It’s thanks to this weekend’s Multicultural Round that we learn how an NRL player’s great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather has been played on screen by Mel Gibson, Marlon Brando and Clark Gable.

One of the 60 per cent of current league players with a parent born overseas, Dylan Walker is a descendant, through his mother, of Fletcher Christian, the leader of the Bounty mutineers who ended up on Pitcairn Island. It’s pretty exotic for someone who is, on his father’s side, as rugby league as it gets: Maori, Souths Junior, born and raised in Matraville.

“I don’t really get to talk about [the Pitcairn Islands] too much,” Walker told nrl.com during the week. “People ask about it and I tell them what it is and they don’t understand.” Travelling to Pitcairn to reunite with his 47 distant relatives, he said, “is on my bucket list”. Having played 212 games for Souths, Manly and now the Warriors, Walker is edging geographically closer.

Who’d have thought rugby league was merely a local phenomenon, the obsession of eastern Australia and Lancashire? Cowboy Marly Bitungane was born in Tanzania with four grandparents from Burundi. Tiger Alex Seyfarth has family born in Slovenia, Spain, England and Sri Lanka. Of Payne Haas’s four grandparents, three were born in Switzerland, Samoa and the Philippines. The Raiders’ Emre Guler, a Muslim whose family come from Turkey, played the Warriors on Friday while observing Ramadan. (Commentators stopped short of observing how hungry he looked.)

Multicultural Round is one of the NRL’s six themed rounds in 2024. With one-third of current players born outside Australia, two-thirds with an overseas-born parent and 63 nations represented in their heritage, they are participating in arguably the most democratic and hard-earned of the themed rounds. The others are either gimmicks (Magic Round, Anzac Round), aspirations (Indigenous Round, Women in League Round) or a health fundraiser (Beanie for Brain Cancer Round). Only Multicultural Round involves so many, on and off the field.

The themed rounds are regular enough to send a signal of good intentions but not overdone. NRL players do good in other ways, contributing behind the scenes to countless causes, without getting a whole weekend dedicated to them. (They need to travel to Brisbane in Round 11 to do that.)

Multicultural Round is the one where the horse is well and truly ahead of the cart. From its white beginnings, league has progressed with Australia. “Multicultural” might be a dated term, emanating from the Whitlam era when Al Grassby was minister for multiculturalism and we shrugged off the usage of “New Australians”, but that tells a story in itself. “Multicultural” has, in some of Australia, been superseded by words alluding to people’s more variegated diversity – more than just nationality. But the minute rugby league strayed into that territory, it found both of its feet in buckets of manure.

Pride Round never got beyond a twinkle in Peter V’landys’ eye. Near the end of 2022, Manly dipped their toe into Pride with well-documented effect. At the end of their rainbow, Manly lost half their team and all their matches. Subsequently, coaches, clubs and eventually the league dropped the idea of a Pride Round the next year and forever after, or until the game has its next Ian Roberts. Multiculturalism, having become uncontroversial, soon took over Pride’s togetherness-and-harmony-and-everyone-in-league vibe.