National Mythscapes and Popular New Zealand Rugby Histories: Representing the 1986 Cavaliers

Abstract

This paper explores Duncan Bell’s heuristic of the mythscape as a means to conceptualize the nationalistic narrativization of the sporting past. Bell approaches the forging of national identity through evocations of the past as mythologized: that is, partial, contested, power-laden, and perpetually mutating. First, we introduce Bell’s concept as a means to evaluate the selective, contested and shifting construction of the sporting past through the prism of nationalism. We first chart the narrativisation of the New Zealand – South African rugby rivalry within popular literature during the apartheid era (1948–1994). This was characterized by the production of ‘governing’ myths and oppositional narrations from the 1960s onward. We then evaluate subsequent post-apartheid narrativizations (1994 onwards) within popular rugby histories, focussing on the 1986 Cavaliers rugby tour to South Africa – the final event in apartheid-era rugby ties between the two nations. We explore how writers use particular narratives, and what they have chosen to exclude, and how it informs a national mythscape. We find the rehabilitation of governing myths that sanitize and redact connections between New Zealand rugby and apartheid. This is symptomatic of a selective construction that valorizes rugby as a idealized national institution. Finally, we offer comments on the utility of the mythscapes concept.