Cricket as ‘cultural baggage’, 1840–1870

Cricket was an integral part of the ‘cultural baggage’ which accompanied the European settlement of New Zealand during the nineteenth century. Missionaries encouraged Maori interest in the game from as early as 1832, but substantive growth came only with the distinct patterns of provincial settlement from the 1840s. The so-called ‘systematic colonisation’ schemes promoted by Edward Gibbon Wakefield ensured that cricket, as an essential institution of England in general and its leisured class in particular, emerged early and naturally, when one might normally expect other amenities and necessities of colonial life to have taken priority. As the tensions of industrial transformation and rapid post-Napoleonic social change came to a head during the early 1830s, Wakefield sought to create a safety valve for British society through colonisation. In addition to a migrant population carefully selected with regard to gender balance and personal morality, his prime mechanism was a ‘sufficient price’ on land – set at such a level as to both limit the number of colonial landowners, and regulate class relationships by creating a subservient workforce among those without means to purchase. With population distribution confined in this way, the perceived chaos and dislocation of ‘frontier’ settlements in Australia and North America would be avoided. Wakefield envisioned an essentially conservative pre-industrial rural idyll described by Keith Sinclair as ‘a vertical section of English society excluding the lowest stratum. It would form not a “new people”, but an “extension” of an old, retaining its virtues, but eliminating its poverty and overcrowding.’