GAME OF THE PEOPLE

JOHN SULLIVAN

DESCRIPTION First New Zealand rugby league team, 1907

MAKER / ARTIST Photographer unknown

REFERENCE PA-Coll-3060: MNZ-1030-1/4-F

DESCRIPTION Match between Brunner and Waro-Rakau rugby league clubs, West Coast, South Island, 2000–05

MAKER / ARTIST Damer Farrell (b. 1943)

REFERENCE PA-Group-00329: PADL-000438/DSC_923

From the time the first rugby league match was played on New Zealand soil in 1908, the sport has had an important role in the life of working-class communities throughout the country. Strongly centred on whānau, family and community, the code has always held great appeal for Māori and Pasifika players, many of whom have represented this country at an international level.

The photograph above shows a game in progress between the Brunner (blue jerseys) and Waro-Rakau (red jerseys) clubs, and was taken sometime in the early 2000s by Damer Farrell (b. 1943), a commercial photographer based in Greymouth who freelanced for the Greymouth Star. It is part of a collection of West Coast images acquired by the Turnbull Library from Farrell in 2008.

Rugby league was founded in England in 1890s, when rugby union clubs in Lancashire and Yorkshire broke away from the London-based Rugby Football Union. The northern clubs, composed mostly of working-class players, had long chafed against the restrictions on compensation for injury and time off work imposed by the amateur code. This was not an issue for the more affluent players predominant in the south of England, but it was a major obstacle for the miners and millworkers of the north, for whom any loss of wages meant significant financial hardship.

The game was introduced to New Zealand in 1907, when Albert Henry Baskerville (1883–1908), a Wellington postal worker, rugby player and author, organised a team of New Zealanders to play against clubs in the north of England that had been banned from meeting the 1905 All Blacks. Baskerville died of pneumonia in Brisbane at the end of the tour, and the first match in New Zealand was a benefit event for his widowed mother, played between the returning tourists and a local side at Athletic Park, Wellington, on 13 June 1908.

Rugby league took root here in working-class communities and was particularly strong in urban centres and in mining areas such as Huntly and the West Coast. The clubs have a strong family emphasis, and it is not uncommon to see three or more brothers playing for the same team. The Brunner Rugby League Club was founded in 1919 in the mining town of the same name, and the West Coast Waro-Rakau club has been in existence since 1969.