Introduction

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 45, 1 January 2013, Page 7

Introduction

CHARLOTTE MACDONALD

Looking for the body in the library might sound like work for Agatha Christie's Monsieur Poirot rather than for historians and other scholars. But it is just that job that the contributors to this issue of the Turnbull Library Record have undertaken. Seven-stone (49-kg) Catherine Wiltshire competing in a 100-mile walking race in 1876, burly axemen standing to their blocks in 1905, the well-clothed Dora de Beer and her climbing companions in south-west China in 1938, the cartoon figures of Maori and Pakeha rugby spectators in 1956, and the perennially popular politicians facing off as boxing opponents in the cartoonist's sketchbook all feature in this issue devoted to New Zealand's sporting life and culture.

Each of the articles opens up a world that is a delight in and of itself. In a society that often prides - or bemoans - itself as 'sport-mad', there are further reasons for a national research library to include sport in its Record. For all the space sport has occupied in town and country sports grounds, and in newspaper columns, there is a surprisingly slight critical tradition in scholarship addressing this aspect of our cultural and social life. Greg Ryan and David Colquhoun, two of the contributors here, are among the relatively small number working in a field that flourishes more robustly elsewhere. Ramachandra Guha's A Corner of a Foreign Field (2002), Barbara Keys' Globalising Sport (2006), Tony Collins and Wray Vamplew's Mud, Sweat and Beers (2002) are just some recent works which suggest the scope for thinking about history at large from the playing field as well as from the workplace, the battlefield or the political stage. 1

In the broader themes of New Zealand history we might look to sport for fresh angles on the tensions between egalitarian beliefs and individualistic inclinations, and how competition operates to feed or undermine these two forces. Sport as a meeting ground of merit and equality for Maori and Pakeha is a much vaunted part of New Zealand's history. Yet it has also been a place of deep and violent contention; and as Paul Diamond suggests, an arena that can mask a different story. Much less easily assimilated into a story of sport as a leveller is its place in the history of men and women (but this issue contains stories that might surprise). Sport fits less easily into conventional histories of the state in New Zealand life,

being regarded more as a matter of local and voluntary endeavour than of state organisation or support. Yet that too is a story that deserves revisiting. In this issue it is touched on briefly, but valuably, in relation to the early twentieth-century regulation of betting (Ryan), and in the experience of Maori as voters (Diamond).

Sport has been a major generator of records in the form of press reports, game programmes and results, manuscripts, memoirs, travel and tour diaries, photographs, paintings, sketches, cartoons, radio commentary, film and television footage, webcams - an array of private and public records, though its inherently ephemeral nature has militated against a strong archival residue. Sport is often, in fact, at the forefront of new technologies of communication, and their associated commercial vehicles (popular weekly papers, commercial radio and cable television are just some examples). In this regard it carries enormous potential for studies of changing habits of reading, viewing and popular consumption. The sources drawn on in these five articles alone illustrate the breadth of materials generated by sports and sports culture.

From at least the eighteenth century, politicians have been depicted as combatants in the boxing ring, runners in galloping horse races, wrestlers struggling for ascendancy, and opponents in tugs of war. lan F. Grant's widely ranging discussion of political cartoons provides an insight into just how extensive a tradition sport provides as visual metaphor. Linguistic riches are also hinted at, along with their histories; the neo-liberalism's 'level playing field' of the 1980 s is just one of many. In spite of - or perhaps because of - their typically un-sporting physiques, political leaders provide cartoonists with splendid fodder. Thinking across New Zealand's twentieth-century leaders - Bill Massey, Joseph Ward, Michael Savage, Peter Fraser, Sid Holland, Keith Holyoake, Norm Kirk, Robert Muldoon, David Lange - it is easy to see the possibilities (perhaps it is only the bulky Dick Seddon or hill-climbing Helen Clark who remotely resemble sporting figures).

If Grant's article tells us something of the long span and variety of sporting imagery, Paul Diamond's discussion takes us to a particular moment. In two cartoons, one by Neil Lonsdale a month before the Springboks versus Maori match played as part of the famous Springbok rugby team's tour of New Zealand in 1956, and one published the Monday following the disappointing 37-0 loss by the local team, drawn by Harry Dansey, Diamond shows the potential of a close examination of the cartoonists' craft. His analysis shows how cartoons provide a way to access a particular contemporary mode of thinking and being, that 'feel of the time' that is so quickly obscured by the roll of subsequent events. Lonsdale gives us caricature Maori, Dansey a modern and variable figure. The i 956 that is peeled back may show some of the conformist complacency associated with the mid-19505, but Diamond's study tells us more about the nature of the quietude. In doing so, it provides us with a stronger base from which to explain the disturbance

that came soon after in the 1959-60 campaign against the non-selection of Maori players for the 1960 All Black tour to South Africa (a campaign orchestrated by the Citizens' All Black Tour Association) and the post-1969 battles fought over all forms of sporting contact with South Africa.

Grant and Diamond illustrate the way in which sport provides a language with which to talk about things off the field: about winning and losing, right and wrong behaviour, strength and weakness. In turn, sport's innocent status provides a place where 'loaded' subjects - race, class divisions, physical attributes - can be discussed in an apparently 'unloaded' apolitical environment.

Sport as a reason for travel, and travel as an occasion for making a record (keeping a diary, writing reports for the press, taking photographs, making movies) is a pattern recurring through these articles and the collections from which they are drawn. This feature is most obvious in Walter Cook's discussion of the little known expedition made by Dora de Beer and her companions in 1938. De Beer, the Australian-born, London-resident granddaughter of Bendix and Mary Hallenstein, travelled to the Yulong Xue Shan mountains in Yunnan, south-west China, in 1938 with the goal of attempting unclimbed Mt Sansato. The party included several other women and men mountaineers whose experience had been gained in New Zealand's Southern Alps. De Beer's expedition, while remarkable, can be seen in the context of intense western interest in China in the 1930 s and of an international mountaineering community with strong imperial contours.

New Zealanders Robin Hyde and James Bertram were among those who travelled to China in the 1930 s (rather than taking the more well-worn route of political travellers to Spain). Missionaries, YMCA and YWCA workers, and civil and military administrators in the British colonial service were already part of a well established network across India and many parts of Asia - part of the formal and informal 'webs' of British and other European empires still firmly intact at this time. 2 De Beer and her party approached their mountains via Burma. Their paths trod ground familiar to readers of Orwell and more recently, James C. Scott's highly original study of the upland south-east Asia region he names 'Zomia'. In The Art of Not Being Governed Scott describes this zone as one of the last and largest places where people evaded incorporation into, and government by, nation states. 3 De Beer's expedition provides a contemporary view into such a place, and the construction of it in the record made for consumption in 'the West'. Cook's discussion is a reminder not only of the inextricable links between personal travel accounts and sporting endeavours, but also of the strong imperial texture to New Zealand's sporting culture. 4

In Colquhoun and Ryan's articles two very contrasting realms of sporting activity come to the fore. In the exploits of Catherine Wiltshire, it is the theatrical world of sporting performance of the mid-1870s. Wiltshire, a 23-year-old assisted

immigrant from London, became the acclaimed 'greatest pedestrienne in the world' following her 100-mile walk within 24 hours, a record-breaking achievement performed in Auckland in 1876. Wiltshire and husband Thomas, a 30-year-old plate layer and fellow migrant on the Pleiades , took on the risky, but opportunist, venture of sports as entertainment within a year of arriving in the colony and marrying. In the settler townships and districts of 1870 s, New Zealand people were eager to get on by working hard - but they also had an appetite for diversion and entertainment; an interest in a bit of light relief on Saturday night. The Wiltshires' enterprise came at a time of worldwide enthusiasm for 'pedestrianism': walking and running events performed inside as well as outside, against the clock as often as against other competitors. Colquhoun's article brings the Wiltshires to attention for the first time. And it is through fragments retrieved via the searching powers opened up by Papers Past (http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz), the digital collection of newspapers, that Colquhoun and Ryan piece together what were highly local, fragmentary, sparsely recorded, and thus, ephemeral contemporary events and characters.

Catherine Wiltshire's specially designed 'walking costume' (revealing bare arms, bare legs, and worn with free-flowing hair), and the worldwide reporting of her feats, are among the many gems Colquhoun unearths. The contrast between Wiltshire and the costumes worn by Ryan's axemen, and their physiques, could hardly be greater. Described as the 'Hercules' of the bush, the axemen who gathered from the 1890 s into the early twentieth century during the heyday of professional competitive axe chopping were burly, muscular, and stepped up to their blocks wearing slightly tidier versions of work clothes - woollen trousers and singlets. Yet far from opening up a view of disorderly frontier masculinity, axe competitions were highly organised and formal affairs with rules, conventions, routines, ethics and significant prize monies. One of the many illuminating features to emerge from Ryan and Colquhoun's discussions are the social geographies. In the axechopping world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the townships of Eltham, Tuatapere and Raetihi were capitals of highest endeavour, the centres of competition and seats of governing power in the sport.

David Colquhoun and Greg Ryan's discussions take us to the colourful, always changing and highly competitive world of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury sport. Physical prowess mixed with a robust sociability. Drinking, gambling, the excitement of a spectacle and meeting-up were all part of the scene. Set notions about amateurism and the rule of regional or national associations were yet to come. Always lurking at the edges was the taint of disorder, sleaze and compromised respectability. Catherine Wiltshire's decorum was preserved by her status as a married woman, and by her speed. The axemen voluntarily policed betting at competitions when the anti-gambling lobby became vocal. But not far

away were the dens of smoke, unrestrained betting, grog-saturated entertainments, hoteliers on the make, scanty clothing and sweaty bodies, dodgy entrepreneurs: the Wiltshires were not the only ones who found they had to leave town in a hurry. Imagining such a world casts modern sports bonanzas as sanitised Sunday picnics by comparison. Colquhoun and Ryan's discussion very nicely brings into view the longer-term cycles of professional and 'amateur' sports. The longer continuities in kinds of professionalism proves the enduring pattern; the mid-twentieth-century strict demarcation between 'amateur' and 'professional' emerges as the aberration.

All five articles provide a taste of the riches in the Turnbull Library collections, and of the questions and pursuits researchers bring to those collections. For all that the 'national sports' of rugby, cricket and netball hog the limelight, this issue of the Turnbull Library Record demonstrates the much larger and more mixed ecology of leisure, of competition and sports, of spectators, gamblers and participants of many kinds. It also tells us something of the ways sport provides a language and a place for discussions that are not about games, but are about who we are and what we think is right.

ENDNOTES 1 Ramachandra Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian Flistory of a British Sport (London: Picador, 2002); Barbara J. Keys, Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930 s (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tony Collins and Wray Vamplew, Mud, Sweat and Beers: A Cultural History of Sport and Alcohol (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002). 2 Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand's Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams, 2012). 3 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). 4 A theme developed in Charlotte Macdonald, 'Ways of Belonging: Sporting Spaces in New Zealand History', in The New Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. by Giselle Byrnes (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 269-96.