Sport and Colonialism in 19th Century Australasia - LA84 Foundation

RECREATIONAL AND SPORTING VALUES ON THE FRINGE
OF AN IMPERIAL EMPIRE: THE RESHAPING OF A
BRITISH HERITAGE IN COLONIAL NEW ZEALAND
SCOTT A.G.M. CRAWFORD
GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY
I
In the history of civilisation the English can claim as
their most important exports to the world literature, language,
parliamentary democracy, and sport. Indeed Anthony Trollope
observed in 1868 that "England's influence in the nineteenth
century would be seen not so much in the imitation of representative
institutions, such as trial by jury or freedom of the
press, but in public amusements". l
The game sports were introduced
to Scotland by English country gentlemen at the beginning
of the 1800s and, during the century, the Scottish Highlands and
Border country became a holiday base for the absentee English
squires and landowners. English sporting country gentlemen
sailed to America in the 1700s and their athletic interests
flourished on the slave economies of Virginia, Maryland, the
Carolinas and Georgia. 2
Race days in the Bahamas of the early
1800s reproduced the affected manners, etiquette and social
elitism of the Ascot meetings in England. 3
Polo was played in
India, croquet in Hong Kong, pigs were stuck from horseback in
the Cape of Good Hope, cricket was played in the Falkland Is-
lands. Wherever the British went sporting activities and recreational
pastimes were exported to the British Empire and were
an integral aspect of that cultural baggage.
It should be emphasised that it was not only the sports
themselves, but the entire Victorian ideology of sport - its
values, attitudes, assumptions, and class bias - that was an
integral part of this cultural diffusion. 4
This ideology, including
the notion of Muscular Christianity, was a part of a
broader ideological cluster that comprised a renewed militarism
(from the Crimea to Mafeking); a devotion, indeed obsession,
with royalty; an identification and worship of national heroes;
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