Gallery
NZ Natives'
Rugby Tour
Rugby and Society |
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What effect did the Natives' tour have on rugby and wider New Zealand society? Along with a privately organised British tour to New Zealand in 1888, it showed that New Zealanders could compete on equal terms with representatives of the imperial centre at rugby in a way they were embarrassingly unable to do at cricket. These tours stimulated the creation of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union in 1892: how else could fully representative teams be chosen and future tours organised? The fact that Eyton had failed to make a significant profit also made future private ventures less attractive. Players like Tom Ellison brought back tactical lessons from Britain which encouraged further innovation here, notably the invention of the positions of 'wing forward' (a second halfback posted to disrupt opponents' moves around the scrum) and 'five-eighths' (links between the 'halves' and the 'threequarters' who enabled greater emphasis on attacking back play). New Zealand rugby players have exercised the utmost creativity in their interpretations of the rules ever since. The societal implications are more elusive. But it is difficult to imagine another nineteenth-century European colony in which a member of an indigenous race (Ellison) would have been captain of the first national team representing the most important sport. In the same year (1893), Maori women won the vote alongside Pakeha women. The year before, New Zealand had gained its first Maori Cabinet minister, James Carroll. Within a few years, Maori were sharing � however grudgingly and inequitably � in old-age pensions and the fruits of other Liberal social legislation. At the end of the decade, in an ironic twist on rugby's intended role in disciplining young empire-builders for battle, many Maori were accepted into contingents heading for the South African War which the British army had decreed would be whites-only. All this was far from 'equality'. But it showed that 'racial amalgamation' did not always and inevitably work to the disadvantage of those whom the colonisers sought to 'amalgamate', in sport or outside it. |
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