John Wood Wood itibaren Cerdas, Costa Rica itibaren Cerdas, Costa Rica

After reading the Davinci code and watching National Treasure, this book was a perfect fit of learning the history of the freemasons. I learned that the Pope was the creator of Friday the 13th and our current popes still fear the free masons and their groups. The famous americans listed are nice tidbit to add.

This was originally published in the The New Zealand Journal of History in October 2006. In the hard fought battle for the label of border closest to my house, Wales is pipped at the post by Worcestershire, but only just. The upshot is that as a possessor of a New Zealand accent, broken chromosome and more that passing academic interest in sports history and studies it is nearly impossible for me to escape the predominant local myth that in 1905 plucky Wales brought the mighty All Blacks to their knees to establish a rugby-inspired bond between Wales and New Zealand: a notion that is dearly held in the introspective worlds of rugby union in both countries. There is a demotic sense of what could be seen as a form of proto-post-colonial bond of not-really-English rugby rivalry. This spirit, this rugby zeitgeist, shapes much of the Welsh-sourced writing, both populist and scholarly or critical, dealing with sporting relations between two countries. This fantasy is powerful not only in Wales. The Deans (non) try in the 16 December 1905 test match has been elevated in the dominant myth to become one of the founding moments of New Zealand-ness, and Deans’ response to the ‘try’ being disallowed as a marker of New Zealand masculinity. I doubt that the ‘try’ has much significance for young New Zealand men, but for those of us ensconced in middle age it was part of the growing into manhood, and quotidian tensions of the Wales-New Zealand rugby rivalries of the 1970s if not later were a central part of our (Pakeha) national-masculine experience. Ryan’s mission to debunk the myth is therefore welcome. Like all myths there is a central core of actuality, a significant element of forgetting, and potent leavening of obfuscation: in the case of 1905, it is not a question of whether Deans scored or not - to even ask the question is to perpetuate the myth. The book has many of the characteristics that we have begun to associate with Ryan’s work: rigorous archival delving, close attention to a context that is not just concurrent with the events in question that also frames them, and a vigorously pursued argument with the goal of demythologising and demystifying. There is no sense of uncertainty about Ryan’s analysis, about where he stands, and about what he thinks about the literature surrounding the issues he is exploring. He has presented a case that considers the 1905 tour in the context of the social and institutional development of rugby union in New Zealand, that deals with the fall out from the tour including the challenge from the less-than-amateurist Northern Union (later to become the Rugby League), and the difficult colonial and imperial relations resulting from the tour including the strained relations between the NZRFU and the various ‘home’ unions as well as between the NZRFU and its constituents. In doing so, he has drawn back many of the obfuscating shrouds contributing to the mythology of the tour and the All Blacks as a historical institution, as well as revealed and evaluated the elements that make up the core of actuality. He makes his case through a tightly argued narrative, and along the way shows a sceptical attitude towards existing scholarly and more popular literature. In this sense, the volume is conventional in its historiographical form, and in the schematisation recently advanced by Doug Booth straddles both constructionist and reconstructionist categories. The contextual focus comes close to telling the story of the tour ‘as it really was’, while the vigorous engagement with previous analyses of events surrounding the tour, especially as they link to elements of New Zealand’s images of masculinity and national identities, are close to the story of the tour ‘as it essentially was’. The dominance of both these Rankean strategies makes the case more reconstructionist in style and form. For the most part, the book is well presented. There is an insignificant number of typographical errors, it is sturdily bound, and attractively (if a little drably) packaged. The illustrations are suitable, but poorly integrated into the volume. I understand the economic imperative to bind photos on glossy stock in a separate section – but they appear at the beginning of the final substantive chapter, and there are few in-text markers of relevance with the result that they neither supplement nor complement the argument. The biographical appendix is extremely useful. Ryan has a tendency to use adverbs and adjectives where none is necessary, but I wonder if this is a sign that the international trend towards increasingly light handed copy editing is reaching Canterbury UP. Turning now to Ryan’s iconoclastic mission. There is little doubt that the image of 1905 needs to be debunked, and that the starting point of this evaluation of both events of the tour and the tour’s historiography is the sort of what really/essentially happened that holds together Ryan’s narrative. The problem is that Ryan’s empiricist narrative does not adequately engage with the after-the-event mythical deployment of the tour. In presenting an argument that is so powerfully rooted in the ‘really/essentially was’ approach, Ryan’s attempts to disprove the analyses advanced by previous writers invoking the tour, especially J O C Phillips and Keith Sinclair, seem to miss the mark and reveal the weaknesses of empiricist approaches to myth-slaying. (I doubt that Ryan would agree with the language of proof in the previous sentence, but the powerful rejection of both Phillips and Sinclair reads as if the objective is to demonstrate incontrovertibly their errors, which looks like disproof to me.) Ryan misses the mark in his rejection of Sinclair’s and Phillips’ cases in two key ways. First, neither of them claimed to analysing the tour in itself but assessing how the tour-as-event was deployed in the language of New Zealand national identity or the image of the Pakeha male. Phillips, in the preface to the first edition (1987) of A Man’s Country? (the edition Ryan cites) makes clear that it is not “a history of male behaviour ...[but] ... of ideas, of stereotypes and images” (p. viii), yet Ryan’s argument seems to be Phillips is wrong about 1905 because the events were in ‘reality’ different. If anything, his argument can be read as validating Phillips’ assessment of 1905 in that Ryan shows the role of the tour in the image of the Pakeha male relies on the deployment of a core of actuality accompanied by an obfuscation of context to construct a particular image that is remarkably consistent with the image of the Pakeha male advanced by Phillips. It is worth noting that Ryan’s rebuttal of Phillips’ claim that in the late nineteenth century 50000 men played rugby in New Zealand is compelling: the figure is simply not plausible. A similar case of endorsement of argument could be made for Sinclair’s analysis of the role of the tour (specifically, the Deans non-try) in New Zealand’s national imaginary as the “Gallipoli” of New Zealand sport. This is not to deny the legitimacy of Ryan’s critique of subsequent authors who have used both Phillips and Sinclair as sources for 1905 as it ‘really/essentially was’ (and I will admit to that tendency). The second way Ryan misses the mark is not one of content but of tone. In the twenty years since Sinclair and Phillips made the cases Ryan critiques we have seen significant developments in our understandings of New Zealand’s social, cultural and sport histories (Ryan has been a major contributor to these developments), in part because writers such as Sinclair and Phillips staked out the territory and put into the public domain the sort of sacrificial arguments the hearts of which Ryan seeks to drive a stake. While we should in the, at times overly polite (maybe even passive aggressive), world of New Zealand History encourage vigorous argument, we need to retain a generosity of spirit and can only hope that in twenty years time our tomes may provide the next generation’s sacrificial texts and arguments. The first weakness in Ryan’s critique of Phillips and of Sinclair is not suggest that he is necessarily wrong, but to suggest that his approach is not best suited to the debunking of myth and he needs a more nuanced assessment of both cases. Myth-slaying historians have a rich literature establishing models on which to draw: one of the best is Marina Warner’s (1981) Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism – 60% the life and death of Jeanne la Pucelle, 40% the afterlife of Joan; 60% historical reconstruction, 40% textual deconstruction. Exploring the essential/reality of an event does not necessarily best expose or undermine its deployment in cultural and social mythology, mainly because the tools of constructionist and reconstructionist empiricism are, for the most part, unable to unpack the textual and discursive uses of the event in subsequent political, social and cultural worlds. Ryan has given us the first part of this debunking and staked out a territory for the critique of the myth. In doing so he has been for the most part successful in walking the difficult line between minutiae of the demands of rugby-history-anoraks and scholarly critique, but his methodological tools let him down. He set out, according to his introduction, to slay the 1905 Jabberwocky: he has found it, but his weapons allow only a flesh wound. As a result, he has given us a life and death of the 1905 tour, but little of the afterlife of the tour: the historical reconstruction is solid, the textual deconstruction is absent. I encourage him to begin a subsequent volume deconstructing the mythology on the basis of this rigorous and valuable empirical base.

This book was awesome! I loved how diferent the story was. it was just fun to read and hard to put down!