ABSTRACT
Like much of the rest of the English-speaking world, Aotearoa New Zealand sees itself as a place that is uniquely or particularly sporting.1 Popular writing about sport consumes public spaces and discourses, while scholarly analyses concurrently produce, reproduce and critique dominant socio-cultural discourses. Most notably, Aotearoa New Zealand’s sports history, like much other scholarly writing about Aotearoa New Zealand’s history, is built within and builds a nationalist frame (as reproduced by this Companion). Despite a sense that the study of sport has been marginalized in academic history, New Zealand’s sporting past has been addressed in a number of mainstream scholarly sources. Belich’s two-volume general history and The New Zealand Journal of History, as well as encyclopaedia and reference books, including Else’s history of women’s organizations and McLintock’s Encyclopaedia, have given considerable attention to a national sporting past.2
New Zealand’s sports history has also been explored in Douglas Booth’s continuing development of a frame for sports historiography grounded in genre and explanatory paradigms, the first derived from work by Alun Munslow and Keith Jenkins, the second from David Hackett Fisher.3 Booth’s work will be considered in the final section of this chapter, and provides a framework against which this chapter may be read. In writing sports history for Aotearoa New Zealand, scholars have accentuated three
interwoven themes. In the first, there is a propensity to construct a history that is nationally distinctive. In the second, paradoxical given the first, there is a lack of comparative historical analysis. The third principle tendency is a focus on masculinist games – especially rugby union. This approach draws on a deep popular tradition of sports writing that until the 1960s addressed a wider range of body culture practices, including wrestling, wood chopping, cycling and equestrianism, than has been seen in more recent writing.4
