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RNZ News
6 days ago
- Sport
- RNZ News
Wild facts about the first All Blacks
The first New Zealand rugby team played its inaugural match, defeating a Wellington XV 9–0 at Newtown Park in 1884. Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library Pumas v All Blacks Kick-off: 9:10am Sunday 17 August Estadio Mario Alberto Kempes, Córdoba Live blog updates on RNZ The All Blacks return to action this weekend against the Pumas in Cordoba. While things have come a long way from training on the decks of ships, or making a mad dash from milking the cows to playing a test match, the age of professionalism was paved through over a century of amateur pioneers. The early days of the All Blacks were full of incredible tales. Though the team did not officially adopt the iconic name until 1905, the country has been selecting its best players to represent Aotearoa since 1884. Here are some of the most fascinating, quirky and tragic stories from New Zealand rugby's earliest characters. An All Black strawweight John Dumbell, an 1884 All Black who weighed just 50kg. An ironic surname considering he could have been curled by a few of today's All Blacks. All Black shot dead Alfred Cooke, who debuted in 1894, was killed in 1900. He was shot accidentally by a friend during a shooting expedition at Lake Ellesmere / Te Waihora, preventing him from seeing his brother debut for the All Blacks in 1903. Coast to coast Henry Butland traversed the Southern Alps on foot to get from Hokitika to Lyttleton for the 1893 tour of Australia. Took part in the Klondike Gold Rush and his son Jack founded Chesdale Cheese. The OG Barrett brothers The Bayley bunch had six brothers who played for Taranaki in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries with Alfred and Walter making their debuts for New Zealand in 1893 and '94 respectively. Horse kills All Black James Lambie first played for New Zealand in 1893. In 1905 while travelling home on horseback after watching Taranaki play Great Britain, he was kicked in the head by his horse and died as a result. Boots and bulbs William Balch, who won a sole New Zealand cap in 1894, was also a noted authority on growing daffodils. Boy amongst men Joe Warbick, who played 21 matches for the 'Natives' and seven for New Zealand starting in 1884, was the youngest person to ever play provincial rugby at just 15. He would often play barefooted and could slot a droppie from halfway. Killed by the Waimangu Geyser eruption of 1903. The fraud forward James O'Donnell was selected for the first national side to tour Australia in 1884, but was arrested on a fugitive warrant at Clinton and returned to Invercargill to face fraud charges. A taboo romance In a 19th century Romeo and Juliet tale, David Gage and a Scottish Aristocrat fell in love during the 1888-89 'Natives' Tour, eventually forced to part ways due to interracial romance being forbidden in Scottish high society. The story was adapted into a three part mini series called 'Savage Play.' The 1888 Native Team played 107 matches over 14 months, winning 78, drawing 6, and losing 23. Photo: Boats 'n all Thomas Ryan, the first player to kick a conversion and a drop goal for New Zealand in 1884, was a renowned artist with three of his pieces in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery. He also skippered a ship for 20 years which ran between Taupō and Tokaanu. Typhoid takes trailblazer Named the first captain of the All Blacks in 1884, William Millton died from typhoid at just 29. Original big bopper Timothy O'Connor was the heaviest All Black in the original 1884 side at a whopping 89kg. Swept away John Taiaroa, a member of the first new Zealand side in 1884, drowned on New Years Eve in 1907 after slipping off his boat in the Otago Harbour. His body was recovered two weeks later, ten miles away. All Black author Billy Stead, a member of the 1905 Originals tour to Britain, wrote 'The Complete Rugby Footballer,' published in 1906, widely regarded as one of the best rugby manuals ever written. Founder of the fern Thomas Ellison was the first captain of New Zealand in 1893, one of the first Māori lawyers in New Zealand, and was the man behind the iconic silver fern on black uniform. All Black hero In 1897, All Black Robert Oliphant was given a bravery award for saving a little girl from drowning in the Auckland Harbour. Mining death An All Black in 1894, John Swindley died in Sumatra in a mining accident in 1918. In the family A member of the first All Black team of 1884, Henry Robert's son Teddy, also a halfback, was a member of the All Blacks in 1913, making them the first father-son duo to play for New Zealand. Edward and William Millton marked the first All Black brothers in 1884. A lucky escape In 1906, Fred Roberts was too ill to travel home with the All Blacks and stayed in San Francisco for several weeks. After surgery to remove his infected tonsils, he travelled back to New Zealand, narrowly missing the 1906 San Francisco earthquake which destroyed his hotel. Reporting from the field Ernie Booth was also a journalist at the same time he played for the All Blacks from 1905-07. Way to get the scoops! On field fatality In 1913 on a tour to Canada, a player on the Victoria team was carried from the field after suffering a big hit from an All Black. He died after the game and it was first thought this was due to concussion of the brain, but a medical investigation showed that he had suffered a heart attack. Tri-code star Before there was Israel Folau, there was George Gillett who played for the All Blacks from 1905-08, and also represented the the New Zealand rugby league and Australian rules sides. An early artist's impression of a rugby match. Photo: Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Otago Daily Times
17-07-2025
- General
- Otago Daily Times
Century farm entries open
Collecting and securing farming families stories is vital to secure New Zealand's heritage, Century Farm's Eddie Fitzgerald, of Lawrence, says. PHOTO: NICK BROOK The Century Farm and Station Awards committee is ready to receive applications for next year's annual awards. Applications from all New Zealand will be celebrated at the 20th ceremony dinner, in Lawrence in May next year. Keeping a farm in a family across generations, through challenging times for a century or more, was an impressive achievement worthy of recognition and Century Farms set out to capture and preserve this history which might otherwise be lost. Families were invited to compile and send in the story of their farm's history, with copies of photographs and documents for the awards committee to permanently archive at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington and each year a new booklet was produced to summarise and celebrate the families. "Century Farms has collected more than 650 stories since it began 2005," Century Farms chairman Edward Fitzgerald said. "Those stories of resilience, integrity and innovation are worth preserving and re-telling, not just from a farming perspective but for our cultural and social perspective as well."
Otago Daily Times
08-07-2025
- General
- Otago Daily Times
Century Farms ready for new applications
Collecting and securing farming families stories is vital to secure New Zealand's heritage, Century Farm's Eddie Fitzgerald, of Lawrence says. PHOTO: NICK BROOK The Century Farm and Station Awards committee is ready to receive applications for next year's ceremony. Applications from across New Zealand will be celebrated in Lawrence in May 2026. Keeping a farm in a family across generations, through challenging times, for a century or more, is an impressive achievement worthy of recognition. Century Farms sets out to capture and preserve this history which might otherwise be lost. Families are invited to compile and send in the story of their farm's history, with copies of photographs and documents for the awards committee to permanently archive at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. Each year a new booklet is produced to summarise and celebrate the awarded families. "Century Farms has collected more than 650 stories since it began 2005," Century Farms chair Edward Fitzgerald said. "From breaking the land by hand, horse and modern machinery, farming continues as the backbone of our country's prosperity and reputation through thick and thin. "Those stories of resilience, integrity and innovation are worth preserving and re-telling, not just from a farming perspective but for our cultural and social perspective as well."
Otago Daily Times
15-05-2025
- General
- Otago Daily Times
Fewer at Century Farms awards
A key national farming event, Century Farms, will welcome lower-than-usual numbers south to its awards this year, although organisers expect the drop to be temporary. The awards honour families who have farmed the same land for 100 years or more. It recognises the early pioneers who cultivated and transformed the country's untamed land into the agricultural industry that exists today, and the families who are still farming those lands. Century Farms celebrates its 19th year in Lawrence on Saturday, and chairman Eddie Fitzgerald said organisers and volunteers were ready to welcome more than 250 guests from across the country to the small rural township. Many of their descendants continued to produce crops and livestock on the land with the same passion, hard work and perseverance shown in those early days, Mr Fitzgerald said. Although the number of families was down to 22 this year, that still entailed a significant effort from local volunteers to mark the occasion. "Because the event takes a lot of organisation, applications are already open for next year. We already have a good start on applicants for 2026, suggesting it could be a big one again. "In 2021 we welcomed 80 families across two weekends, which was a significant challenge, so in some ways 22 is a good number, allowing us to focus on providing a fantastic experience and a warm Lawrence welcome for our visitors." Family histories are celebrated during an awards dinner at the town's Simpson Park, then accompanying records archived at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. Three sesquicentennial families would receive awards this weekend, Mr Fitzgerald said. "Increasingly, with the value of land nowadays, succession within the same family can be harder and harder to achieve. "We're seeing a lot of farms leaving families in the present climate, which makes the achievements of our century farmers, marking either 100 years or 150 years like the three sesquicentennial families this year, all the more remarkable." Long-standing farming families often contributed significantly to their region in more ways than simply economically, he said. "For many, the efforts of their ancestors have been underappreciated or completely unacknowledged. Through wars, depressions, pandemics, droughts and floods, financial crisis and government policies these families have survived and built an amazing legacy. They have stories worth telling, not just from a farming perspective but a cultural and social perspective as well. "It's a real honour to acknowledge their hard work and perseverance."
Otago Daily Times
09-05-2025
- Science
- Otago Daily Times
The origins of us
Plain of the Ruahanga, opening into Palliser Bay near Wellington , 1843, by Samuel Charles Brees, hand-coloured lithograph. Alexander Turnbull Library. In 1843, Brees and Taringa Kuri, probably a Ngāti Raukawa rangatira, made the first of two expeditions into the Wairarapa to determine the feasibility of building a road. This is the middle panel of three, and shows a pig hunt under way not far from Cape Palliser, Cook's name for Matakitakiakupe, close to where Kupe is said to have made landfall. Creating New Zealand was a novel experiment, informed as it was by time and place, Emeritus Prof Erik Olssen tells Paul Gorman. Experiments aren't always carried out in a laboratory, with people in white coats and bubbling test tubes. Sometimes they take place in the real world, in real time — social experiments aimed at changing societies and, if they have the best of intentions, making a fairer world. Then there was European colonisation, a social experiment that played out across the globe in the second half of the last millennium. It was often brutal and unethical, resulting in the deaths of millions of indigenous people and the loss of their cultures. Repercussions from such repressive, murderous colonialism still ripple through those communities. Aotearoa in the 18th and 19th centuries was also the scene of an experiment, one that took place within that context of colonisation, but a far more benign experiment, argues Dunedin Emeritus Prof Erik Olssen in a book released this week. The Origins of an Experimental Society: New Zealand, 1769-1860 (Auckland University Press) is the first of three planned volumes by the University of Otago historian, whose research cuts across politics, society, ideas, culture and economics. The book focuses on how Pākehā settlers, imbued with evangelical humanitarianism and brought up on the Enlightenment school of thought in the 18th century, met and interacted with Māori and how both peoples worked together to develop a "distinctively experimental society". Colonisation post-James Cook's arrival in 1769 became one of the few post-Enlightenment experiments in building a new country anywhere in the world, Olssen says. European settlers had new-found belief in the powers of reason and experience to improve peoples and societies. The Missionary Settlement Rangihoua on the North Side of the Bay of Islands, Unknown artist, c.1832. National Library of Australia. In 1815 John Nicholas noted that Rangihoua was surrounded by "several plantations of potatoes, coomeras, and other vegetables, and the cultivation had such an appearance of neatness and regularity, that a person not acquainted with the ... natives could never suppose it was the work of uncivilized barbarians" ( Narrative of a Voyage , Vol. 1, pp.1701). The pā has been stylised, but the divisions between the houses and cultivations are carefully shown. The long low building in the centre of the mission is missionary Thomas Kendall's schoolhouse. They hoped Māori would not be driven to extinction but take their place as equals in a modern commercial society, a "Better Britain", one fairer and more just than the one they had left behind. "In turn, Māori adapted these new ideas to their own ends, giving up slavery and inter-tribal warfare, and adapting the institutions of the colonisers in ways that would re-define the experiments," the book's media release says. "This then is an ethnography of 'tāngata Pākehā', a people of European descent changed by their encounters with 'tāngata Māori' and their land — just as Māori themselves changed — and the story of the society they built together." The book's introduction sets the scene: "The islands of New Zealand were colonised by two seafaring peoples, the Polynesians from around 1350 and the Europeans from the early 1800s. In 1642 the Dutch sailor Abel Tasman arrived. "Had his first brief contact with Māori led on to further European arrivals in the same century, New Zealand's history would have been very different; but Europeans did not return until the late 18th century, in the so-called "Second Age of Discovery", and this second arrival coincided with the intellectual transformation now commonly known as the Enlightenment. "This book contends that the timing of encounters between tāngata whenua and Europeans, and the European colonisation of New Zealand, has profoundly shaped its subsequent history. While that history echoed the broad shape of earlier colonial histories in other places, particularly in other settler societies, it also diverged and took its own course in important ways." Talking to The Weekend Mix , Olssen says he is aware the findings of his book may not resonate with current views of colonisation and the harm it has done. "It possibly will attract the ire of some people. I mean, I've called it an ethnography of the Europeans, and I want to make it clear that, especially in the North Island, they're interacting with Māori so extensively, and Māori were so central in a sense to the [New Zealand] Company's view of what New Zealand was about. "I hope that weakens the sense of 'he's just trying to justify colonisation'. Some people like that are ... probably not going to read it." Putting together such a large volume of history from primary and secondary sources is an intellectually challenging task, even for an experienced academic. View of Arched Rock, on the Coast of New Zealand; with an Hippa, or Place of Retreat, on the Top of it , by Sydney Parkinson, 1769-1784. Alexander Turnbull Library. Olssen says that, originally, he was going to devote the 1990s to the book. "It was an idea in the back of my mind, really. It began as a short history of New Zealand, centred on the fundamental argument that what is distinctive about a neo-European society is that it's thoroughly post the Enlightenment. So, people will no longer look back to tradition for answers — they're pretty suspicious if you suggest that that is going to help them find an answer to a problem." Academic and departmental matters then interceded, but during a summer fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1997-98 he completed a draft, "though I wasn't very happy with it". After retirement in 2001 and other book projects, Olssen, now 83, knuckled down and worked intensively on the book from about 2013 till 2016. He says he now has a pretty good draft of the second volume, covering from 1860 to the end of World War 1, and has a rough draft of volume three, which will run from then until more modern times. He faced many challenges in compiling and analysing so many documents across different subject areas, including reading French expedition accounts to New Zealand in their own language, and carefully interpreting and reinterpreting historical sources. There was also the need, as an academic, to maintain intellectual curiosity over many years, avoid making assumptions and writing simplistic narratives about class and race, and to keep up with emerging findings. It would be easy to feel daunted by such a vast project, wouldn't it? "Well, I enjoy the writing. Maybe I just realise now the world's vastly more complicated, so it's more difficult writing. When I was younger it was simpler and quicker to write. But I've always enjoyed writing and drafting, and I can get lost in it. If anything is going wrong in the world, I can lock myself in my study and I don't even think about what's going on. "I don't work at night anymore, except in a total emergency. Writing in the morning is my ideal life — write till lunchtime, might do a little bit in the afternoon. If a bright idea comes to me, I'll try to grab it while I'm thinking of it, before it disappears. But I'm not a very good touch-typist." The book was a matter of "bringing stuff together", he says. "The first taproot for the project was, 'Is there a New Zealand political tradition?'. There's quite a lot on it for the 1890s onwards, a time of social reform, but there wasn't much for the 19th century. And so, thinking about that, the founding fathers — more fathers than mothers — such as [Edward Gibbon] Wakefield and co, began to attract my attention. Emeritus Prof Erik Olssen has published the first book in what he intends to be a three-volume exploration of New Zealand's experimental society. Photo: Gregor Richardson "The second taproot was when I was at high school, and the same at Otago [University], you couldn't do New Zealand history. There was an MA paper which looked at British imperialism in the Pacific, and that included some New Zealand stuff, but that was it. "That didn't interest me, but I did do a master's thesis on New Zealand history. I couldn't think of a topic, but I was sitting around in the student café and this guy said, 'oh, you should do John A. Lee'. So I did, and that became my first book. "There used to be a joke that there was so little written about New Zealand history that was acceptable to scholars that you could read it all in one summer, while babysitting." Olssen had much of the material when he started writing, or so he thought. "A friend who read chapter one, on Cook's voyages, said to me, 'I think you need to say a bit more about what they thought about the Māori'. As soon as he said it, I thought, yeah, well that's true. And that became a massive rabbit hole, because the English were really more obsessed with class, and they weren't interested in race. "I had to master a whole lot about attitudes to race then that I wasn't going to be including in the book. It took me time to realise the English cared about class and the North Americans were more concerned with race." With the book covering so much ground, it's hard to know where to start with an overview. In the book, Olssen says New Zealand's history as a new nation, dominated by British settlers, is distinctive "precisely because it became entangled with the ferment of ideas generated by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, both of which stressed the ability of humans to use reason to manage the world and improve both themselves and their society". Olssen told The Mix he was particularly fascinated by several individuals, including Cook, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Bishop George Selwyn. "I tracked down papers generated by the last two still held in private hands by descendants in England. I also came to think that their historical importance had been dismissed too completely." A group I once saw in Maori Land, New Plymouth , by William Strutt, 1856, pencil and wash. Alexander Turnbull Library. William Strutt had been trained as an artist in Paris, but then migrated to settle and reinvent himself as a farmer. In this work two Māori men and a woman canter on horseback, the woman wearing a top hat and riding side-saddle, the men in peaked caps and upright in their saddles. Not surprisingly, the image stuck in Strutt's memory. Among other things the painting illustrates the speed with which Māori had adopted the horse and European conventions as to how men and women ought to ride. Wakefield — whose chequered past included a conviction for kidnapping a 15-year girl — had been planning two church-based colonies in New Zealand. One was to be Scots-Presbyterian, involving a vision of a "New Edinburgh"; the other Church of England, eventually the Canterbury Association. In 1846 Charles Kettle, a native of Kent who had learned surveying in Wellington before heading to Scotland to promote the Otago Association, was chosen to survey Dunedin. He used novel trigonometric techniques in designing a townscape that adapted the rectangular grid to a difficult site while making provision for "Public Buildings, Sites for Places of Worship and Instruction, Baths, Wharfs ... Cemeteries, Squares, a Park, and other places for health and Recreation", including an extensive town belt that enclosed the future city within an irregular crescent of native bush. Leading up to 1840 and the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Māori were expected by the William Hobson administration to help shape the course of events and be protected by it, Olssen says in the book. Where Māori and Pākehā children grew up together or married, they learned enough English and Māori to move quite easily between both worlds. Over the same period, 1800-1840, the tribes had to achieve a larger sense of unity, prefigured as it was in the increasing use of the word Māori to differentiate themselves from Pākehā, their word for the polyglot mix of nationalities who arrived on their shores. Although Hobson's administration consisted of the normal officers — a judge, a superintendent of police, a surveyor general, a colonial secretary and a treasurer — he was also instructed to appoint a Protector of Aborigines and to be guided by the imperial government's determination to protect the "Aborigines of New Zealand" from the evil consequences of colonisation, while assisting the missionaries in helping this most remarkable people continue their advance from "barbarism" to "civilisation". Olssen points out the awareness of women's importance in settling the new country, with Wakefield's observation that "an unbalanced sex ratio" was "the fundamental source of the pathology of previous frontier societies". Hence, young married couples and a roughly equal number of young single men and women became central to systematic colonisation. Although E.G. Wakefield agreed with Adam Smith that women's economic contribution was of little importance, he also agreed with John Millar, a luminary of the Scottish Enlightenment, that the status and position of women in any society was a measure of that society's sociocultural development and refinement. New Zealand's temperate climate and fertile soils quickly attracted plants from around the world. Horticultural societies proliferated and domestic gardens soon became part of Wakefield's experiment. Protestant mission wives had set the trend, planting honeysuckle and roses, as well as almost every fruit and vegetable known in Britain. Church cemeteries also became adorned with flower beds and ornamental shrubs. "Making roses grow where no flowers grew before," as Auckland's first harbourmaster remarked — providing a picture postcard summary of colonisation together with its justification. In the Aglionby or Matukituki Valley, looking into the Otapawa. 20th Feb. , by William Fox, 1864. Alexander Turnbull Library. Fox loved the physical challenges of colonial life and in 1846 joined Charles Heaphy and Thomas Brunner in exploring Nelson provinces southwest, guided by Kehu of Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri, a superb bushman and devout Wesleyan. During these journeys Fox made sketches and later worked some up with watercolours. Critics have claimed that some of Fox's works express the widespread British belief that land not actively cultivated by Māori was available for colonisation. This image, however, portrays a Māori man — possibly Ngāi Tahu Poutini, but probably Kehu — making traditional use of resources by catching a weka. That well-tended image was not without its challengers. The labourers' revolt of the early 1840s proved enormously significant and challenging to the experiment here of a "Better Britain", the book says. Promised plenty of work, wages, access to land and free medical assistance, labourers soon found wages and rations cut because few capitalists had also migrated. Nelson's labourers summed up the issue, saying if there was no work for them they had still been guaranteed one guinea a week with rations. "We do not want large fortunes or Extraordinary Incomes but to live Comfortably and decently." Dissatisfied with the lack of response, and furious when their wages were not paid, a "disorderly mob", many of them armed and "inflamed with alcohol", rioted. On another occasion, furious labourers threw their supervisor into a ditch. Many of those dependent on selling their labour took their cue from settler Chartists and socialists, and now thought of themselves as "the working men" or even "the working class", a novel collective identity that signalled a shift from a social order based on rank to one based solely on occupation. The well-to-do panicked. Did the great post-Enlightenment "experiment" in New Zealand work? In Olssen's view, it was a mixed outcome. "In terms of experiment one — to protect Māori in developing a new society — that did work, though I think we would now say perhaps they (settlers) were excessively gloomy, and that Māori wouldn't have died out regardless of what had been done to them. "They had been very obsessed with, or preoccupied with, the fate of the Amerindians, especially the Spanish conquest of Central America in which millions died. So, they thought this was inevitable, but were certainly anxious that it did not happen. Because right from Cook, contrary to Tasman, they held Polynesians in general and Māori in particular in very high regard. "The second experiment was to make a better Britain. Right now, for somebody my age, if you'd asked us in about 1980 or '90, we'd probably say, 'yeah, we've done that'. "But sitting here 30 or 40 years later, you read about the meth and the violence, the poverty and the homelessness. So, probably a question mark on that one."
