ABSTRACT
SOME KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF, and influences on, this bookmay help readers understand my arguments and conclusions. My early research interests – apartheid sport and the sports boycott of South Africa, tensions between surfers and surf lifesavers on Australian beaches, and the olympic games and international relationships1 – followed my academic background in politics, a discipline based on the principles of advocacy. When I began teaching a 200-level survey course on the history of sport at the University of Otago in the mid-1990s, I gave it a strong political flavour. The political dimension was less pronounced when I was teaching a 300-level course on the history of New Zealand sport. Politics underscored New Zealand’s sporting relations with its great rugby rival South Africa, and especially that cataclysmic event in the nation’s history, the 1981 Springbok rugby tour. However, the literature on these two subjects was, and remains, sparse and insufficient to support an upper level university course.2 The paucity of literature in this area raised the question, what were historians of New Zealand sport studying in the second half of the 1990s? In fact, two key themes – the development of rugby as the national game and the marginalisation of women in local sporting culture – were potentially highly political. But most of the works on these subjects were either avowedly a-political histories or sociological treatises. From the perspective of a political advocate, this struck me as strange. What were the objectives of historians who shied from politics? Were these colleagues really writing history for its own sake? These simple questions launched my quest to discover how other professional historians of sport interpret their field and ply their craft.
