Mr Jules Guerassimoff
Published Sun 01 Jan 2017
Jules Guerassimof was a key part of a glorious era for Australian rugby through the 1960’s.
A charismatic and aggressive flanker, he was a University club stalwart who played a then
record 74 games for Queensland from 1962 and 12 Tests for Australia from ‘63.
All this after his Russian grandparents used falsified documents to escape the Communist
Government of Siberia in the 1920s before jumping a Japanese ship and bribing sailors to let
them ashore at Hokkaido, where eventually his parents met and married.
In 1940 the family moved to Cape York and 10 days after their arrival young Jules was born
in the tiny Central Queensland town of Thangool.
He learned rugby league at Rockhampton Grammar, and from 1958 studied Agricultural
Science at the University of Queensland, where his love of rugby was born.
With the aid of a 30,000-pound Golden Casket win the family prospered, and big Jules
played with untold passion for his State and Country. So passionate that in 1967, when the
code moved to Ballymore, he would trim the turf with a hand-held garden mower.
He is part of the fabric on which professional rugby was built, and now, he is the 18th
rugby inductee to the Queensland Sport Hall of Fame
