Sport and Leisure in Colonial New Zealand, 1840-c.1890.

This thesis explores the role that sport played in New Zealand society from 1840 to c.1890. Four main chronological chapters discuss the developments across the six settlements of Auckland, Taranaki, Wellington, Nelson, Canterbury, and Otago. The discussion examines how sport grew and changed during this period, and how sport became intertwined with the social lives of those who arrived as colonists and settler migrants, those whose home it was, and increasingly over the period, those born in New Zealand. The main sports participated in by the inhabitants of New Zealand during this period were cricket, sailing, and horse racing, followed by rugby from c.1870 onwards. These were joined by an array of other minor sports including tennis, football, and boxing that formed a diverse sporting scene. Sports were played across the whole year with clubs and social groups having formed from an early stage, but public holidays such as anniversaries were also often celebrated with a sporting event such as a regatta, horse race, or cricket match. Participation and spectatorship to some degree included all strata of New Zealand society across gender, race, class and others with each affecting how and why sport was engaged with. Sport has long been included in general histories of New Zealand, whether at a national or local level histories. In these histories it has been a minor observation without much analysis, depth or careful study and has existed from time to time rather than as a consistent component of New Zealand society. Specific sport history in New Zealand is still in its infancy, with the first book dedicated exclusively to examining the history of sport in New Zealand being Ryan and Watson’s Sport and the New Zealanders published in 2018. Issues of race and gender have attracted some commentary. Hokowhitu’s works on the perception of Māori masculinity and how sport shaped this image has added to the historiography on race in the sporting scene in New Zealand. Macdonald’s chapter in The New Oxford History of New Zealand (2009) argued that being a woman was the most exclusionary factor in New Zealand sport, instead noting how ideas of masculinity were pervasive in sport during this period. Curtin and Palmer’s works, largely about women involved in rugby, have added to the historiography on gender which has grown in the last decade. This was added to by Auger and Simpson’s The Warm Sun on my Face in 2020 which detailed the history of women’s cricket in New Zealand. This thesis adds to this historiography by examining sport in the smaller communities of New Zealand as well as positioning it within the larger systems of sport within the British Empire. This has been done by examining specific sporting events, such as the Auckland Regatta, interprovincial cricket matches, and international tours, as well as the general sporting scene of clubs, committees and schools. The themes of the existing historiography, of gender, race, and class related patterns of inclusion and exclusion have been put into a more localised context, exploring how time and place affected how these themes were interacted with. The findings are that the nature of sport varied vastly from place to place, and changes were swift as a gap of just ten years had profound effects on the sporting scene. Race was used as a divide in sport from the beginning of the period under review, however Māori participation was still frequent although it would decrease from the mid-1850s onwards before seeing a resurgence in rugby from the mid-1870s onwards. The military and colonial officials were key to the early popularity of sport, especially cricket, as they made up a significant proportion of the population in the 1840s and 1850s, before being involved in the conflicts of the 1860s. The major primary source from this period for the study of sport in colonial New Zealand is newspapers. Newspapers were common from the beginning of the major settlements of New Zealand and reported extensively on sporting events. More than just giving an account of the result of the events, they would give a commentary on the general running of the event allowing for a far deeper examination of the social dynamics at such fixtures. There were also the school magazines from many of the elite public schools that started to be published in the 1880s and detailed the sporting events of the school such as fixtures, training, and the construction of sports facilities, as well as alumni news. The conclusions of this thesis are that sport was an integral part of life in New Zealand both as light entertainment and recreation as well as a tool for people within the colonial structure to impart their imperial aims