JAMMERS AND BLOCKERS

VALERIE LOVE

DESCRIPTION Richter City Roller Derby poster, Wellington, 2011

MAKER / ARTIST Richter City Roller Derby

REFERENCE Eph-D-SKATING2011-01

The Richter City Roller Derby league was established in Wellington in 2007. Roller derby is a full contact sport played on quad skates on an indoor track, and features two five-person teams (from their quota of 15 players) on the track at the same time. A team scores points when the skater identified as the ‘jammer’ passes the hips of members of the other team. The other members of the team, the ‘blockers’, try to block the opposing team’s jammer from passing them, while making space for their own jammer to skate through.

Roller derby traces its origins to competitive walkathons around indoor tracks. These were popular spectator sports in Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand in the late nineteenth century, when they were one of the few activities in which men and women could openly compete against each other. Women ‘pedestrians’ could set aside corsets or heavy, structured dresses and wear costumes that allowed for greater freedom of movement.

The most famous competitive walker in New Zealand was Kate Wiltshire, the great-great-grandmother of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. She walked 100 miles (160 kilometres) around an indoor track in Auckland’s City Hall in 1876 in under 24 hours, earning her the title of ‘The Greatest Female Pedestrienne in the World’.

By the 1930s, the novelty of competitive walking had worn off; however, roller skating enjoyed steady popularity. ‘Roller derby’, which combined competitive track walking with roller skating, was established as a unisex sport in 1935 in Chicago and continued through to the early 1970s. In the early twenty-first century, it had a resurgence as a women’s sport, with the first teams being established in Austin, Texas, in 2001 and spreading internationally from there.

This poster for a Wellington league ‘bout’ demonstrates both the athleticism and counterculture aesthetics of the contemporary sport of roller derby. The two teams featured here, along with Comic Slams, make up the league’s three home season teams. The Brutal Pageant player’s uniform of feminine singlet, short shorts and pageant sash spoofs the concept of traditional femininity and beauty pageants. The Smash Malice team’s name refers to the 1981 Roger Donaldson film Smash Palace. The poster’s bold visual design showcases the signature colour of each team.

Rather than playing under their own name, each player has a unique pseudonym. This is usually based on a pun or other cultural reference, as in the poster where Ms Savage faces off against Tuff Bikkies.

The Turnbull’s collection of ephemera, including posters like this, is a rich source of information about the diverse cultures and social life of Aotearoa New Zealand.