'The Axe is the Pioneer of Civilisation': Competitive Wood Chopping and New Zealand Sporting Culture, 1890-1914

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

'The Axe is the Pioneer of Civilisation': Competitive Wood Chopping and New Zealand Sporting Culture , 1890-1914

GREG RYAN

On Boxing Day 1905, as the All Blacks neared the end of their first tour of Britain with an unconvincing 10-8 victory over the Cardiff Club in front of a crowd of 50,000, an estimated 4,000 spectators attended the Axemen's Carnival at Eltham in Taranaki. They witnessed West Coaster Con Casey secure the 18inch underhand title at the first world championship wood chopping event to be contested in New Zealand. Casey received £5 ($790 in 2012) and a gold medal worth £lO. As the gathering came to an end, the local Hawera & Normanby Star remarked that while Eugene Sandow, the father of modern body-building, had described the All Blacks as the finest band of athletes he had seen, if he had visited Eltham on carnival days, 'he would have seen men of better muscular development than our footballers'.' Over the next decade, New Zealand axemen were to excel in Australasian and world championships and to figure prominently in an extensive network of semi-professional or 'cash' athletics throughout New Zealand and Australia. But it is scarcely surprising that the achievement of the All Blacks in losing only one, still disputed, match to Wales during their tour of Britain became etched in the national consciousness in a way that wood chopping did not. Rugby was not only a game bound to the ideals of the middle-class leaders of the Victorian and Edwardian sporting revolution, but also the first game at which New Zealand was seen to succeed on the all-important British stage. As the All Blacks continued to win the majority of their games during the twentieth century, their first British tour inevitably became a creation myth that helped to explain all that followed, and to link rugby with conceptions of emergent New Zealand manhood. 2 With periodic exceptions, other sports soon fell under the domineering presence of rugby.

However, this elevation of the 1905 All Blacks owes a good deal to hindsight and nostalgia. No one who read the voluminous sporting press in New Zealand in the decade prior to the Great War could be in any doubt that theirs was

a complicated and contested sporting world. The All Blacks were far from universally admired in 1905, and New Zealand rugby would soon be locked in an internal crisis that risked it being cut adrift by the guardians of the game in Britain. 3 In turn, this crisis highlights more fundamental questions about the extent to which the day-to-day thinking of the wider New Zealand sporting public was shaped by the higher sporting ideals so beloved of articulate middle-class sporting administrators, educators, journalists and politicians, and especially the apparently rigorous binary opposition between amateurs, who pursued sport for pleasure and intrinsic moral lessons, and professionals, who pursued it for money. A range of New Zealand historians have been rather preoccupied with the rhetoric and legislative successes of the 'wowsers' during what James Belich has characterised as the 'Great Tightening'. 4 Writing on the development of New Zealand sport has been largely preoccupied with the creation of the 'pyramid' of participation, which funnelled increasing numbers of players from schools to clubs to provincial, and later national teams in a few of the most popular, largely team and almost exclusively amateur, sports dominated by the four main cities. 5 But this emphasis on the quest for order and formalisation within clubs, provincial and national administrative bodies has largely neglected the exploits of any number of popularly acclaimed professional champions, the sustained efforts of professional sports to enforce their own codes of morality and respectability, and the reality that relations between amateurs and professionals in pre-1914 New Zealand were frequently co-operative rather than diametrically opposed. While many middleclass sporting administrators scorned working-class professionalism and tried to keep such barbarian influences far from the gates of amateur purity, others were more pragmatic in their response. 6

This paper is an exploration of such themes through an examination of the emergence and acceptance of competitive wood chopping and its association with a network of professional sports during the quarter-century prior to the Great War. In origin, wood chopping was a sport of the tough, male-dominated colonial frontier, replete with cash prizes and bookmakers. Yet it came to be highly regulated, to eschew gambling, and to be welcomed at the showpiece events of an emerging New Zealand society.

What follows is an endorsement of the transformative powers of the Papers Past website. 7 The history of wood chopping, and the wider sporting world in which it existed, must be pieced together from brief news items, advertisements, and only a few lengthy articles. These are easily assembled in the digital age, but would be almost impossible to capture by traditional archival research. Of particular importance is the Hawera & Normanby Star for its coverage of the wood chopping stronghold of Eltham. Even so, there appears to be a great deal that went unreported either as a consequence of the prerogative of editors to define

what was of interest to the community, or the lesser inclination of many working people in particular to chronicle their activities.

Money changed hands from the earliest days of organised sport in European New Zealand in the 1840 s. Anniversary and other sports gatherings were frequently sponsored by publicans wishing to attract custom, and spectators gambled sometimes considerable sums on the sidelines. On the goldfields, especially in the 1860 s, many miners endeavoured to supplement their income as professional athletes, moving between regular sports meetings and frequently having agents, trainers and sponsors to manage their affairs. But this was also a world of corrupt practices, not the least of them being the 'ringing-in' of talented athletes under assumed names, and under the guidance of bookmakers, to win races at long odds against unsuspecting local competitors. 8

From the mid-nineteenth century an emerging generation of middle-class, public-school-educated sportsmen in Britain responded to the growing popular interest in recently codified sports by establishing various rules designed to regulate participation and ideally separate the classes. At its most straightforward this was a distinction between amateurs who played for pleasure and professionals who derived monetary reward, on the basis that the latter, unencumbered by the need to earn a living by other means, possessed more time for training and practice and therefore an unfair physical advantage over those compelled to pursue sport amid other responsibilities. Excessive training and practice also undermined the 'natural' game and the moral importance of sport as character training for the greater struggle of life. The professional was believed to represent the threat of winning becoming more important than taking part. If sport was a livelihood, the rules would be undermined by whatever conduct was necessary in order to win 'at all costs'. But in reality, amateurism was a scarcely disguised means to sustain the entrenched class divisions of British society and limit the extent to which gentlemen had to mix on or off the field with their social inferiors. Cricket and soccer, the sports with the greatest working-class presence, enacted tightly regulated forms of player payment and control. Rowing and rugby created progressively inflexible definitions of amateurism that effectively squeezed out any working-class participants who were unable to spare time away from work to play sport without some form of monetary compensation. Athletics, as one of the few sports with a significant tradition of class mixing, as foot races had always been a regular part of town and village holiday festivities, fell between these two extremes. 9 Although New Zealand was geographically far removed from the rapid transformations of nineteenth-century British sport, new migrants ensured that it was not immune to the crucial debates of the period. Elite athletics and rowing clubs in particular introduced restrictive definitions of amateurism during the 1870 s and 1880 s, and the New Zealand rugby union, if not always its provincial affiliates

and their clubs, was determined to follow the same course. These bodies also took a determined stand against gambling among spectators and more particularly against players who were tempted to perform according to the whims of bookmakers. 10

But transferring amateur principles shaped by the British class system to the formative environment of New Zealand or any other colony was always problematic. While relative population growth enabled some colonial sporting administrators to pursue an exclusive stance, they ultimately did so at their peril as playing numbers were only a fraction of those in Britain. It is also likely that a more commercially minded colonial middle class, dominated by men involved in the management of small-scale enterprises that allowed more common ground between employer and worker, perhaps possessed a greater tolerance towards elements of working-class culture and were therefore less bound to amateurism as a mechanism for exclusion. Nor was there a substantial revenue-producing spectatorship to sustain a fully professional sporting structure against which amateurs needed to define themselves." Against this background, rather than the over emphasis on amateur hegemony, the emergence of wood chopping and" the response to it can be better understood.

Large-scale clearance of bush was essential to the ethos of progress and the opening up of good arable land in both New Zealand and Australia throughout the last third of the nineteenth century. While clearance by burning was common, there was also a high demand for timber for housing, fencing and railways. Although it is difficult to assess the extent and rate of deforestation, an estimate of 9 million acres (3642170 hectares) for New Zealand during the 1890 s is probably accurate. By 1907, when milling was already past its peak, output in the lower North Island was 432 m superfeet from 411 mills, and more than 7,000 men were working in the timber industry. 12

In Australia, and especially Tasmania, from the early 1870 s sawyers began to extend their work into competitive sport, although initially with tests of endurance rather than speed. With the development of the Tasmanian axe to deal with the hard woods of Australasia, and the emergence of steam-powered mills which diminished the importance of sawyers during the 1880 s, the competitive emphasis shifted to axemen. 13 From the outset competitions were the focus for significant wagers between competitors and among spectators, and appeared alongside other more traditional sporting events such as athletics and wrestling, but also older, 'folk' sports such as cock-fighting, bare-knuckle fighting, and possum against bull terrier fights. The atmosphere was also likely to be charged by drinking. 14

As the scale of competitions increased, steps were taken towards uniformity. The United Australasian Axemen's Association was formed in Latrobe, northern Tasmania, in June 1891 with a grand statement of ecological imperialism to justify its sporting inclinations. It aimed:

To demonstrate the great skill to which the settlers of all the heavily timbered parts of Australasia have attained during their fights with the dense bush with saw, axe, splitting knife and other tools, a dexterity and skill which, when combined with true British pluck, has enabled these "heroes of the bush" to hew out for themselves homes, and to effectually rescue and bring into cultivation some of the richest soils in the Southern Hemisphere.

In addition to cash prizes for a range of chopping and sawing events covering different log sizes, the Association offered a trophy donated by the Hon. Thomas Reibey, Speaker of the Tasmanian House of Assembly. 15

Within weeks, the Association's secretary H. A. Nichols tried to make arrangements with the Union Steam Ship Company to enable New Zealanders to compete at events in Tasmania. Any non-winners would be subsidised £3 (•$550) towards travel expenses. In December 1892 a team of four from Southland competed without success at the world championships in Tasmania. The following year the Association authorised T Reeves to 'chop any man in New Zealand for £25 [s4soo] and upwards a side' in Tasmania. New Zealand timber would be used, although the cost of getting this to Tasmania had to be borne by the New Zealand challenger unless other arrangements could be made. 16 In 1896, having evidently failed to attract further interest from New Zealand, Nichols made another overture to anyone willing to cross the Tasman. 'Our next grand competition for the bushmen of the colonies is to be held in Deloraine on November 25 and 26. The prizes are rich, and as the association is run on behalf of the axemen of Australasia, we strive to place all axemen on a level, and men from your colony, having greater travelling expenses, are allowed free entry'. 17

Chopping and sawing contests were part of New Year sports gatherings under the auspices of the Caledonian Society at Woodlands in Southland from at least 1888, while a contest with a first prize of £3 10s ($640) was held in Waikawa, an important sawmilling area of the Catlins, on 26 August 1893. In Taranaki the Eltham and Kaponga Caledonian societies included various sawing and chopping contests at their sports meetings from at least 1894.'* By October 1896 the Otago Witness felt compelled to defend the credentials of the new sport:

Chopping wood is sometimes derisively referred to by writers of the American school as an avocation only suitable for those who betray a deficiency in intellectual capacity, but in Tasmania the practice of it is elevated to an art ... Chopping wood is as honourable as any other employment, and proficiency in it is as commendable as that in any other handicraft - such as, for instance, ploughing. Indeed, we should be disposed to believe that a chopping contest is likely to evoke even

higher qualities of mind, and certainly a higher degree of muscular efficiency, than ploughing. It is impossible to withhold admiration from the spectacle of a muscular and well-trained man deftly plying the axe and displaying in the exhibition a degree of dexterity which would surprise those not familiar with it. 19

There was a significant increase in popularity on the West Coast in the late 1890 s, with all of the mills in the Grey Valley regularly entering their 'favourites' for chopping and sawing events in Greymouth. As the Grey River Argus noted: The timber industry is of great advantage to the business people of the Coast, and these contests have a beneficial effect as to the most suitable tools and methods to be employed in the daily work of the men. Therefore these sports are really deserving of public support'. 20

Although the sport initially seemed to have deeper roots in the South Island rather than Taranaki, it was Eltham residents who took the lead in forming a New Zealand Axemen's Association, as a joint-stock company on 30 March 1901. Its first Axemen's Carnival was staged on 9 November 1901, expanding quickly from 128 entries in 1902 to 243 in 1903. It was soon regarded as the official New Zealand championship, with local and international manufacturers and traders contributing significant cash and equipment prizes. With financial backing from the Axemen's Association, West Coasters Con Casey and Charlie Hutton won world championship titles in Tasmania in 1903 and 1904, an Australian team toured New Zealand in 1904-5, and world championship events were held in Eltham in December 1905, and regularly from 1908 until 1914. By 1907 the Association had at least 35 affiliated clubs, mostly in the North Island, and required all competitive axemen to be licensed. 21

From the outset, accounts of the Eltham carnival and other major chopping and sawing contests were at pains to emphasise the athleticism of the participants and the respectability of proceedings. A report of an axemen's carnival in Southland in March 1902 referred to the 'New Zealand champion chopper, J. More of Orepuke ... a man of splendid physique. A Hercules in build, with a good face and a pleasant smile, no wonder his wins were popular'. 22 When explaining why a 1904 event was being staged over two days, the Otago Witness referred to the 'great strain to which the axemen are subjected in competition events during the one day'. Competitors, after going to considerable expense in coming to town from the backblocks, wished to enter all of the events on the programme in order to recoup expenses and make a few pounds extra. 'The strain is ever so much greater than in ordinary athletic events, and unless a competitor has gone through a systematic course of training then he is rendered physically unfit for days after'. 23 In 1908 the Hawera & Normanby Star praised the 'veritable Sandow's

as regards muscular development' who came from remote districts to compete at Eltham. '[T]here is probably no other branch of sport in which competitors are set such severe tests, and it is therefore imperative that the axemen should be of sound constitution and physically adapted to the task.' Success was attributable not merely to strength and power but to 'science'. 24 As the same source described the competition at Eltham in 1910:

There are no doubt many reasons for the deep interest evinced in this two days' carnival by the public, chief among which may be the purity of the sport. The prizes given by the Axemen's Association run into several hundred pounds, and are such as to attract practically every first-class exponent of the axe and the saw in Australasia. There is no more exhilarating sight in the arena of athletics than honest competition between highly skilled, straight-going muscular giants. And assured of all branches of athletics there is none that numbers among its exponents so high a percentage of the finest specimens of manhood. 25

By this stage, once rather disorderly gatherings at which the excited public frequently encroached on the competition arena had been superseded by strictly run programmes with impartial judges. 26 The strongest endorsement for such claims to respectability came in January 1907 with the inclusion of an axemen's carnival with total prizes of £l5O ($23,000) at the New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch. The Exhibition featured not only the best of colonial industry and progress, but a conscious effort to portray the qualities of colonial manhood in a similar context to the praise accorded New Zealand troops during the South African War and the carefully orchestrated, if sometimes ham-fisted, effort by Premier Richard Seddon to link the success of the 1905 All Blacks to the apparently superior New Zealand environment and social order. There was a strong martial emphasis, with events including the trooping of the colour, a full military parade by volunteers, 5,000 school cadets encamped at the Exhibition, and extensive displays of armaments. A proposal for a rugby tournament was eventually deemed inappropriate at the height of summer. 27 It was therefore determined that the axemen's carnival was the best embodiment of both the athletic prowess of colonial sportsmen and the pioneering endeavour that was gradually taming the country. As The Press enthused of the competitors:

They wore no fancy costume, only the garb in which many of them had fought with nature in her solitudes. Their easy ways and careless costume told at once of the country, and the axes which they wielded

were the visible sign and instrument of its development. Surely there could be no manlier sport, and none more full of meaning than this which drew out the same strength as that which had been exerted to clear the wilderness. The axe is the pioneer of civilisation. 28

By this definition wood chopping was a productive and progressive sport rather than a merely recreational one, and was therefore perhaps better able to navigate around any middle-class reservations over its open professionalism. The Governor, Lord Plunket, had no hesitation in lending his patronage to an Exhibition that featured axemen competing professionally for substantial prizes, and he ultimately became patron of the Axemen's Association. 29 The amateur sporting ideals beloved of many middle-class propagandists were clearly not all encompassing, and New Zealand had within it a range of sporting heroes and measures of sporting success much wider than those most often represented.

Simultaneously with its recognition in Christchurch, the Axemen's Association was involved in a concerted effort to regulate professional sport. In late 1905 the New Zealand Athletic Union was organised in Invercargill with the aim of bringing uniformity to a wide range of 'cash' and professional sports. Among other things it established an elected council, divided New Zealand into administrative centres, and sought to standardise types of events, registration procedures, handicapping and rules against misconduct and corruption throughout the country and extending to visiting competitors from Australia. There were to be no 'confederacies' or other forms of 'fixing' the results of events, and there would be disqualification for entry of athletes under false names or attempts to bribe officials. In athletics a strong stand was also taken against athletes competing as 'maiden' runners or running 'stiff in order to lengthen the odds at subsequent meetings. By 1909 the Athletic Union claimed to cover 'all events requiring skill or science', including athletics, numerous types of wrestling, quoit throwing, throwing the cricket ball, hammer throwing and various musical and dancing events associated with Highland games. Although the latter soon went their separate way under the jurisdiction of Caledonian societies, professional cycling was firmly in the administrative fold by 1914 as part of an extensive and buoyant circuit of seasonal sports days and agricultural and pastoral shows at which sport played a prominent role and sustained a number of fully professional athletes. 30

Such was the success of the Athletic Union in enhancing the image of professional sport, that the generally conservative New Zealand Amateur Athletic Association (NZAAA) was willing to enter discussions to establish 'reciprocity' in the management of events. 11 The NZAAA recognised that while it was possible to run separate competitions for amateurs and professionals in centres of larger population, it was clear that the survival of 'amateur' athletics in many smaller

centres was dependant on co-operation with professional bodies to create combined programmes 32 . Further, both amateur and professional governing bodies had a common enemy in 'private speculators' who organised events on their own terms and outside the authority of recognised governing bodies. In November 1907 a New Zealand Sports Federation was established, with representatives from a wide variety of amateur and professional sports including athletics, boxing, cycling, hockey, rowing, rugby, swimming and tennis. Its objectives were 'the protection and conservation of the interests of each affiliated body, and the maintenance of the existing rights and privileges of such; the mutual recognition by each of each body's suspensions, disqualifications, registrations etc'. 33 In short, the defining issue was not about a conventionally understood cleavage between amateurs and professionals, but about regulated or unregulated sport more generally.

The New Zealand Axemen's Association initially remained at arm's length from these developments. When Southland axemen aligned themselves with the Athletic Union in early 1906, the association threatened to have the Southland Easter Carnival declared an unsanctioned event unless appropriate registration fees were forwarded to Eltham. Through the Athletic Union the Southlanders replied that the Axemen's Association, as a joint-stock company, was 'exhibiting an improper penchant in the direction of money-making' and was not a legitimate national governing body unless it took immediate steps to organise across the colony. If it did not do so, the Athletic Union would endeavour to bring chopping and sawing contests under its own control. 34 These claims were strongly refuted by F. E. Hardy, secretary of the Axemen's Association, who insisted that the registration as a joint-stock company was merely for administrative purposes and pointed out that contests under the jurisdiction of the Axemen's Association had paid out £2067 ($320,000) in prize money in 1906-7 compared with only £7B 10s ($12,000) for events organised by cash athletics clubs in Otago and Southland. 35 Eventually, in April 1907, it was agreed that the Association and Union would remain separate but have a reciprocal arrangement to disqualify any competitor breaking the rules of the other. 36 But in 1908 and 1909 the Athletic Union refused to support the entry of the Axemen's Association to the New Zealand Sports Federation as the sport was still effectively governed by a company rather than an elected representative structure across the whole country. What followed in these convoluted negotiations is far from clear, although it seems that by late 1910 the Eltham Axemen's carnival had the official sanction of the Athletic Union. 37 That the two bodies were embroiled in such protracted arguments about the regulation of athletes and the extent to which they were rewarded for their achievements certainly runs counter to a contemporary amateur insistence that those associated with the finances of professional sport were unscrupulous in their dealings.

The final element in the quest for respectability for wood chopping

revolved around its long-standing association with bookmakers and gambling. From the beginning in Australia side bets between competitors and the presence of bookmakers among the spectators were considered a legitimate part of any competition. In 1894 the Tasmanian parliament legalised use of the totalisator at axemen's championships, 38 while rule 29 of the Royal Woodchopping, Sawing and Axemen's Association of New South Wales was typical of many in stating that: 'Any registered competitor making a private match for any sum of money or trophy shall acquaint the Secretary of the Association of the fact, and shall forward him full particulars of the result, within seven days after the match, or be liable to disqualification or fine'. 39 In New Zealand, although the 1881 Gambling and Lotteries Act had banned gambling on sport between individuals, this prohibition was honoured only in the breach as gambling continued wherever there was public interest in an event. 40 Within the limits of the law the Axemen's Association permitted licensed bookmakers at the Eltham carnival on payment of a fee of £5 ($790) for the two days, and there is ample evidence that they were licensed at other gatherings. 41 But by 1906 the tide was turning as forces mustered, particularly under the influence of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, that would eventually see bookmakers declared illegal in 1910. 42 As the Hokitika Axemen's Carnival approached, the West Coast Times cautioned against one aspect of the considerable popularity of the sport:

There is but one danger, which has had a baneful effect on many forms of sport, which is likely to affect the popularity of chopping and sawing contests, and that is if unlicensed gambling is permitted in connection with these contests unchecked. It is, we know, a difficult matter to control, but the backing of competitors for large sums is bound to degenerate the sport, and should be repressed by all possible means when discovered. 43

This was less an attack on gambling per se than on unregulated gambling. But the Axemen's Association evidently read the mood for more comprehensive change and banned bookmakers altogether before its 1908 carnival. The move seemed to have no detrimental impact on proceedings, with more spectators and entries than before. The Hawera & Normanby Star remarked that: 'The absence of bookmakers certainly frees the sport from any application of crooked dealings, and the additional patronage accorded the Association is certainly proof that the general public appreciate clean sport'. 44

In the years leading to the outbreak of the First World War, wood chopping consolidated its position within the New Zealand sporting calendar. In February 1914 the Auckland Industrial, Agricultural and Mining Exhibition featured an

axemen's carnival spread over three days which drew the best competitors from throughout Australasia and included prizes as high as £l5O ($22,000) for each of the most important events. 45 The last of the great Eltham axemen's carnivals was held in December 1915, after which the demands of the Great War stifled this and much other sport. During the 15 years of carnivals, 20 world titles were decided at Eltham as well as five Australasian and 23 New Zealand titles. When peace returned, wood chopping again emerged as a popular feature of the A & P Show circuit and other local sports gatherings, and significant axemen's carnivals developed at Tuatapere and Raetihi. But its scale and prominence was a thing of the past, and the prizes were not as substantial. The New Zealand Athletic Union finally took control of wood chopping from a somewhat fragmented Axemen's Association in 1920. 46 No doubt the sharp decline of the timber industry in the 19205, as bush clearance slowed dramatically and a 'timber famine' emerged, had a role to play. 47 There was equally a more general decline in professional athletics of all kinds other than perhaps cycling. Amateur sport thrived during the inter-war years as its administrators consciously linked its moral and physical qualities to the same qualities of manhood that had prevailed during the Great

War. The NZAAA and other amateur sporting bodies introduced relatively liberal reinstatement policies for former professionals on the basis that those who had fought for their country ought not to be discriminated against. 48 But a more comprehensive examination of the retreat of professional athletics is needed, although it will have to wait until the Papers Past repertoire for the inter-war period is as full as for earlier times. Without this the fragments of professional sporting activities on the margins of a dominant amateur narrative will be difficult to assemble.

ENDNOTES 1 Hawera & Normanby Star, 30 December 1905, p. 5. 2 Greg Ryan, The Contest for Rugby Supremacy: Accounting for the 1905 All Blacks (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2005); Jock Phillips, A Man's Country: The Image of the Pakeha Male, a History (Auckland: Penguin, 1987), pp. 81-130. 3 Greg Ryan, Contest for Rugby Supremacy, esp. pp. 85-117; Caroline Daley, 'The Invention of 1905', in Tackling Rugby Myths: Rugby and New Zealand Society, 1854-2004, ed. by Greg Ryan (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2005), pp. 69-87; Geoffrey T. Vincent & Toby Harfield, 'Repression and Reform: Responses Within New Zealand Rugby to the Arrival of the "Northern Game", 1907-B'. New Zealand Journal of History 31, no. 2 (1997): 234-40. 4 James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880 sto the Year 2000 (Auckland: Penguin, 2001), pp. 158-73.

5 This point is certainly reinforced by the disproportionate amount of writing on amateur rugby union as opposed to nominally professional rugby league in New Zealand. An exception, in that it covers a number of aspects of early professional sport, is David Grant, On a Roll: A History of Gambling and Lotteries in New Zealand (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 38-47; 68-72. 6 Geoffrey Vincent has gone some way to exploring these themes in New Zealand rugby during this period. See Vincent & Harfield, above, and Geoffrey T. Vincent, "'A Tendency to Roughness": Anti-Heroic Representations of New Zealand Rugby 1890-1914'. Sporting Traditions 14, no. 1 (1997). 7 Papers Past is at http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz.

8 David Grant, On a Roll, pp. 38-47; 68-72. 9 On the evolution of amateurism, see Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 96-99, 104-5, 116-17; John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 1870-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 155-86. 10 For an interpretation of the contradictions of amateurism in nineteenth-century New Zealand, see Geoffrey T. Vincent & Greg Ryan, '"A Small Knot of Muscular Friends": Class and Athletic clubs in Colonial Canterbury, 1870-1890'. Journal of New Zealand Studies 8 (2009): 121-44. See also Martin Crotty, '"Purely and Simply for the Pleasure and Love of the Good Old Sport": The Amateur Question in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Rowing', History Now 2, no.l (1997): 10-11; Arthur C. Swan, The New Zealand Rugby Football Union, 1892-1967 (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1967), pp. 16-21.

11 Geoffrey T. Vincent, "'A Tendency to Roughness'", pp. 93-97. 12 A. H. Grey, Aotearoa and New Zealand: A Historical Geography (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 1994), pp. 383—4; Malcolm McKinnon (ed.), Bateman New Zealand Historical Atlas: Visualising New Zealand (Auckland: David Bateman, 1997), plate 47. 13 Richard Beckett, Axemen, Stand by your Logs! (Sydney: Lansdowne, 1983), p. 65. 14 Ibid., p. 66. 15 Southland Times, 9 September 1891, p. 2. 16 Otago Daily Times, 8 September 1891, p. 2; Southland Times, 1 December 1892, p. 2; Taranaki Herald, 20 July 1893, p. 2. 17 Otago Witness, 10 September 1896, p. 30.

18 Southland Times, 20 December 1888, p. 2; 26 December 1889, p. 2; 29 December 1891, p. 2; 7 August 1893, p. 2; Mataura Ensign, 14 October 1892, p. 4; Hawera & Normanby Star, 24 December 1898, p. 2. See also Eric Warner, 'Early FHistory of the Sport in New Zealand". New Zealand Axemen's News (October 1971): 20; September 1972, pp. 16-17; September 1973, p. 16; October 1980, pp. 11-12; October 1981, p. 12; October 1982, pp. 13-14. 19 Otago Witness, 1 October 1896, p. 14. 20 Grey River Argus, 12 July 1898, p. 2; 1 December 1898, p. 3. 21 Wanganui Herald, 21 April 1903,p. 4; The Press, 18 January 1907, p. 8. 22 Otago Witness, 9 April 1902, p. 44. 23 Otago Witness, 23 March 1904, p. 43. 24 Hawera & Normanby Star, 31 December 1908, p. 5. 25 Hawera & Normanby Star, 6 December 1910, p. 5. 26 Grey River Argus, 1 December 1898, p. 3; Otago Witness, 9 April 1902, p. 44. 27 Jock Phillips, 'Exhibiting Ourselves: The Exhibition and National Identity', in farewell Colonialism: The New Zealand International Exhibition, Christchurch, 1906-07, ed. by John Mansfield Thomson (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1998), p. 23. 28 The Press, 18 January 1907, p. 8.

29 Hawera & Normanby Star, 16 July 1907, p. 5. 30 Otago Witness, 4 April 1906, p. 58; Constitution and Rules & Regulations of the New Zealand Athletic Union Inc. (Dunedin: The Union, [1909]); Constitution and Bye-Laws & Regulations of the New Zealand Athletic & Cycling Union Inc. (Timaru: New Zealand Athletic & Cycling Union, [1914]). 31 The Press, 26 January 1907, p. 11. 32 For example, Otago Witness, 16 May 1906, p. 58; The Press, 27 August 1907, p. 9. 33 The Press, 1 November 1907, p. 8. 34 Otago Witness, 21 March 1906, p. 53; Bay Of Plenty Times, 25 October 1907, p. 3. 35 Star, 13 April 1907, p. 5. 36 Otago Witness, 20 March 1907, p. 63; Hawera & Normanby Star, 18 April 1907, p. 8. 37 The Press, 28 February 1908, p. 8; Otago Witness, 3 March 1909, p. 63; Hawera & Normanby Star, 30 November 1910, p. 5.

38 Wanganui Herald, 29 September 1894, p. 2. 39 Richard Beckett, Axemen, Stand by your Logs!, pp. 69, 72-73 40 David Grant, On a Roll, pp. 68-72. 41 Hawera & Normanby Star, 29 November 1904, p. 3. 42 David Grant, On a Roll, pp. 84-85; 89-92. 43 West Coast Times, 23 October 1906, p. 2. 44 Hawera & Normanby Star, 31 December 1908, p. 5. 45 Auckland Star, 27 February 1914, p. 6; 28 February 1914, p. 10. See also, Auckland Industrial Agricultural and Mining Exhibition: Official Catalogue and Guide (Auckland: Goldfinch System, [1913]). 46 Hawera & Normanby Star, 8 December 1920, p. 7; 8 July 1922, p. 4; 15 September 1922, p. 5. 47 A. FI. Grey, Aotearoa and New Zealand, pp. 383-4 48 For example, Evening Post, 3 March 1920, p. 2; 22 November 1924, p. 18; 4 October 1928, p. 6.