searching for the past: sport historiography in new...

Searching for the Past:SPORT HISTORIOGRAPHY IN NEW ZEALAND

Douglas Booth is Professor of Sport and Leisure Studies at the University ofWaikato. He is the author of The Race Game (1998) and Australian Beach Cultures(2001) and, with Colin Tatz, One-Eyed: A View of Australian Sport (2000). He serveson the editorial boards of the Journal of Sport History, Sport History Review and theInternational Journal of the History of Sport.

This article provides an overview of academic sport historiography in NewZealand. Two conditions make such an overview pertinent. First, thejuxtaposition of radically different histories of sport in New Zealand raisesquestions about the interpretation of the past. Why do historians of sport inNew Zealand, for example Clare Simpson, Shona Thompson, Greg Ryan andMalcolm MacLean, produce such structurally diverse histories?1 Second,interrogating sport historiography in New Zealand seems relevant in thecontext of new questions, new methods, and new theories associated with thecultural turn in social history.2

In the first part of this article I investigate the general nature of historicalknowledge in New Zealand sport history using a simple, but highly effective,framework developed by Alun Munslow. In the words of Munslow and hiscollaborator Keith Jenkins:

it is possible to characterise all historical writings as one of three basictypes, basic genres. For us, no matter if history texts are written byeconomic or social or cultural historians; no matter what the periodor specialisation; no matter if the writers are Marxist or liberals,feminists or reactionaries; no matter if they are overtly positioned ornot, the most insightful and productive way of organising them all isto locate them as belonging to — having an orientation to — one ofthe following three genres: reconstructionist, constructionist ordeconstructionist. 3

Reconstructionism, and to a lesser degree constructionism, dominate sporthistory. Reconstructionists and constructionists privilege empirical methods,accept historical evidence as proof that they can recover the past, and insistthat their forms of representation are transparent enough to ensure theobjectivity of their observations. The key difference between reconstruction-ists and constructionists is the extent to which they engage a priori knowledge.The latter willingly embrace concepts and theories as tools to propose and

Sporting Traditions, vol. 21, no. 2 (May 2005), pp. 1-28.Published by the Australian Society for Sports History.

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explain relationships between events; reconstructionists oppose theory on thegrounds that it subjects historians to 'predetermined explanatory schemes'and reduces them to 'tailoring evidence'.4 Sceptical of objective empiricalhistory, deconstructionists view history 'as a constituted narrative' devoid of'moral or intellectual certainty',5 Deconstructionism challenges reconstruc-tionism's confidence in the cognitive power of narratives to flow naturallyfrom historical facts. Deconstructionists want historians to be more reflexive,an approach that they believe is more honest with respect to how historianspresent the past and one that will ultimately enhance and enrich history.6

Deconstructionist reflexivity is beginning to appear in sport historyelsewhere,7 but more practitioners, including New Zealanders, will have tofollow suit if the field as a whole is to avoid intellectual stagnation.

Munslow's models are ideal types and in practice the boundaries are oftenblurred, especially between reconstructionism and constructionism. Indeed,the majority of sport historians work at the intersection of reconstructionismand constructionism, what Munslow calls the reconstructionist-construction-ist alliance. I use the term conservative reconstructionist to identify thosereconstructionists who shy or retreat from theory Admittedly the term theoryalso carries its own set of problems with few historians offering definitionalclarity. Rather than using history to build theoretical explanations, mostconstructionist sport historians appropriate theoretical concepts from otherdisciplines — sociology, anthropology, psychology — and use them in a non-critical manner to aid their analyses of the historical record.

Part two of this article examines more explicit applications of historicalknowledge in sport history under the heading of what David Hackett Fischercalls 'explanatory paradigms'. An 'interactive structure of workable questionsand the factual statements which are adduced to answer them', anexplanatory paradigm carries quite specific epistemological assumptions andconstitutes the framework used by historians to orientate their arguments.8

Seven explanatory paradigms are readily identifiable in New Zealand sporthistoriography: traditional narrative, advocacy, contextual, comparative,causal social change, and new culture. While these are not the onlyparadigms in sport history — one could also make the case for a quantitativeor statistical paradigm or a feminist paradigm — these seven are, I believe, themost prominent.

Lastly it bears repeating that this article sets out only to offer an overviewof different approaches to sport history in New Zealand. I do not advocateone model or one explanatory paradigm as superior to all others in allconditions. On the contrary the relevance of a model or a paradigm dependsentirely on the question the historian asks, and what answer she or he seeks.Some questions necessitate a careful gathering and interrogation of theremnants of the past, others demand the incorporation of abstract concepts

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Douglas Booth Searching for the Past

such as structure, while others require close attention be given to thelanguage in the sources or in colleagues' texts. It also needs to be pointed outthat my approach is a critical one in the sense the examples and case studiesare opened to the scrutiny of contending models. My objective in thisapproach is to simply make historians of sport in New Zealand — andelsewhere — aware that even the most tacit assumptions about history arevisible in representations of the sporting past.

Models of New Zealand Sport HistoryHistorians disagree about much: the objectives of history the meaning offacts, the construction of facts, methods of procedure, the role of theory, thebasis of theory, the form of presentation. But they agree that history is anevidence-based discipline, and that evidence imposes limits on interpretation.The epistemological agreements and disagreements within New Zealandsport history are examined below using Munslow's three models of historicalinquiry. Academic sport history in New Zealand supports mainly reconstruc-tionists and a handful of constructionists; deconstructionists are largelyabsent. Each group conceptualises history around a different set of objectives,epistemology, and mode of presentation.

ReconstructionismOperating under the assumption that they can discover the past as it actuallyhappened, reconstructionists promote history as a realist epistemology inwhich knowledge derives from empirical evidence and forensic research intoprimary sources. Forensic research means interrogating, corroborating andcontextualising sources to verify them as real and true, Reconstructionistsmaintain that history exists independently of the historian and that the pastcan be approached objectively without ideological contamination. 'Thehistorian is permitted only one attitude, that of impartial observer, unmovedequally by admiration or repugnance', say reconstructionists who insist thatreal historians 'simply relate the facts' and should avoid dictating readers'responses.9 Reconstructionists are particularly vigilant of colleagues who donot gather all the facts and who distort history Greg Ryan criticises NewZealand historians who characterise early 'rugby as the epitome of rural,colonial masculinity' and 'a counterpoint to sedentary urbanity, femininityand domesticity'. He accuses them of failing to 'systematically analyse thesocial and geographical origins of New Zealand rugby players' and of 'leavinga deceptive impression' about the 'rural dimension' of rugby's developmentand success in the colony.10

Narrative is the medium of presentation in reconstructionism.Reconstructonists assume a close correspondence between the language intheir sources and the past and maintain that narratives are essentiallytransparent. In evaluating good representations of history, reconstructionists

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gauge the structure, unity and coherence of the narrative. They placemaximum emphasis on the narrative as a whole process and the way itinforms the structure of the argument, although re constructionists also assessrelationships between individual statements and sources. Cross-examinationof evidence involves interrogation of language to ascertain the tone andaccuracy of sources, and to clarify what particular sources say and what theyleave out. More specifically, interrogation entails questions about word usage,figures of speech and stylistic cadence and the way that these articulate ideasand sympathies.11 Reconstructionists maintain a strong vigilance over styleand rhetoric in their sources and especially in colleagues' texts. Style has'enormous evidential value, both in getting and in giving evidence'; rhetoricis a 'mechanical trick' associated with propaganda, poetics and oratory.12 Yet,for all their talk about careful scrutiny of colleagues' language,reconstructionists rarely take their evaluations beyond banal commentswhether they be praise for 'delightful' sentences, remarks about 'clear, carefuland cautious writing', or criticisms of 'glaring' grammatical errors.13

ConstructionismConstructionists, like reconstructionists, believe that empirical evidenceprovides the ultimate source of knowledge about the past. In this sensereconstructionism and constructionism are evidence-based, objectivist-inspired models in which historians aspire to build accurate, independentand truthful reconstructions of the past. Both distinguish history from fictionand value judgements: history means discovering and recording what actuallyhappened in the past. Where these models diverge is with respect toacceptance of a priori knowledge, particularly theory and theoreticalconcepts.14 Real historical phenomena, according to conservativereconstructionists, are unique configurations and one-off occurrences:history consists of the 'stories of ... individual lives or happenings, allseemingly individual and unrepeatable'.15 A form of methodologicalindividualism emphasising human actions and intentions, or what sociologistscall agency,16 conservative reconstructionism casts theory into the realm ofspeculation. Theory, argues Geoffrey Elton, 'infuses predestined meaning'into history. In short, theory is antithetical to the objectives and practices ofconservative reconstructionism. Not all reconstructionists are so averse totheory; not all reconstructionists consider the investigation of unique eventsas the 'litmus test' of historical knowledge. They acknowledge that historiansalso discern patterns of behaviour across time, societies and social groups, andthat they categorise different forms of human action and place them intogeneral moulds. Such approaches compel historians to think 'in terms ofabstraction' and theory.18 I am not aware of any New Zealand historians ofsport who shy from collective identities such as nationalities, social classes,

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amateurs, and volunteers that have proved invaluable and indispensablehistorical abstractions.

Constructionists deem theory integral to historical research. Summing upconstructionism, the German economic historian Werner Sombart arguedthat 'the writer of history who desires to be more than a mere antiquarianmust have a thorough theoretical training in those fields of inquiry with whichhis work is concerned'.19 While not denying that historians require anintimate and technical knowledge of their sources, Sombart deemed theseskills elementary. Constructionists consider theory fundamental to history forthree reasons. First, the range and volume of evidence bearing on manyhistorical problems is so large that historians cannot avoid selection, andtheory is a critical tool. It provides frameworks and principles for selectingevidence and thus steers practitioners away from contradictions in theirexplanations. Second, theory brings to the fore interrelations between thecomponents of human experiences at given times thus enriching historicalaccounts. Third, as already mentioned, identifying historical patternsinvariably involves some form of abstract thinking and connections totheoretical explanations and interpretations. Responding to the commoncharge levelled by conservative reconstructionists that theory predetermineshistory, constructionists counter that theories enhance understanding andthat no one can 'approach their evidence innocent of presupposition'.20

The enduring influence of reconstructionism cannot be ignored as adebate between Gordon Stewart and Peter Hansen illustrates. (Althoughneither scholar hails from New Zealand, one of the antipodean nation'sfavourite sons — Edmund Hillary — figures in their respective deliberationsof British Mount Everest expeditions). Hansen and Stewart both emphasisetheir own atheoretical positions and accuse the other of falling prey to theory.According to Hansen, Stewart's 'neo-Orientalist interpretation' of the BritishEverest expeditions between 1921 and 1953 is too selective and suppressescompeting evidence especially that pertaining to the narratives and voices of'others'. According to Stewart, Hansen's postmodern relativism fuelsexcessive 'fluidity and hybridity' that effectively 'flatten [s] the imperial world','almost completely remove[s] ... power and hierarchy ... from the picture',and 'dissolves' truckloads of archival evidence into 'nothingness'.21 (If oneaccepts, as I do, that theory does actually underpin the works of both Hansenand Stewart, then their debate also draws attention to the tendency amongconstructionists to accuse colleagues of applying the wrong theory. Suchaccusations, however, are rare among New Zealand sport historians.22)

While conservative reconstructionism finds expression in New Zealandsport history via texts like Arthur Swan's History of New Zealand Rugby Football,23

as an approach it holds minimal sway. However, this does not mean that sporthistorians in New Zealand have embraced 'complex social science

5Douglas Booth Searching for the Past

constructionism'; they neither employ the historical record to constructformal theories nor use it to apply, test or confirm theories. Nonetheless,many practitioners in New Zealand utilise 'organising concepts', as distinctfrom full-fledged theories, to 'fine focus' their interpretations of the evidence.Perhaps better recognised as classes of objects (e.g., amateur sports), generalnotions (e.g., amateurism, professionalisation, commercialisation), themes(eg., sporting ideologies, nationalism, international relations), periods (e.g.,colonialism, postcolonialism) and constellations of interrelated traits (e.g.,modernity, tradition, globalisation), concepts abound in New Zealand sporthistory. John Nauright and Shona Thompson, for example, both utilisehegemony in their respective accounts of media representations of netballersand women's opposition to rugby.24 The importance of concepts is that theyhelp identify recurrent features and patterns and expose new realms ofobservation that encourage historians to move past the 'single instance' andto 'transcend immediate perceptions'.25

DeconstructionismDeconstructionist historians are highly sceptical of the claims to truth madeby objective empirical history and they view history as a constituted narrativedevoid of moral or intellectual certainty. Deconstructionists argue thathistorical understanding involves unavoidable relativism (the belief that thereare no overarching rules or procedures for precisely measuring bodies ofknowledge, conceptual schemes or theories, and that without fixedbenchmarks the only outcome can be difference and uncertainty26). Thus,deconstructionists do not promote the single interpretation associated withthe history, eg., the history of the Springbok tour. Rather, they examinedifferent perspectives within the history, e.g., pro-tour and anti-toursupporters.27 In this sense, deconstructionists acknowledge that each grouphas its own unique perspective and faces its own struggles and, moreover, thatevery group is subjected to internal pressures and tensions. Proceeding fromthe premise that written words do not carry inherent meaning,deconstructionist historians delve into the production of sources and textswith a sharp eye on the intentions of the author. While manyreconstructionists believe that their interrogations of, or conversations with,sources is tantamount to deconstruction, deconstructionists disagree.According to deconstructionists, historians necessarily impose themselves onthe reconstruction process and any notion that they can objectively removethemselves is erroneous.28 In this sense, deconstructionism poses majorchallenges for reconstructionism which places inordinate confidence in thecognitive power of narratives.

As we shall see, deconstructionism promotes ideas about criticalreflection. But deconstructionism has yet to colonise New Zealand sport


history in any substantial manner. I am not aware of any historian of NewZealand sport who has embraced the primary assumptions ofdeconstructionist history, that language 'constitutes the content of history'and that language provides the 'concepts and categories deployed to orderand explain historical evidence'.29

Explanatory ParadigmsMore specific than a model, yet less prescriptive than a method, anexplanatory paradigm is an 'interactive structure of workable questions andthe factual statements which are adduced to answer them'.30 Sport historiansin New Zealand structure their arguments, or frame their questions andanswers, within seven distinct explanatory paradigms: traditional narrative,advocacy, contextual, comparative, causal, social change, and new culture.Most historians embrace two or three paradigms, although the epistemo-logical assumptions in any one piece of work will determine the combinationand range of paradigms. Generally speaking, the traditional narrative,advocacy, and contextual explanatory paradigms fall within the ambit ofreconstructionism, the comparative, causal and social change paradigmsalign with constructionism, and the new culture paradigm sides withdeconstructionism. The contextual, comparative and causal paradigms cansupport the epistemologies of both reconstructionism and constructionism.

Traditional Narrative ParadigmAlthough narrative is the subject of vigorous debate,31 historians nonethelessagree that at its heart lies 'some sense of story' and that it is theoverwhelmingly dominant form of representing the past.32 Conservativereconstructionists assume a high degree of correspondence betweennarrative and the past, and promote the view that a narrative is simply themedium of their histories, the shape and structure of which closely resembleactual events in the past. In other words, reconstructionists hold that narrativelanguage is mimetic or referential, that is, unproblematic or, at the very least,adequate to the job of describing the past. Reconstructionists believe that anhistorical explanation materialises 'naturally from the archival raw data, itsmeaning offered as interpretation in the form of a story related explicitly,impersonally, transparently, and without resort to any of the devices used bywriters of literary narratives, viz., imagery or figurative language'.33

The reconstructionist assumption that a narrative is merely the form bywhich historians present the past as a collation of discovered facts is apparentin numerous New Zealand histories of sport.34 Rex Thomson, for example,buttresses his history of rugby in Otago with catalogues of facts; dates, timesand places, and the names of officials, administrators, coaches and playersflood the pages. Thomson's narrative may convey the impression of atechnical, pristine recovery of the past but to accept such a relationship is to


ignore the nature of the sources, and the different ways that the authorintrudes into the history. Thomson's sole primary sources are newspapersthat comprise 48 of the 86 references; there is no other corroboration and,more importantly, no evidence of him having interrogated the preferences,biases, knowledge and experiences of those who composed the reports andaccounts upon which he relies. On the contrary, Thomson appears touncritically accept newspaper sources as credible evidence. Of course, in thisrespect he is no different to so many other historians of sport. Deconstructingthe literary dimension of Thomson's narrative by analysing the poetics oftroping, emplotment, argument and ideology,35 reveals the extent to whichhe imposes himself on his history.

Thomson employs a metonymic trope. Metonymy reduces wholes, inThomson's case the development of rugby in New Zealand, to componentparts. Thomson's components are devotees of manly sports, such as GeorgeSale and George Thomson, and early clubs such as the Dunedin FootballClub, the Union Football Club, the Auckland Football Club, and the OtagoUniversity Football Club. Thomson's plot is romantic. His narrative refers tobroken limbs, bloodshed, unsporting behaviour, and controversial decisionsby referees but these are merely stages in rugby's development as the nationalgame. Guided by men of learning and the cloth, judges and members ofparliament, it is hardly surprising that New Zealanders quickly embracedrugby as '"a perfect analogue for a harmonious society'". Thomson presentsa formist argument that stresses the unique, atomistic and dispersive charac-ter of events and people. This enables him to discuss individual events anddraw significant generalisations from them. Thus a challenge issued by theAuckland Football Club, which toured New Zealand in 1875, saved rugby inDunedin. At the time the game in the southern city 'lacked impetus and firmdirection', and debates over rules and friction over the use of groundsthreatened its 'continued existence'. But negotiations to choose a team anda venue, and public support for the match, won by Dunedin, undoubtedlyhelped 'establish rugby football as the dominant code' in the city. Similarly,the appointment of George Sale to the chair of Classics at the University ofOtago precipitated the development of rugby in the region: the learnedprofessor was 'the moving force behind the establishment of rugby football'in Otago, being closely involved in the organisation of the first recorded gameof rugby in Dunedin and serving as president of the first club.36

Thomson constructs his narrative in such a way that implies truthfulnessand objectivity but this construction does not remove the ideologicalcomponent. On the contrary, he presents a liberal moral ideology. Liberalismis typically optimistic about change, does not consider structural changenecessary, and views change through the analogy of adjustments or finetunings of a mechanism. The latter is evident in the discussion of the


codification of football rules which, notwithstanding the tensions notedearlier, Thomson describes as an essentially amicably negotiated processuntainted by the protracted bitter political controversies, fractures and splitsthat characterised other codes37 and in fact most sports.38

From a deconstructionist perspective it is not the facts of rugby'sdevelopment that determine how Thomson constructs his narrative. Instead,he brings a set of ontological and epistemological beliefs to the facts and usesthese to construct a specific narrative form that reflects his own beliefs as anhistorian rather than an objective discovery of the past as it actually was.39

Thomson is not unique in this respect: according to White all historianscreate history.40

As well as traditional narratives, sport history in New Zealand supportsadvocacy as a paradigmatic form of reconstructionism. Advocates make avirtue of their forensic interrogation of sources.

Advocacy ParadigmReconstructionists charge advocates with undermining the objectivity ofhistory and destroying the credibility of the historian as a 'neutral, ordisinterested, judge' whose 'conclusions ... display ... judicial qualities ofbalance and evenhandedness'.41 While Robert Berkhofer distinguishesbetween 'arguing for a point of view' and 'arguing from a point of view'(emphasis added), ultimately all historians advocate particular cases, stances,or interpretations.42 Here, however, I employ the term advocate in referenceto those historians whose basic objective is to debunk myths associated withNew Zealand's sporting past. Advocates in New Zealand sport history includeJock Phillips and Greg Ryan. Both debunk myths concerning the All Blacks,the national rugby team.

Phillips tackles the myths surrounding the celebrated and eulogised 1905All Black team. On a tour of Britain, France and North America, the teamscored 976 points and conceded just 59, and lost only once — in controversialcircumstances — to Wales. Commentators at the time attributed the AllBlacks' successes to a combination of colonial traits (including healthylifestyles, versatility, teamwork, egalitarianism and modesty) and the AllBlacks' scientific approach to the game. Phillips dismisses these explanationsthat he claims contributed to a hyper-masculine caricature of New Zealandmen. He thus sets out to debunk the myths of the 1905 All Blacks'achievements. Interrogating the result sheets, Phillips reminds us that theNew Zealanders arrived early in the English season before the locals werematch fit and that the highest scores (e.g., 63-0 against Hartlepool) were allrecorded before mid-October. Moreover, the opposition comprised clubs orsmall regional teams many of which, especially in the north of the country,had been 'enormously weakened' by the defection of players to professional


rugby league. The results, Phillips observes, were not as spectacular 'when theteam reached Wales in December, where rugby was still a sport of the massesand where teams were match hard'. The All Blacks

lost to Wales, and almost lost to Cardiff and Swansea, in all scoringonly 29 points to 17 (as against 801 to 22 in England). The results inWales were explained away in terms of the team's tiredness at the endof an arduous tour and, inevitably, unfair Welsh refereeing.43

In addition to subjecting the scores to forensic interrogation, Phillips alsoquestions the official view that the 1905 All Black tourists were 'angels ofvirtue' who renounced 'disreputable male behaviour', a theme also exploredby Geoffrey Vincent.44

While Phillips thoroughly debunks one key sporting myth in NewZealand, he also stands charged with propagating another. As noted earlier,Greg Ryan accuses Phillips of sowing erroneous ideas about the 'ruraldimension' of New Zealand rugby. In order to settle this question, Ryanforensically examines the social and geographical origins of All Black players.He concludes that the game in the antipodean nation 'has always beendisproportionately urban and rather more middle-class than egalitarian incharacter. All Black teams ... were dominated by players from the ... fourmain cities who were far more likely than the population as a whole to haveattended elite educational institutions'.45

What criteria should historians use to assess the neutrality or objectivity ofadvocates? Dennis Smith classifies advocates according to how they handlethe relationship between involvement (the capacity to empathise with andevoke the situation of particular participants in specific historical situations)and detachment (the ability to observe processes and relationshipsobjectively, discounting political/moral commitments and emotion-ladenresponses). On this basis Smith distinguishes four categories of advocate:judges, partisan eyewitnesses, expert witnesses, and leading counsels.46

Avoiding theory and trying to 'give coherence to as much empiricalcomplexity as possible', judges 'achieve a creative balance betweeninvolvement and detachment, each complementing the other'. Phillips is ajudge. A self-confessed fan of the athleticism and aesthetic qualities of thegame and a critic of rugby culture that celebrates 'violent insensitivity to painand injury' and tolerates crude language, misogyny and drunken boorishness,Phillips strives to understand the truth of its history.47 Ryan exhibits thedetachment of an expert witness and whatever his level of involvement hethankfully avoids the tones of fandom that bedevil sport history.48

Contextual ParadigmNothing is more fundamental in the lexicon and methodology of history thancontext.49 'Although historians may differ among themselves about what


constitutes a proper context in any given case', observes Robert Berkhofer,'they do not question the basic desirability of finding one as the appropriatebackground for understanding past ideas, behaviors and institutions':

words and sentences must be read in the context of the document,and the document as part of its community of discourse or of theideological and belief system that gave it meaning at the time.Discourses and world views in turn demand the context of theircultures and times. Likewise, human activities and institutions are tobe understood in relation to the larger network of behavior or socialorganization and structure of which they are said to be part. Social,political, religious, economic, family, philanthropic, and otherinstitutional practices make sense only when placed in their propersocial and cultural contexts. Thus eras and nations, wars and socialmovements, individuals and events, and speeches and diaries must allbe situated in their contexts.50

Yet, despite its centrality, 'historians rarely discuss' what contextualisationinvolves or its implications.51 The general consensus is that contextualisationestablishes patterns that share relationships beyond a temporal juxtaposition.Philosopher William Walsh elaborates. Historians

initially confront what looks like a largely unconnected mass ofmaterial, and ... then go on to show that sense can be made of it byrevealing certain pervasive themes or developments. In specifyingwhat was going on at the time, [historians] both sum up individualevents and tell us how to take them. Or ... they pick out what [is]significant in the events they relate, [that is], what points beyond itselfand connects with other happenings as phases in a continuousprocess.52

However, while historians agree that temporal contiguity meets the criteria forcontextualisation, few successfully or even adequately integrate contextualrelationships. Contextualisation does not mean integrating 'all the events andtrends that might be identified in the whole historical field', rather it requireslinking events and trends in 'a chain of provisional and restrictedcharacterizations of finite provinces of manifestly "significant" occurrence'.53

Arthur Marwick delineates contextual relationships using a modelcomprising four principal components:1. Major forces and constraints

• structural (geographical, demographic, economic and technological),• ideological (what is believed and is possible to be believed, existing

political and social philosophies), and• institutional (systems of government, justice, policing and voting,

educational, religious and working-class organisations, and the family).


2. Events (Great Depression, Second World War).3. Human agencies (politicians, presidents, prime ministers, protest

movements).4. Convergences and contingencies (interrelationships between events and

human agencies that generate unforeseen events and circumstances) .54

Marwick's components figure in Greg Ryan's contextualisation of thedevelopment and demise of cricket in New Zealand. Ryan describes theeffects of structural, ideological, and institutional forces and constraints oncricket. Immigration, economic boom and urban growth, associated with thediscovery of gold, facilitated cricket's expansion. Urbanisation congregatedpeople and assisted new sporting competitions among city dwellers whocraved entertainment and sought different ways to demonstrate physicalprowess and status. However, as Ryan notes, there were limits on who playedwith whom, with the working classes significantly underrepresented in cricketas players and officials. Yet, he maintains that the constraints on working-classparticipation stemmed more from restricted opportunities bound up with apaucity of educational opportunities, long working hours and the transientnature of their lives, than from deliberate strategies of exclusion devised bythe middle class. The second major structural constraint on cricket in NewZealand is climate: rain inevitably interrupts play and shortens seasons and,combined with cold temperatures, produces damp and inferior pitches.

Cricket arrived in New Zealand long before the economic boom in thethird quarter of the nineteenth century propelled it into national conscious-ness. Middle-class Victorian colonists conceptualised cricket as a metaphor for'the relationship between physical and mental health, the maintenance ofappropriate standards of morality, [and] the cultivation of "manly" character'.In this sense, cricket constituted a moral ideology that was especially strongin secondary schools. Indeed, so strong was this ideology among cricket'spatrons that they relegated economic costs, notably those associated withorganising international matches against England, to a secondary considera-tion; after all, international cricket relations with England would preserveNew Zealand's 'niche within the Empire'. But ideology also imposed con-straints, most notably in the area of women's participation: the Victoriansbelieved cricket was too vigorous for women and that it posed grave threats totheir reproductive capacities.

Institutional support for cricket came from the military, elite middle-class secondary schools (including girls' schools where the game survived ina cloistered environment), provincial associations, and the New ZealandCricket Council (NZCC). On the other hand, provincial antagonism and self-interest worked against the NZCC that struggled to produce a viable productto sell to the public. Perhaps the greatest institutional constraint on NewZealand cricket was the Public Reserves Acts of 1877 and 1881. These pieces of


legislation prevented cricket authorities from enclosing public grounds andcharging admission. By the time an amendment in 1885 allowed cricketauthorities to establish permanent facilities and generate income,Canterbury, Otago and Wellington had already committed themselves toprivate ventures that remained financial millstones for 20 years.

Events precipitated different trajectories for cricket. James Lillywhite's AllEngland XI tour in February 1877 hastened the formation of the Otago andCanterbury Cricket Associations. By contrast, defeats at the hands ofAustralian and English touring teams in the early-twentieth century dented'public enthusiasm for international cricket'.

Ryan names scores of individuals integral to cricket's development. Theyinclude patrons 'with the right mix of English public school and Oxbridgegrooming, wealth and influential connections', entrepreneurs who broughttouring teams to the country, and secondary school headmasters andteachers. In many instances the latter 'injected athletic life into schoolcricket'. Among their number were Charles Corfe (Christ's College), JosephFirth (Wellington College), Walter Empson (Wanganui), C. F. Bourne(Auckland Grammar School), and William Justice Ford (Nelson College).

Lastly, Ryan examines the impacts of convergences and contingencies. InDunedin two associations competed for political control of cricket. Themiddle-class Otago Cricket Association eventually gained power and theworking-class Dunedin and Suburban Cricket Association disintegrated. Butthe former paid a heavy price for its increasing alienation of the working class:declining bank balances limited its ability to stage interprovincial matches.Similarly, New Zealand's refusal to join the Commonwealth of Australia, andits determination to pursue a more conventional imperial role that prizedcultural and political links with Britain, had detrimental consequences forcricket in this country.55

One issue contextualisation raises in sport history is its tendency to 'losetouch with the dramatological', that is, the various 'ritualistic and theatricalfeatures which contribute to the charisma, aura and popular attraction' ofsport.56 Ryan captures none of the dramatological in cricket. Of course,conversely, where sport historians focus on the dramatological as ClareSimpson does in her analysis of women cyclists, contextualisation typicallydisappears.57

Reconstructionists and constructionists both utilise the contextualparadigm. However, they conceptualise it differently. Reconstructionists stressthe 'nonrepetitive elements' and the 'individuality of the overall network ofrelationships'; constructionists deem contextualisation a matter of theory.The reconstructionist perspective prevails in New Zealand sporthistoriography.


Comparative ParadigmComparisons involving allusions to another case in order to highlight aspectsof a particular case abound in New Zealand sport history. Comparisonsinclude instances of similar or different kinds and they range across space,time, practices, ideologies, institutions, groups and individuals. A comparisonof rugby culture in New Zealand and South Africa provides the foundationsfor John Nauright and David Black's analysis of sports sanctions againstapartheid.58 Comparing the opportunities for sport and recreation amongwomen in colonial New Zealand and England, Scott Crawford argues that'less severe divisions of social class and the relatively spontaneous tenor ofcommunity life' afforded the former a 'degree of emancipation' unknownamong the latter.59 A comparison of institutionalised surf-lifesaving inAustralia and New Zealand reveals considerable differences in theconceptualisations of the activity in the early twentieth century.60 MalcolmMacLean offers an interesting comparison of liberal-left and conservativememories of the 1981 Springbok tour and suggests that their respectivememories facilitate two distinct nostalgias. In their romanticisation of NewZealand pre-1984 (the year marking the emergence of a particularly virulentform of new right ideology in the country), left-leaning liberals see the anti-tour protests as just another political action that challenged state power andaimed to build a more just world. By contrast, conservatives tend to 'deny thepolitical context of the anti-tour campaign' and, indeed, the significance ofthe whole historical frame leading up to 1984 — the year New Zealandsupposedly reached maturity.61

Comparison stands beside contextualisation as the principal paradigms inGreg Ryan's history of New Zealand cricket. He employs comparisons toanswer numerous questions. How did New Zealand provincial cricketassociations survive during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in theface of sustained economic losses? Why did rugby replace cricket as NewZealand's national game? Did the NZCC do enough to develop the sport?Why did New Zealand cricket privilege imperial ties with England overcolonial independence? To answer the first question, Ryan compares thesituation in New Zealand with that in England. Ideologues in both countries,Ryan argues, viewed cricket as an integral component of the social fabric andwillingly subsidised the game.62 While the development of cricket and rugbyboth faced obstacles of geography, demography and a transient labour force,factors concerned with climate, time, and expense ultimately favoured rugbyover cricket.63 A comparison with the administration of Australian cricketreveals that a strong, viable game 'can emerge despite the best efforts ofadministrators'.64 Lastly, in a further comparison with Australia, Ryan showshow New Zealand's cricket patrons preferred to idealise 'all things English'and 'defer to English superiority' rather than follow their trans-Tasman rivals


who preferred to assert colonial and national independence.65

Among a smaller group of historians, notably constructionists who definethemselves as historical sociologists, systematic comparison is the fundamen-tal means by which they build concepts, theorise, and propose the causalexplanations they believe lie at the heart of historical practice.66 Sporthistorians in New Zealand have generally shied from systematic comparison.Following a lead from Andrew Moore in Australia, I recently compared theearly development of rugby league in England, Australia, Wales and NewZealand utilising an approach put forward by New Zealand social historianMiles Fairburn.67 My question was why did professional rugby emerge andprosper in England and Australia around the turn of the twentieth century?While irreconcilable class-based differences over the meaning of rugbyexplain the emergence, further comparisons with New Zealand and Walesexplain why league prospered in some areas and not others. Professionalrugby competitions also existed in Wales and New Zealand but they struggledto win widespread popular support. While these latter cases support thecontention that professional rugby stemmed in the first instance fromirreconcilable class-based differences, they also demonstrate that the vitalityand viability of the professional game depended on a strong working classproviding material as well as emotional support to an alternative concept ofthe game. By appealing to nationalist sporting sentiments, the middle classesin New Zealand and Wales (and South Africa) disrupted the alternativesporting concepts advocated by small and weak working class movements.

Causal ParadigmAs with the contextual and comparative explanatory paradigms, conservativereconstructionists and constructionists conceptualise historical causesdifferently The former tend to assume direct relationships between causesand effects. For example:• if event B (e.g., the popularisation of cycling among New Zealand women)• coincided with event A (eg., the emergence of the women's emancipation

movement)• then B must have happened because of A (i.e., women took to cycling as 'a

statement of female independence and solidarity'68).Here a set of purely fortuitous (and agent driven) factors caused specificaction, that is, women seeking socio-political emancipation adopted thebicycle and radical bifurcated riding garments as the symbols of femaleliberation. But most reconstructionists, and certainly constructionists, regardcontingent factors as superficial and search elsewhere for causal phenomena.Usually they employ some level of contextualisation which removes explicitcausal explanations. Constructionists tend to engage structural explanationsas causes notwithstanding the conceptual difficulties associated with notions


of structure.69 More rare in New Zealand sport history are practitionersincorporating both contingent and structural causal explanations. TaniaCassidy's analysis of the transformation of the physical education curriculum,including its underlying philosophy, in the late 1980s illustrates one suchattempt.70

In analysing the effects of educational reform on the curriculum andphilosophy of physical education, Cassidy draws attention to the right-wingphilosophies and policies of the government, and individual agents andtheir relationships, rivalries and intersecting and conflicting ambitions andagendas. While some readers might interpret Cassidy's description of theruling Labour government's philosophies and policies as simply the contextfor educational reform, her general discussions of the New Right, states andcrises, lead to the conclusion that she conceptualises the 1980s reforms inNew Zealand within a set of broad socio-economic structural conditions thatultimately have causal impacts on the content and teaching of physicaleducation. But when it comes to examining the conditions (causes) that ledto the acceptance of physical education as a seventh form, universityentrance, subject, structural conditions give way to individual agents such asMike Murtagh (secretary of the University Entrance Board), Grant Jones (arepresentative of the physical education profession) and Bevan Grant (whorepresented physical education in the universities).

A key issue for historians negotiating structural and agent-driven causes isthat the focus on one or the other will lead to quite different conclusions.Cassidy demonstrates this in her discussion of how the introduction ofseventh form — University Bursaries — physical education (UBPE) shapedthe content and philosophy of the subject. Focusing on the aims andobjectives of the individual agents who successfully lobbied for (caused)UBPE conveys impressions of progress and innovation. For example, studentenrolments in physical education climbed steadily after the introduction ofUBPE. In contradistinction, notions of change and creativity are lesscompelling when seen through the lens of structural beliefs and values. AsCassidy observes, the profession continues to teach 'traditional conservativevalues' and this will not change until teachers conceptualise physicaleducation within the 'wider socio-historical and economic conditions inwhich it is enmeshed'.71

Social Change ParadigmThe term history invokes notions of change. Historians study by-gone erasand elapsed conditions, and understanding the past, and what differentiatesit from the present, means comprehending social change.72 This can involvecomparisons between, and contextualisations of, past and present conditionsand circumstances, and examinations of the causes of change.


Reconstructionists who venture into large scale social change tend toemphasise the accumulation of modifications, which are often small andgradual, and eventually reach a point that historians agree denotesfundamental change. In sport history reconstructionists describe modernsport as the coalescence of sporting and social modifications. These includethe introduction of rules, umpires and administrative bodies, theconstruction of specialised and dedicated facilities (pools, gymnasiums,fields), and the development of transport systems (especially rail whichfacilitated the movement of sporting teams and spectators), mass production(that lowered costs of sporting equipment and goods), and masscommunication (notably penny newspapers that popularised sport).Analysing the accumulation approach, Tom Bottomore says that it placessocial change at the 'intersection of separate and distinct quasi-causal chainsand the accumulation of their effects ... which produce a dominant tendencytoward a major change'.73 The accumulation approach to social changeprevails in New Zealand sport history in the works of Scott Crawford, JockPhillips and Erik Olssen.74

Constructionists approach social change through theory The theoreticaldimension of social change emerges from two questions ignored or glossedover by reconstructionists. First, what, precisely, changes? Actors, of course,have relatively short lives and change over time. Yet, although individualsconstantly move on, in many instances like-minded types replace them so thatneither new actors, nor even entire new generations, necessarily mean freshpatterns or alternative ways of doing things; the way people play, for example,shows remarkable continuity. Hence change emanates not simply from freshpersonnel, but from their beliefs, values, norms, roles, practices, and ways ofdoing things that differ from past forms and types and which, mostimportantly, have new structuring effects. A second question logically followsthis perspective of social change: how do structures change? There is nosingle answer. Structural change depends entirely upon the historian'sconceptualisation of structure and their understanding of the relationshipbetween structure and human action. At one extreme, determinists viewstructures as determining action independent of the will of human agents;with respect to structural change, determinists 'locate the fundamentaldetermining sources ... outside the conscious agency of human subjects'within the social or physical environment, or within various psychological orbehavioural predispositions. Nondeterminist concepts of structures findmore favour among historians. Nondeterminists situate structures within thesphere of human action, and they 'locate the fundamental source of changewithin the conscious human agent, albeit an agent who always acts within astructured social, cultural, and geographical environment'.75

As historians trying to mediate between agent driven and structural causes


of social change have discovered, rigorous nondeterministic accounts thattake cognisance of all the evidence are notoriously difficult to construct. Insport history hegemony is a popular concept among constructionistpractitioners seeking to introduce agency and to escape the determinism ofstructural Marxism. However, more often than not constructionist sporthistorians engage hegemony as an explanation for the perseverance ofstructures of domination (e.g., capitalism, media, patriarchy), rather than foraccounts of social change. Referring to the development of organised netballin New Zealand, for example, John Nauright and Jane Broomhall concludethat 'the media ... hailed it as a great game for women especially as it fits intothe dominant conceptions of proper female behaviour and physical activity.As a sport, netball does not challenge notions about ways in which womenshould express themselves physically and therefore does not pose a threat tothe gender order'.76 Nauright similarly argues that 'the links between rugbyand hegemonic masculinity' in New Zealand and a host of other countries,'demonstrates the power of male elites to fend off challenges to historicallygrounded cultural practices'. As he concludes, 'hegemonic cultures are ableto overcome threats and reappear in an emergent form that incorporateselements of past resistance'.77

In short, sport historians have found limited success propoundingrigorous explanations of social change. This is largely a consequence of theirreluctance to seriously engage theories of structure that are integral toconceptualising social change.

New Culture ParadigmIncreasingly culture rather than structure holds the attention of historians ofsport working outside New Zealand. Since the early 1990s they have shown agrowing interest in cultural aspects of sport, that is, how different groupsemploy sporting artefacts, symbols, language and texts to produce meaning,create traditions, embody values, propagate ideas and nurture institutions.Within this cultural turn a new paradigm is emerging that focuses on theconstitution, transmission, representation and transformation of culturallife.78 While the full thrust of the new culture paradigm has yet to surface inNew Zealand sport history, two key elements are evident, narrative, and thebody.79 In his most recent analysis of the 1981 Springbok rugby tour, MalcolmMacLean identifies narrative as a popular linguistic tool used to give meaningto lives and to simultaneously connect and disconnect individuals and groups.MacLean discusses the stories that circulated within the anti-tour protestmovement and that connected members to a range of general socialconcerns prevailing at the time, including Maori land rights and feministpolitics.

MacLean's incorporation of narrative is consistent with deconstruction-


ism's approach to language. Deconstructionist historians closely examine theform and structure of narratives and are interested in the links between'culture as a system and culture as a practice'.80 With respect to the latter,MacLean's narratives are not simple ideologies. Rather he ties the narrativesof anti-tour and pro-tour groups to the realm of affect, the emotional domainthat gives tone and texture to our everyday lives. (Lawrence Grossberg definesaffect as the energy invested in particular cultural practices, and emotions asthe specific forms that this affective investment takes. An affective investment'anchors people in particular experiences, practices, identities, meanings andpleasures'.81) According to MacLean, rugby fans 'invest ... in particularpractices and texts' that

grant them a means of asserting control over their affective lives andallow new investments in and creations of meaning. In this way theassociation of rugby union with the dominant cultural formation ofNew Zealand grants the people who have joined that formation, butare not members of the socio-cultural elite, a means of controllingtheir lives and of articulating their membership of the nation.

On the other hand, by 'criticizing rugby's connections with South Africa, anti-tour activists [called] into question the legitimacy of that dominant affectiveeconomy'. Through these concepts MacLean views 'the clash of 1981' as onebetween competing affective economies played out, in part, through differentnarratives.82

David Lowe calls the body, the 'referent of all referents'. In the finalanalysis, he says, 'all signifieds, values, or meanings refer to the delineationand satisfaction of the needs of the body'.83 Studies examining the means bywhich cultures constitute and control bodies, especially female andindigenous bodies, proliferated in sport history during the 1990s and are nowseeping into New Zealand sport history. Drawing on Foucauldian notions ofpower and control, Catherine Smith traces the development of physicaleducation and sport in New Zealand girls' schools in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth century from drill and Swedish gymnastics to athletic games.Although these different activities might convey contrasting images ofmilitary-style discipline and unrestricted freedom respectively, Smith findslittle difference in the discourses accompanying the two forms of physicalpursuit: both encourage girls to 'work on their bodies through exercise tomake them fitter within specific limits'. While the discourse of drill andgymnastics propagated notions of stronger and better mothers, the discourseof sport reinforces doctrines of 'individual responsibility for health and thedesirability of self-discipline'.84

Brendan Hokowhitu applies Foucauldian notions of power to dominantWestern discourses of black physicality arguing that they contribute to thesubjugation of people of colour, even when they present positive images. For


example, by highlighting images of successful Polynesian sportspeople suchas Jonah Lomu and Tana Umaga, contemporary discourses perpetuate thetradition well established by the early twentieth century that indigenous NewZealanders are 'best suited to achiev[ing] within the physical realm'.85

Illustrating the power of these discourses, Hokowhitu notes that many Maorirecognise sport as one of the few areas in which their young men can succeed.Pertinent here are the views of a community leader who Hokowhitu cites assaying that 'a lot of the schools which Polynesians attend aren't up to meeting[their] needs ... many of them are destined for failure without direction. Butthe young ones ... are learning that sports and rugby in particular, offers a wayfor them to achieve'. Sadly, the discourse of making it through sport,Hokowhitu concludes, tends to close off '"other occupations that hold greaterpotential for meeting the real political needs of both themselves and theirpeople.'"86

Although she excludes sport, Caroline Daley places the body at the centreof her history of physical culture in New Zealand between 1900 and 1960.Daley, like Smith and Hokowhitu, follows Foucault in examining the ways'voluntary effort' shapes modern bodies. As she puts it, 'self-control ratherthan imposed, governmental control, propelled the culture of constraint'evident in leisure activities at, and around, gyms, pools, playgrounds andbeaches. Thus one group of southerners who camped on the shores of LakeWakatipu in the late 1920s and early '30s, happily pursued a routine thatincluded rising at 5.30 a.m. for a swim or run and parading at 6.00 a.m. forhalf-an-hour of drill before breakfast. But Daly is also interested in how NewZealanders used their bodies as sites of pleasure and enjoyment, andconsistent with the linguistic aspect of the new culture paradigm, she strivesto give average Kiwis their own voices. For example, Daly recounts the illicitpleasures described by three young women who rented a whare (house) on anisolated beach in February 1932 and who 'spent much of their time enjoyingnude sunbathing and the "invigorating feeling ... [of] the waves against ourbodies, unhampered with bathing costumes'".87 Likewise, CharlotteMacdonald in her analysis of competition marching for girls and youngwomen notes a sport striving to convey a 'model of order ... imbued withmoral and social value' based on highly disciplined bodies. Yet, even in thishighly controlled and regulated activity, Macdonald finds (Foucauldian)ambiguities. Although subjected to the disciplining gaze of the public,marching team girls were not powerless; they could clearly find a 'measure ofenjoyment' and 'they could occupy centre stage, drawing admiration withoutthe complications of individual engagement'.88

ConclusionSport historians in New Zealand mostly work at the epistemologicalintersection of reconstruction and construction which Joyce Appleby, Lynn


Hunt and Margaret Jacob label practical realism.89 While practical realismacknowledges the very real gap between words and reality, it does notconsider the distance sufficient cause to abandon the search for accuracy.Rarely are words arbitrarily connected to objects. Sportsman, for example,connotes a specific set of behaviours. The meaning of the term changed overtime as different groups appropriated it for their own ends, but the sporthistory community has built up a strong consensus on the different meanings.Practical realism emphasises that historical facts derive from tangible materialdocuments and supporting evidence. Practical realists concede that allhistories begin from the personal interests and cultural attributes of thehistorian, that no knowledge is neutral, and that all knowledge is contentiousand that its production involves struggles between different interest groups.Nonetheless, they reject the view that historical narratives are literary forms.Likewise, they dismiss the charge that constant reassessment of the past isproof that the field lacks objectivity: reassessment reflects attempts bysuccessive generations to give new meaning to the past.

With respect to explanatory paradigms, most New Zealand historiansstructure their work to place sport within a broader social, economic orpolitical context, or to explain some issue of social change. Interestinglycontextualisation and social change pose the greatest technical hurdles forsport historians. A fine line separates over- and under-contextualisation. Theformer ignores sport's relative autonomy as a social practice; the latter assignsa significance to sport that far exceeds its social influence. Similarly,reconciling agency and structure remains a thorny issue for sport historiansworking within the paradigm of social change.

More recent works in sport history, such as those produced by MacLeanand Macdonald, suggest that New Zealanders will accommodateepistemologically non-threatening forms of deconstructionism and the newculture paradigm.90 But whether reconstructionist-orientated New Zealandsport historians will accommodate deconstructionist calls for greaterreflexivity and for practitioners to critically engage their own work and thebroader discipline remains to be seen. Logically epistemological aspects oflanguage should occupy centre stage of the cultural turn in social history.Lynn Hunt establishes the connection when she notes that 'as historians learnto analyze their subjects' representations of their worlds, they inevitably beginto reflect on the nature of their own efforts to represent history; the practiceof history is, after all, a process of text creating and of "seeing", that is, givingform to subjects'.91 This, in a nutshell, is the essence of the deconstructionistproject, one that remains over the horizon for New Zealand historianssearching for the sporting past.


Notes

1 Clare Simpson, The Development of Women's Cycling', in John Nauright(ed.), Sport, Power and Society in New Zealand, Sydney, AustralianSociety for Sports History, 1995, pp. 21-45; Shona Thompson,'Challenging the Hegemony: New Zealand Women's Opposition to Rugbyand the Reproduction of a Capitalist Patriarchy', International Review forthe Sociology of Sport, vol. 23, no. 3, 1988, pp. 204-211; Greg Ryan,'Rural Myth and Urban Actuality: The Anatomy of All Black and NewZealand Rugby 1884-1938', New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 35, no.1, 2001, pp. 45-69; Greg Ryan, The Making of New Zealand Cricket1832-1914, Frank Cass, London, 2004; Malcolm MacLean, 'Football asSocial Critique: Protest Movements, Rugby and History in Aotearoa, NewZealand', in J. A. Mangan and John Nauright (eds), Sport in AustralasianSociety: Past and Present, Frank Cass, London, 2000, pp. 255-77;Malcolm MacLean, 'Making Strange the Country and Making Strange theCountryside: Spatialized Clashes in the Affective Economies ofAotearoa/New Zealand during the 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour', in JohnBale and Mike Cronin (eds), Sport and Postcolonialism, Berg, Oxford,2003, pp. 57-71.

2 On the cultural turn see, Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History,University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989. For the cultural turn insport history see, Douglas Booth, 'Escaping the Past? The Cultural Turnin Sport History, Rethinking History, vol. 8, no. 1, 2004, pp. 103-25.

3 Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow (eds), The Nature of History Reader,Routledge, London, 2004, p. 4. See also, Alun Munslow, DeconstructingHistory, London, Routledge, 1997.

4 Geoffrey Elton, Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the PresentState of Historical Study, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991,p. 27.

5 Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 14 and p. 15.

6 Robert Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text andDiscourse, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 243-83.

7 See, Daniel Nathan, Saying It's So: A Cultural History of the Black SoxScandal, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2003, and Patricia Vertinsky,and Sherry McKay (eds), Disciplining Bodies in the Gymnasium: Memory,Monument, Modernism, Routledge, London, 2004.

8 David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of HistoricalThought, Harper & Row, New York, 1970, p. xv.

9 Michael Stanford, A Companion to the Study of History, Basil Blackwell,Oxford, 1994, p. 91 .

10 Ryan, New Zealand Cricket, pp. 167-8. Ryan labels this group the 'Phillipsschool' which includes Jock Phillips, John Nauright and Scott Crawford.See, Jock Phillips, 'Rugby, War and Mythology of the New Zealand Male',New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 18, no. 2, 1984, pp. 83-103; JockPhillips, The Hard Man — Rugby and the Formation of Character', inA Man's Country: The Image of Pakeha Male — A History, Second


edition, Penguin, Auckland, 1996, pp. 108-118; John Nauright, 'Sport,Manhood and Empire: British Responses to the New Zealand Rugby Tourof 1905', International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 8, no. 2, 1991;John Nauright, 'Colonial Manhood and Imperial Race Virility: BritishResponses to Post-Boer War Colonial Rugby Tours', in John Nauright andTim Chandler (eds), Making Men: Rugby and Masculine Identity, FrankCass, London, 1997, pp. 121-39; Scott Crawford, '"Muscles andCharacter are there the First Objects of Necessity": An Overview of Sportand Recreation in a Colonial Setting — Otago Province, New Zealand',British Journal of Sports History, vol. 2, no. 2, 1995, pp. 112-18.

11 Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method,Second edition, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1969, pp. 149-50.

12 Peter Gay, Style in History, Basic Books, New York, 1974, p. 3. See also,Gottschaik, Understanding History, pp. 17-19.

13 See for example, Bob Stothart, Review of Nauright, Sport, Power andSociety in New Zealand, Sporting Traditions, vol. 12, no. 1, 1995, p. 167;Malcolm MacLean, Review of Trevor Richards, Dancing on Our Bonesand Malcolm Templeton, Human Rights and Sporting Contacts,International Sports Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 2000, p. 74; Greg Ryan,Review of J. A. Mangan and John Nauright (eds) Sport in AustralasianSociety: Past and Present, and Chris Collins (ed.), Sport in New ZealandSociety, International Sports Studies, forthcoming.

14 Nancy Struna, 'Historical Research in Physical Activity', in Jerry Thomasand Jack Nelson (eds), Research Methods in Physical Activity HumanKinetics, Champaign, 1996, p. 252.

15 Michael Postan, Facts and Relevance: Essays on Historical Method,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971, p. 62.

16 Steven Lukes, Individualism, Blackwell, Oxford, 1973.

17 Elton, Return to Essentials, p. 15 and p. 19.

18 Munslow, Deconstructing History, pp. 22-3; John Tosh, The Pursuit ofHistory: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of ModernHistory, Second edition, Longman, London, 1991, pp. 154-5.

19 Werner Sombart, 'Economic Theory and Economic History', TheEconomic History Review, vol. 2, no. 1, 1929, p. 3.

20 Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 23 and p. 40.

21 Peter Hansen, 'Comment', Past and Present, no. 157, 1997, p. 162, p.163 and p. 168, and Gordon Stewart, 'Reply', Past and Present, no. 157,1997, p. 178, p. 186 and p. 188. The source of this exchangee debate isGordon Stewart's article, Tenzing's Two Wrist Watches: The Conquest ofEverest and Late Imperial Culture in Britain 1921-53', Past and Present,no. 149, 1995, pp. 170-97.

22 For one exception see, Douglas Booth, 'Modern Sport: Emergence andExperiences', in Chris Collins (ed.), Sport and Leisure in New Zealand,Palmerston North, Dunmore Press, 2000, pp. 45-64. In this article Iaccuse a group of New Zealand sport historians (see note 74) of adoptingan excessively narrow view of modernity and the roie of sport therein.


23 Arthur Swan, History of New Zealand Rugby Football, Volume 1, 1870-1945, Moa Press, Auckland, 1992, and Arthur Swan, History of NewZealand Rugby Football, Volume 2, 1946-1957, Moa Press, Auckland,1992. See also, Rod Chester and Neville McMillan, History of NewZealand Rugby Football, Volume 3, 1958-1979, Moa Press, Auckland,1992, and Rod Chester and Neville McMillan, History of New ZealandRugby Football, Volume 4, 1980-1991, Moa Press, Auckland, 1992.

24 John Nauright, 'Netball, Media, Representation of Women and Crises ofMale Hegemony in New Zealand', in Nauright, Sport, Power and Society,pp. 47-64; Thompson, 'Challenging the Hegemony'. See also, JohnNauright and Jane Broomhall, The Development of Netball and a FemaleSporting Culture in New Zealand, 1906-70', International Journal of theHistory of Sport, vol. 11, no. 3, 1994, pp. 387-407, and AngelaBurroughs and John Nauright, 'Women's Sports and Embodiment inAustralia and New Zealand', in Mangan and Nauright, Sport inAustralasian Society, pp. 188-205.

25 Peter Burke, History and Social Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992,p. 29; Norman Denzin, The Research Act, Third edition, Prentice Hall,Englewood Cliffs, 1989, p. 13.

26 Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 188.27 See for example, MacLean, 'Making Strange the Country'.

28 Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 118. For good examples of thisargument in sport history see, Murray Phillips, 'A Critical Appraisal ofNarrative in Sport History: Reading the Surf Lifesaving Debate', Journalof Sport History, vol. 29, no. 1, 2002, pp. 25-40, and Murray Phillips,'Remembering Sport History: Narrative, Social Memory and the Origins ofRugby League in Australia', International Journal of the History of Sport,vol. 21 , no. 1, 2004, pp. 50-66.

29 Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 181.

30 Fischer, Historians' Fallacies, p. xv.

31 Geoffrey Roberts (ed.), The History and Narrative Reader, Routledge,London, 2001.

32 Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, p. 37; Phillips, 'Remembering SportHistory', p. 61 .

33 Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 10.

34 Crawford, '"Muscles and Character"'; Scott Crawford, '"One's Nervesand Courage are in very Different Order Out in New Zealand":Recreational and Sporting Opportunities for Women in a Remote ColonialSetting', in J. A. Mangan and Roberta Park (eds), From Fair Sex toFeminism: Sport and the Socialization of Women in the Industrial andPost-industrial Eras, Frank Cass, London, 1987, pp. 161-81; Simpson,The Development of Women's Cycling'; Bob Stothart, The Developmentof Physical Education in New Zealand, Heinemann, Auckland, 1974; RexThomson, 'Provincial Rugby in New Zealand: Otago's AcademicPioneers', Journal of Sport History, vol. 23, no. 3, 1998, pp. 211-27.


35 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1973.

36 Thomson, 'Provincial Rugby in New Zealand1 . Quotes, p. 212, pp. 216-17,and pp. 219-20. See also, Rex Thomson, 'Rugby at the University ofOtago: Humble Beginnings for New Zealand's Premier Club', InternationalJournal of the History of Sport, vol. 14, no. 2, 1997, pp. 176-188.

37 See, for example, Tony Collins, Rugby's Great Split: Class, Culture andthe Origins of Rugby League Football, Frank Cass, London, 1998; RobHess and Bob Stewart (eds), More Than a Game: An UnauthorisedHistory of Australian Rules Football, Melbourne University Press,Melbourne, 1998; John Watterson, College Football: History, Spectacle,Controversy The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2000.

38 Richard Gruneau, Class, Sports, and Social Development, University ofMassachusetts Press, Amherst, 1983.

39 Phillips, 'Remembering Sport History', p. 63.

40 See, for example, White, Metahistory, pp. 429-30, and Hayden White,Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, Baltimore, 1978, p. 122.

41 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Quest" and theAmerican Historical Profession, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,1988, p. 2.

42 Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, p. 165.

43 Phillips, The Hard Man', p. 118.

44 Geoffrey Vincent, '"A Tendency to Roughness": Anti-HeroicRepresentations of New Zealand Rugby Football, 1890-1914', SportingTraditions, vol. 14, no. 1, 1997, pp. 91-110.

45 Ryan, The Making of New Zealand Cricket, p. 168, Ryan, 'Rural Myth andUrban Actuality', p. 45, p. 58 and p. 60. See also, Caroline Daley, Leisureand Pleasure: Reshaping and Revealing the New Zealand Body 1900-1960, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2003, p. 4 and CarolineDaley, The Invention of 1905', in Greg Ryan (ed.), Tackling Rugby Myths:Rugby and New Zealand Society, 1884-2004, forthcoming. Ryan alsoassumes the role of debunker of myths in 'Anthropological Football:Maori and the 1937 Springbok Rugby Tour of New Zealand', NewZealand Journal of History, vol. 34, no. 1, 2000, pp. 60-79. Here hechallenges the view that Maori protests against New Zealand's relationswith racist South Africa date from the late 1950s.

46 Dennis Smith, The Rise of Historical Sociology, Polity Press, Cambridge,1991, p. 163 and p. 165.

47 Phillips, The Hard Man', p. 85 and p. 271.

48 As Tony Mason reminds us, too many sport historians are simply 'fanswith typewriters'. Cited in Jeff Hill, 'British Sports History: A Post-modernFuture?', Journal of Sport History, vol. 23, no. 1, 1996, p. 2.

49 Struna, 'Historical Research', pp. 262-4.

50 Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, p. 31 .

51 Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, p. 32.


52 William Walsh, 'Colligatory Concepts in History', in Patrick Gardiner (ed) ,The Philosophy of History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1974, p 136.See also, Nancy Struna, 'E. P. Thompson's Notion of "Context" and theWriting of Physical Education and Sport History', Quest, vol. 38, 1986,pp. 22-32.

53 White, Metahistory, pp. 18-19.

54 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, andthe United States, c. 1958-c. 1974, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998.

55 Ryan, New Zealand Cricket. Quotes, p. 81 , p. 85, p. 107, p. 176, p. 214and p. 233. For another comprehensive example of contextualisation see,Malcolm MacLean, 'From Old Soldiers to Old Youth: Political Leadershipand New Zealand's 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour', Football Studies, vol. 1,no. 1, 1998, pp. 22-36.

56 Maurice Roche, Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in theGrowth of Global Culture, Routledge, London, 2000, p. 12 and p. 20.

57 Clare Simpson, 'Respectable identities: New Zealand Nineteenth-Century"New Women" — on Bicycles', International Journal of the History ofSport, vol. 18, no. 2, 2001, pp. 54-77.

58 John Nauright and David Black, 'New Zealand and International Sport:The Case of All Black-Springbok Rugby, Sanctions and Protest AgainstApartheid 1959-1992', in Nauright, Sport, Power and Society, pp. 67-93.

59 Crawford, '"One's Nerves and Courage"', p. 162 and p. 163. See also,Ryan, New Zealand Cricket, p. 24.

60 Douglas Booth, 'Surf Lifesaving: The Development of an AustralasianSport', in Mangan and Nauright, Sport in Australasian Society, pp. 167-87.

61 MacLean, 'Football as Social Critique', in Mangan and Nauright, Sport inAustralasian Society, pp. 255-277.

62 Ryan, New Zealand Cricket, pp. 144-48.

63 Ryan, New Zealand Cricket, p. 169.

64 Ryan, New Zealand Cricket, pp. 171-72.

65 Ryan, New Zealand Cricket, pp. 178-9 and p. 182.

66 Arthur Stinchcombe, Theoretical Methods in Social History, AcademicPress, New York, 1978, p. 22, and Edward Carr, What Is History?,Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1964/1990, pp. 104-105. See also, Struna,'Historical Research', p. 256 and pp. 258-59.

67 Douglas Booth, 'From Allusion to Causal Explanation: The ComparativeMethod in Sports History', International Sports Studies, vol. 22, no. 2,2001, pp. 5-25; Andrew Moore, 'Jimmy Devereux's Yorkshire Pudding:Reflections on the Origins of Rugby League in New South Wales andQueensland', Tom Brock Lecture, Australian Society for Sport History,1999; Miles Fairburn, Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods,St Martin's Press, New York, 1999.

68 This example is from Simpson, The Development of Women's Cycling',p. 23.

69 See, Douglas Booth, Theory: Distorting or Enriching Sport History?',Sport History Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1-32.


70 Tania Cassidy, 'Politics, Policies and Physical Education: New RightReforms', in Nauright, Sport, Power and Society, pp. 95-112.

71 Cassidy, 'Politics, Policies and Physical Education', p. 107.

72 Not unexpectedly, historians disagree about the concept of social change.Some conceive society as 'a fixed, stable and persisting structure'; othersview it as a 'process in which there is continual breakdown and renewal,development and decline, the disappearance of old forms and the creationof new ones' (Tom Bottomore, 'Structure and History', in Peter Blau [ed.J,Approaches to the Study of Social Structure, The Free Press, New York,1975, p. 159). Nancy Struna recently proposed that historians should focuson social change as a nondeterministic process of 'moving away from thepast' rather than 'moving toward' the creation of new social forms('Reframing the Direction of Change in the History of Sport', InternationalJournal of the History of Sport, vol. 18, no. 4, 2001, pp. 1-15).

73 Bottomore, 'Structure and History', p. 164.

74 See for example, Scott Crawford, A History of Recreation and Sport inNineteenth Century Colonial Otago, unpublished PhD dissertation,University of Queensland, 1984, Phillips, 'The Hard Man', p. 91 , and ErikOlssen, Towards a New Society', in Geoffrey Rice (ed) , The OxfordHistory of New Zealand, Second Edition, Oxford University Press,Auckland, 1992, p. 258. Ryan also slips into this approach early on inNew Zealand Cricket. See, pp. 7-9 and p. 27

75 Christopher Lloyd, Explanations in Social History, Basil Blackwell, Oxford,1988, p. 192 and p. 193.

76 Nauright and Broomhall, 'A Woman's Game', p. 404.

77 John Nauright, 'Sustaining Masculine Hegemony: Rugby and theNostalgia of Masculinity', in Nauright and Chandler, Making Men, p. 241.See also John Nauright and David Black, '"Hitting Them Where It Hurts":Springbok-All Black Rugby, Masculine National Identity and Counter-Hegemonic Struggle, 1959-1992', in Nauright and Chandler, Making Men,pp. 205-26.

78 Hunt, The New Cultural History, p. 17. See also, Victoria Bonnell andLynn Hunt, Introduction', in Bonnell and Hunt (eds), Beyond the CulturalTurn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley, 1999, p. 6.

79 Booth, 'Escaping the Past?1, pp. 103-25.

80 Bonnell and Hunt, 'Introduction1, p. 17.

81 Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: PopularConservatism and Postmodern Culture, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 82.

82 MacLean, 'Making Strange the Country', p. 58 and p. 64.

83 Cited in David Harvey, The Body as Referent', The Hedgehog Review,vol. 3, no. 2, 2001, p. 2.

84 Catherine Smith, 'Control of the Female Body: Physical Training at ThreeNew Zealand Girls' High Schools, 1880s-1920s',Sporting Traditions,vol. 13, no. 2, 1997, pp. 59-71. Quotes p. 63, p. 68 and p. 69.


85 Brendan Hokowhitu, 'Race Tactics: The Racialised Athletic Body',Junctures: The Journal of Thematic Dialogue", no. 1, 2003, p. 30.

86 Brendan Hokowhitu, Tackling Maori Masculinity: A Colonial Genealogy ofSavagery and Sport', The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 16, no. 2, 2004,pp. 273-74. See also, Brendan Hokowhitu, '"Physical Beings":Stereotypes, Sport, and the "Physical Education" of New Zealand Maori',Culture, Sport Society, vol. 6, nos. 2/3, 2003, pp. 192-218, and BrendanHokowhitu, 'Maori Masculinity, Post-structuralism, and the Emerging Self,New Zealand Sociology vol. 18, no. 2, 2003, pp. 179-201.

87 Daley, Leisure and Pleasure, p. 9 and pp. 166-68.

88 Charlotte Macdonald, 'Putting Bodies on the Line: Marching Spaces inCold War Culture', in Patricia Vertinsky and John Bale (eds), Sites ofSport: Space, Place, Experience, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 97 andp. 100.

89 Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth AboutHistory, W. W. Norton, New York, 1994.

90 Catriona Parratt, 'Reflecting on Sport History in the 1990s', Sport HistoryReview, vol. 29, no. 1, 1998, p. 13.

91 Hunt, The New Cultural History, p. 20.


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