Sport and Colonialism in 19th Century Australasia - LA84 Foundation

of endeavour: not just sport. Great lawyers, Prime Ministers,
and leading figures in the community played down the cult of
personality. There has been within New Zealand a resounding
display of egalitarianism, that continues up to the present day.
When Sir Keith Holyoake died in 1983, an obituary notice, on
New Zealand's second-longest-servinc Prime Minister, captured
the "common touch,, that permeates so much of the fabric of
society.
During the short walk from his official residence to
Parliament each morning he stopped at three or four
shops... to talk on the matters of the day and what
would win the big race on Saturday... The ease with
which ordinary New Zealanders could approach him
seems almost unbelievable...the Prime Minister's
number was in the phone book. He would take a call,
even from a Saturday-night drunk. 22
"Play Up and Play the Game,, was one of a number of British
aphorisms of the nineteenth century that illustrate how sport
became an expression of a national and religious ethos. The
athletic emphasis, however competitive the game, was to play
well not necessarily to win. The difference for colonial New
Zealand was that the dominant social activity was not cricket,
a uniquely English synthesis of sport and morality but rugby.
Cricket had always provided the analogy for the game of life-,,
. . . it's more than a game. It's an institution". 23
Cricket became
the sport of the Empire and carried its ethical values
with it. The phrases "fair play", "not cricket", and "a sticky
wicket,, were used as familiarly by an educated Indian and outback
Australian on vast sheep-stations, as they were by an
English schoolboy. 24
In New Zealand schools sport was taught
and organised as if at British facsimile public schools. 25
However, New Zealand school graduates were not going out to the
massive network of the colonies and the British Empire. They
stayed at home, worked hard and played harder. Why was it that
rugby football became the ethical examplar of New Zealand social
and spiritual life? The game had skill and courage, and physical
violence, and physical contact. Moreover, it was a game
with singular structural properties. Not only did classes meet,
they were crushed together and bumped about. Lansbury sees the
critical feature as "class" and argues the case that cricket
"sustained the class structure of English society". 26
If this
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