The Australian rugby league premiers are the winners of the top grade competition in Australian rugby league, which is currently the National Rugby League. History From 1905 the states of Queensland and New South Wales were beginning to create Rugby League competitions, using the rules created in Northern England as a break-away game from Rugby Union. The first season of rugby league in Australia commenced in New South Wales and was held in 1908 and was run by the New South Wales Rugby Football League. Queensland Rugby League was established in 1908 also; they ran their inaugural senior season in 1909. Both states ran parallel state competitions from that time. The game was adopted in both states in order to break away from the amateur rugby union competitions that existed at the time. The players had fallen out of heart with the administration of that game due to increased revenue from the game not being reflected in player allotments. At the end of the 1908 NSW season, South Sydney became the first team to win the New South Wales premiership. The Fortitude Valley Diehards, then known as Valleys, won the inaugural senior Queensland Rugby league season in 1909. The New South Wales Rugby League and Brisbane Rugby League competitions ran parallel to each other for nearly the entire 20th century, with interstate competitions held annually. However, due to these competitions being mainly between state representative sides, apart from a few NSWRL premier v BRL premier competitions held in the 1920s, there was often no way to determine a national premier. After 19 years of interstate-era dominance by New South Wales, the advent of State of Origin football in 1980 led to increased nationalisation of rugby league in Australia. After a failed proposal to play the first ever "National Championship" game in 1984 between the highly fancied BRL premier Wynnum-Manly Seagulls and the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs of the NSWRL, it was decided that the Queensland Rugby League should form a team in 1986 to enter the NSWRL premiership. While the QRL slowly looked to create their own team, a private bid from the Brisbane Broncos consortium won the licence and the team entered the NSWRL in 1988. As a result, the standard of the Brisbane Rugby League decreased, and no BRL player was picked to represent Queensland or Australia afterwards; at this point most historians agree that the NSWRL became the premier