Table Of Contenta history of children 's play
NEW ZEALAND, 1840-1950
a history of
Φ
The University of Pennsylvania Press · Philadelphia · 1981
Brian Sutton-Smith
children's play
New Zealand 1840-1950
Copyright © 1981 by the University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
First published in the United States by
the University of Pennsylvania Press
First published in New Zealand by New Zealand
Council of Educational Research
Designed by Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden
Photos on pp. 33, 48, 138, 194, and 297 are reproduced
courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington,
New Zealand.
Frontispiece and line drawings on pp. ii, 1, 149,
and 281 are reproduced courtesy of Richard Kennedy.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sutton-Smith, Brian.
A history of children's play.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Play—New Zealand—History. I. Title.
GV149.S87 790.Γ922Ό9931 81-51140
ISBN 0-8122-7808-9 AACR2
Printed in the United States of America
contents
Preface vii
Introduction xiii
1 THE CONTROL OF CHILDREN AT
SCHOOL, 1840-1890
1 Pioneer Children 3
2 On the Way to School 18
3 Inside the Schoolhouse 31
4 The Playground 43
5 A Naive World 62
6 Barbaric Pastimes 75
7 Out of School, Out of Doors 98
8 The Nineteenth Century: An Overview 136
2 THE CONTROL OF CHILDREN'S
LEISURE, 1890-1950
9 Setting the Scene 151
10 Adult Recreation 155
11 Picnic and Parlor 163
12 Schoolteacher and Playground 176
13 The Playmasters and the New Philosophy of Play 191
14 An Era of Change in Play 201
15 The Organization of Games 232
16 Modes of Modern Recreation 246
17 The Playground Today (1950): Sophistication and
Mechanization 255
18 The Playground Today (1950): Speed, Freedom, and
Domestication 272
Vi Contents
3 A PERSONAL EPILOGUE
19 The Control of Children in the Home, 1950-1980 283
Appendix 1: Sources of Information 299
Appendix 2: Reminiscence Sheet 313
Appendix 3: Place Names Cited in Text with
Provinces 317
References and Bibliography 319
preface
I want to pay special tribute to the many folklorists of
games and play who have preceded me, particularly to Dorothy
Howard, whom I came to know personally. In my relative isola-
tion in New Zealand, I found that their work supported my
belief that this kind of study was worthwhile. In some ways my
own work parallels theirs, but it has a different orientation.
We have all been interested in history. In early folk-game
studies, it was thought that history could be arrested before it
slipped away (Strutt 1903; Newell 1883), even that the origins
of current civilization could be traced through historical folk-
game materials (Tylor 1888; Gomme 1894; Bett 1929; Spence
1947). More recently, Peter Opie (1963) has presented the view
that the collected games of children reveal the continuity of
human nature. He says, "Man himself, as the study of folklore
shows, alters little, certainly less than do his surroundings; and
Preface
I sometimes wonder if the total quantity of traditional lore does
not remain fairly constant."
The present work deals, by contrast, with the assumption
that the historical record is more remarkable for the changes
that it exhibits than for its constancies. The apparent differ-
ence may lie in Opie's study of a traditional country, England,
and in my study of a pioneering one, New Zealand, with little
history of European settlement. There is, of course, a longer
history of Maori settlement in New Zealand, but that story
must be told elsewhere, and my part of it has already been
documented (1951:317-30). If one looks to the game and play
histories of the United States for some ruling on this contrast
between play as a record of continuity and as a record of
change, there is both the kind of record that documents tradi-
tion (Newell 1883; Brewster 1953) and the kind that empha-
sizes modernity and change (Knapp and Knapp 1976). It seems
probable, however, that comparative ratios of continuity and
discontinuity across historical time cannot be assessed without
more systematic records of play and games than those pres-
ently available. In contrast to the work of the Opies, however,
it is the aim of the present work to provide evidence that in the
New Zealand setting the general character of child play and
games and leisure habits has changed drastically since the
1840s. Furthermore, this documentation is meant to challenge
that kind of adult thinking which assumes that the answers to
present dilemmas can be found or ignored with homilies on the
idylls of a playful yesterday.
My own interest in children's play was prompted in 1948
by the children of standard three at Brooklyn School in Wel-
lington.* I had been reading to them from The Book of Wiremu
by Stella Morice and discovered their interest in "realistic"
details of the New Zealand scene. This led to my own children's
stories, Our Street (Wellington: Reed, 1950), Smitty Does a
Bunk (Wellington: Price-Milburn, 1961), and The Cobbers
(Wellington: Price-Milburn, 1976). More important, having had
my own imagination for childhood aroused by this process of
•Standards correspond approximately to grades. Grades 1-6 equals stan-
dards 1-6.
Preface
storytelling, I became intensely interested in the imaginative
world of childhood other than my own. In the years from 1949
to 1951, facilitated by a New Zealand University doctoral fel-
lowship, I traveled around New Zealand, interviewing many
aged informants and observing in many schools. The names of
those who contributed information during these peregrinations
are contained in Appendix 1, along with further information
on the sources of information used throughout this work. I
interviewed over 250 persons, some of them quite elderly, and
received reports from 650 Teachers College and University stu-
dents; their comments are introduced into the text with the
date and place to which they refer. In addition, I visited 32
schools and received reports from 19 others. While oral reports
could take me back only until around 1870,1 relied for earlier
material on school jubilee magazines and other written
sources, such as the school logbooks kept by the teachers in
those days. As a result, there emerged a historical picture of the
changes that had occurred in children's play between 1840 and
1950, and this book is the record of those changes.
Formal descriptions of the games have been published in
The Folkgames of Children (1972) and will not be repeated
here. At that time the concern was more with games as texts
than with the contexts in which games were played. My earlier
book, therefore, was about the games as texts. This one, how-
ever, is about the larger context of children's play in New
Zealand history. Although the present work was written at the
same time as those other records (1950-52), the increased theo-
retical interest in context makes its publication now possible.
If there is a bias in the sources used in this work it is clearly
on behalf of the South Island and the southern part of the
North Island, which are overrepresented in the data presented
here. This means that Scottish and English influences are max-
imized and the impact of the Maoris upon the pakeha (non-
Maoris) is minimized. In the early days the Maoris lived almost
entirely in the northern part of the North Island. Furthermore,
they were largely confined to rural areas and had little influ-
ence on most pakeha children. In 1951, about the time this
work was completed, only 30 percent of Maoris lived in urban
centers. By 1980 that figure was 80 percent, so the effect of the
