4 November 2005
Original perspective offered on All Black Originals
Sports historian and author Greg Ryan’s latest book might ruffle the odd feather amongst Kiwi rugby fans as he tackles a
few myths surrounding the Original All Blacks.
For most rugby followers, the 1905 All Black tour of Britain has assumed legendary proportions. By its end, this
unheralded team had taken the traditional rugby strongholds by storm, dazzled with its athleticism and innovative style,
accumulated a string of huge victories, and put its young colony firmly on the world map.
The tour created the ‘All Blacks’ name and mystique and enshrined expectations of international success that show little
sign of receding. Its associated myths and symbols are etched in the collective consciousness of New Zealand rugby
enthusiasts.
The Contest for Rugby Supremacy: Accounting for the 1905 All Blacks, released this month by Canterbury University Press,
provides a new and critical perspective on the events and personalities of the 1905 tour and the broader rugby world in
which it took place.
“What I’m offering is an entirely new angle – a somewhat provocative book that completely reassesses the achievements of
the 1905 All Blacks and presents arguments and evidence that are not to be found in other accounts of the tour,” says Dr
Ryan.
While the book does not seek to belittle the achievement of the All Blacks, it does aim to set it the tour in a far more
comprehensive context than previous writing on the team and tour. This centenary year has seen a number of books
published on the 1905 All Blacks, but Dr Ryan says many are almost entirely uncritical, celebratory in tone, downplay
the tour controversies, and are largely devoid of context.
“Most of the stuff written about the 1905 All Blacks stops in March 1906 when the team get home and leaves you with a
‘happily ever after’ ending to the story. What actually happened was a bunch of the players went back to Britain with a
rugby league team which established the professional game in New Zealand and plunged rugby union into chaos. By 1912 New
Zealand and British rugby did not want to have anything to do with each other.”
The Contest for Rugby Supremacy is the first book on the tour that bases its research largely on British sources and
their perspectives rather than the selective range of reports that were published in New Zealand, so it offers the
sporting enthusiast some new perspectives to debate in the changing room, the pub, or over the airwaves on talkback
radio.
The Contest for Rugby Supremacy examines key themes in the formative years of New Zealand rugby that both shaped the
success of the All Blacks and produced frequent controversy around them; explores significant political and sporting
debates during the course of the tour; reassesses the achievements of the team within a British sporting world in which
soccer was dominant and rugby union was severely weakened by the rise of rugby league in the north; sets the supposed
controversy of the loss to Wales in a wider context; and finally considers the significant deterioration in
British–Australasian rugby relations in the years immediately after the tour.
“I don’t know whether I’ll be shot down in flames or banned from rugby clubs,” Dr Ryan says. “I don’t set out to
antagonise people but hopefully make a convincing argument and people will see I’ve done my research.
“I think some of our sporting myths can be unhealthy. Our present teams are saddled with unrealistic expectations. They
have to live up to this mystique of these great All Blacks, who if you go back and look into it were not invincible and
were subject to a good deal of criticism at the time.”
Greg Ryan is a Senior Lecturer in History at Lincoln University and is a former lecturer and alumnus of the University
of Canterbury. He is the author of Forerunners of the All Blacks: The 1888–89 New Zealand Native Football Team in
Britain, Australia and New Zealand (1993) and The Making of New Zealand Cricket 1832–1914 (2004) and editor of Tackling
Rugby Myths: Rugby and New Zealand society 1854–2004 (2005). He has also published numerous popular and academic
articles on the history and contemporary state of New Zealand sport.
- The Contest for Rugby Supremacy: Accounting for the 1905 All Blacks, by Greg Ryan, published by Canterbury University
Press, October 2005, RRP NZ$34.95, Paperback 228 x 152 mm 240 pp plus 16 pp illustrations. ISBN 1-877257-36-2.
ENDS