Rugby: Kiwi aims to be great Aussie hooker

As a teenager, Jeremy Paul spent the school holidays working alongside his slaughterman father in freezing works.

"He didn't want me to follow him into that sort of work. He wanted to put me off and encourage me to study hard at school," Paul said from Brisbane, where he is preparing for the rugby test between Australia and South Africa on Saturday.

"It certainly put me off, although I never studied hard. When I got back to school, all I wanted to do was play football."

And David Paul's plan for the youngest of his three sons may have seemed completely derailed when the youngster left school in Brisbane and joined his dad for a few months in the freezing works.

But a few years on, it is football which is providing a more-than-decent livelihood for a player who looks well on the way to establishing himself as the next great Australian rugby hooker.

The rise up the rugby ladder has happened quickly for the 22-year-old Paul, who was 13 when his family left small-town life in the Waikato to try their luck in Brisbane.

The Pauls had moved around the Waikato - from Hamilton, where Jeremy was born, to Ngaruawahia and Paeroa, before joining the family migration to Australia.

One of Jeremy Paul's brothers had already moved to the mining town of Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia, where he would have had an enthusiastic greeting.

Nine of David Paul's 13 brothers and sisters had already moved from New Zealand to the tiny town.

"I'd always played rugby league and soccer as a little kid, but when we moved to Paeroa I had to play rugby. It was like a lot of smaller places in New Zealand - they didn't even know what rugby league was there," Paul said.

It was a similar story during his one year at St Stephen's College, but in Brisbane he rejoined the rugby league ranks until he was 16, when a friend invited him to a club rugby training session.

He was quickly slotted into the Queensland junior representative system and won selection in the national under-21s. But at the point when he figured he was rated the sixth-best hooker in the state, Canberra came a-calling and offered him a place on a development tour.

So Paul packed his bags and headed to live in the capital last year. And what a year it turned out to be, although it was bizarre, to say the least. Paul might have set a new record for making the greatest strides with the least amount of sweat, not that he actually wanted it that way.

Out of the pack who included the ageing Phil Kearns, who was fighting his way back from injury, and battlers like Michael Foley and Marco Caputo, Paul emerged as the Wallaby hooker of the future.

And all that in a year in which he has calculated he played a total of five games of football.

He played in seven Super 12 games, but all as a late substitute for Caputo. And four of his five test appearances were also brief efforts off the bench as Kearns clung to his position, with Paul getting his one start against Tonga at his home ground in Canberra.

By the end of the year, he had hardly raised a sweat, let alone got his jersey dirty. He was dropped for the end-of-year tour to England and France,with Foley getting the nod.

"When you're not playing you lose your fitness and your skills," Paul said.

"It is like a player coming back from injury. It takes two or three games to get really going again and I never even had the opportunity of that many games.

"I just wasn't up to it last year. The greatest thing for me was missing that end-of-year tour. It didn't give me a kick in the pants so to speak.

"It was just a good opportunity to rest properly then get into eight to 12 weeks of hard training and working on my skills like lineout throwing. I was only 21 and I've also developed a bit more."

Paul hit the ground running this season. He began on the bench in the Brumbies' first trial game, but started in the rest and produced a brilliant Super 12 season, which has seen him take over Kearns' cherished Wallaby No 2 jersey.

And he is part of an international Wallaby front-row club, who include the New Zealand-born Glenn Panoho and former Puma prop Patricio Noriega.

So is Paul, who has spent more of his life in New Zealand than Australia, a true Ocker? And oh, that other question: is he related to the Kiwi rugby league brothers, Henry and Robbie Paul?

"They might be distant cousins. I'm always asked that and I'd love to be able to say we're related but I'm really not sure," he said.

"And I'm definitely an Australian. You never forget where you come from but my heart is with Australia and I back them in everything."