarded to the winner of the grand final is the John I Dent Cup, named after the benefactor who donated it to the union.The earliest report of a football match in Newcastle was in 1860, when 'a lover of the old English games has offered one of Mrs. O’Hagan’s most fashionable bonnets as a prize to the fortunate party who shall give the winning (final) kick in a game of foot-ball, to be played on the new cricket ground, near St. John's Church'.