Greg Ryan

Few and Far Between: Māori and Pacific Contributions to New Zealand Cricket

This contribution represents the first sustained discussion of factors determining the relative lack of participation by Māori and Pacific Island players within New Zealand cricket. It begins with a consideration of the factors that shaped a degree of Māori involvement in rugby and that should have been preconditions for the embrace of cricket during the nineteenth century. It then examines a range of demographic, geographic and socio-economic elements that precluded such involvement other than among an atypical Māori and Pacific elite. With the sharp increase in Māori urbanization and in Pacific migration to New Zealand after the Second World War, various explanations for the apparent ‘Polynesianization’ of a number of sports are then set against the continued failure of cricket to appeal. Again, cultural and socio-economic explanations are preferred to those of a more physiological or psychological nature offered by the New Zealand media and some former players. Finally, the development and cultural significance of kilikiti is considered as an alternative to traditional cricket.

The Turning Point: The 1950 British Empire Games as an Imperial Spectacle

This article examines the origins, staging and reaction to the 1950 British Empire Games held in Auckland, New Zealand, in the context of broader attitudes to the British Empire and Commonwealth in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It argues that New Zealand, as perhaps the most loyal and Empire-focused of the former white dominions, viewed the Games far less as a sporting event than a spectacle through which the country could display its continued devotion to Britain. In this context considerable effort was made to present the best possible image of New Zealand for domestic and overseas audiences. The ‘family’ atmosphere and amateur spirit of the Games was also presented as a conscious counterpoint to the intensity and internationalism of the Olympic movement. However, contradictory attitudes to race, and especially to the performances of non-white athletes in Auckland, also reveal the conservative limits of New Zealands conception of the imperial family.

Amateurs in a Professional Game: Player Payments in New Zealand Cricket, c.1977–2002

This article examines the genesis of and reactions to the six week strike by members of the New Zealand Cricket Players Association in late 2002 in which the primary focus was a claim for a 60 percent increase in pay. It argues that contrasting reactions to the strike among current and former players, cricket administrators, cricket fans and the media, must be understood in terms of a longer history of difficulty and dispute over players payment and representation in New Zealand cricket – a history that embodies a fundamental tension between the demands of professional cricket and the amateur ethos that characterised the New Zealand game from the late nineteenth century to the late 1970s.

‘They Came to Sneer, and Remained to Cheer’: Interpreting the 1934–35 England Women’s Cricket Tour to Australia and New Zealand

Abstract This paper focuses generally on the history of women’s cricket during the earlier twentieth century, primarily on the 1934–35 England women’s cricket tour of Australia and New Zealand, and more so on the New Zealand dimension. The tour occurred at a critical time for women’s team sport in both countries in that from the 1920s consistent local and then national competitions brought continuity to previously fragmented activities. Hence the tour provides a useful barometer for a wide range of attitudes to sporting participation by women and reveals contrasts between Britain and Australasia. At the same time, there are specific attitudes to the playing of cricket by women that need to be explored. Here there are some obvious differences between accounts in dedicated women’s cricket sources and the specialist women’s press, both of which sought to encourage the game on its own terms, and those in sources with a broader scope and male-dominated editorship which were more inclined to trivialize and disparage women’s cricket and to judge it against the men’s game.

The Tornado that circles round the liquor question: New Zealand anti-prohibition arguments and strategies c1890–c1930

Abstract This article briefly examines a range of economic, moral, political, theological and other arguments against the introduction of prohibition in New Zealand c1890–c1930 and the individuals, organisations and strategies used in this campaign. As with other countries that witnessed a sustained campaign for prohibition, existing historiography has focused very largely on the anti-alcohol lobby and has tended to convey an impression that theirs was a necessary and justified response to contemporary circumstances. Yet as well as predictable opposition from the licensed trade, in New Zealand, there were also articulate critiques of prohibition from abstainers, academics, theologians and the business community. Perhaps, most prominent was William Salmond, ordained Presbyterian minister and Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the University of Otago, who published Prohibition a Blunder a trenchant, multi-dimensional critique of the “vicious moral coddling” of the New Zealand Alliance and its allies. If we are to accept the conventional wisdom that voluminous prohibitionist oratory and tracts influenced many to join the prohibitionist cause and help it achieve over 55% support against a 60% threshold at the 1911 general election, then it is only logical to conclude that the arguments and methods of anti-prohibitionists dissuaded many others. Moreover, as the vote for prohibition retreated after 1911, it is evident that many voters changed allegiance.

Sport and the British World, 1900–1930: amateurism and national identity in Australasia and beyond, by Erik Nielsen

War Museum. She warns us that each of these is mediated by different factors, such as the sensitivity of recipients of the letters, the conscious shaping of particular images of the Aussie soldier and the censorship of profanity. Slang, Laugesen explains, was important as a coping mechanism for soldiers dealing every day with the unknown and the shocking, from death, to boredom, to homesickness. New vocabularies were also needed to describe the new technologies of war—grenade, Howitzer, trench, to name just a few—and soldiers made them a little less fearsome by their own naming, as in ‘toothpick’ for bayonet. The heart of Furphies and Whizz-Bangs is divided into ten chapters, arranged around themes such as ‘Life in the army’, ‘Place names’, and ‘Home and home front’. Each chapter, after an insightful overview, provides an alphabetical list of well-annotated slang terms. In chapter one (‘Australian Soldiers’), for instance, we learn that that essential designation ‘Aussie’ was first used during the Great War; that it was used to refer to Australia the country by a nurse writing home in 1915; and that it was used to refer to an Australian person in a troopship periodical in 1918. The book ends with a bibliography and an index to all terms mentioned earlier. Australians’ wry sense of humour is displayed in many of the soldiers’ inventions. A good example is ‘deep thinker’, which referred to a soldier who enlisted late in the war (having, it seems, thought long and hard before acting). A soldier away without leave was ‘adrift’; and we are probably all aware that a venereal disease inspection was a ‘short arm parade’. More distressing are their imaginative words for death: to ‘chuck a seven’ (as in the game of hazard); ‘gone west’; to ‘take the count’—and, more gruesome, ‘hanging on the barbed-wire’. Along the same lines, the weapons of mass destruction, Great War style, were Annies, Big Berthas, Black Marias, flying pigs, grannys, Jack Johnsons (as in the African-American prize fighter), and minnies. As can be expected, the world revealed by the slang featured in this book is a verymasculine one. Itwould be interesting to know if the nurses and other women who served in this war developed their own vernacular. In the book’s final chapter, Laugesen gives a history of dictionaries of Great War slang that is particularly interesting for its tracing of the waxing and waning of interest in the war and in the Anzac ideal. The first, published in 1919 by W. H. Downing, and the second, by A. G. Pretty during the 1920s, were, as mentioned above, important sources for all later dictionaries, including the one under review. (A version of Pretty’s volume edited and annotated by Laugesen is available on the National Dictionary Centre’s website.) During the war books boom of the late 1920s and early 1930s the three editions of Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, 1914–1918 by John Brophy and Eric Partridge (Scholartis Press, 1930, 1930 and 1931) appeared. In a resurgence of interest in the Great War in the 1990s, a new edition of Downing was edited and annotated by one of Laugesen’s predecessors, W. S. Samson, and his colleague, J. M. Arthur (OUP, 1990). Oxford University Press has not served this excellent book well. The cover is drab and the quality of paper and print poor. This is an academic book that has plenty of crossover appeal, but it is unlikely to be noticed on the booksellers’ shelves, especially if it is stocked with the dictionaries to which category the publisher consigns it.

Men Who Defaulted in the Greatest Game of All: Sport, Conscientious Objectors and Military Defaulters in New Zealand 1916–1923

During the Great War most New Zealand sports bodies restricted their competitions in some way. A rhetoric against ‘sporting shirkers’ proliferated and was reinforced when the New Zealand government introduced military conscription in 1916 and adopted a trenchant attitude against any who were unwilling to serve. After the Great War the New Zealand Returned Soldiers Association (RSA) requested that regional and national sports bodies ban known conscientious objectors and military defaulters from all sporting competitions. Subsequent actions by sports bodies were largely if not wholly symbolic in that the number of conscientious objectors was small and there is scant evidence of any individual actually being removed from sporting competition. But they are nevertheless a potent expression of the nexus between sporting prowess and blood sacrifice that developed throughout the British Empire during and after the Great War. But not all followed the wishes of the RSA. Some were concerned that an onus was being put on sporting administrators to fulfil a role that was the responsibility of the government, while militant trade unionists took exception to such punitive treatment of those who had had the courage to stand by their convictions.

The Scottish Contribution to New Zealand Beer: Exporters, Brewers and Anti-Prohibitionists

As counter to the narrow focus of a number of New Zealand historians on the prohibitionist activities of the Presbyterian Church, this article examines three significant Scottish contributions to the history of beer and brewing in New Zealand prior to 1940. These are: the reasons for and the nature of the disproportionate Scottish contribution to the export of British beer to New Zealand from the 1860s; the influence of leading Scottish-trained brewers such as Robert Whitson of Auckland and William Dawson of Dunedin; and links in the cause of anti-prohibition between the National Council of the Licensed Trade of New Zealand and the Edinburgh-based Anti-Prohibition Campaign Council.