On the back row of an old team photo, chest puffed out with pride, stands Sione Tuipulotu.

Now a Lion, back then Tuipulotu, born and brought up in Melbourne, was representing Victoria’s Under-12 state team.

The ready smile and hefty build make him easy to pick out more than 15 years on.

The boy standing in front of him is less readily recognisable though.

The hair is shorter, the frame is slimmer, but Rob Valetini, the Wallabies’ great second-Test hope, stares out of the same frame.

Had a few sliding doors lined up, Valetini and Tuipulotu could have been on the same side this weekend.

One side of Valetini’s family, like Tuipulotu’s, has Scottish ancestry. Captain William Sinclair, a diplomat, was dispatched to Fiji in the 19th century and is his great-grandfather.

On his father’s side, a route to Britain and Ireland opened up more recently though.

“I was supposed to come to England to play for Bath,” Valetini’s father Manueli tells BBC Sport.

Manueli was a fast, strong runner, capable of playing in both the back row and centres, long before Levani Botia pulled the same trick.

He had played against the Wallabies for one of Fiji’s regional teams and was on the fringes of the national team when, in 1985, Bath offered to sponsor a move to the other side of the world.

“It was very close to happening, but my dad told me ‘no, England is too far, you had better go to Australia or New Zealand’.

“I think I made the right choice to come to Melbourne.”