© 2012 by University of Hawai‘i Press Postcolonial Anxieties and the Browning of New Zealand Rugby

Looming large in dominant narratives of New Zealand’s history is the “national sport, ” rugby union.1 The prominence of rugby in the forg-ing of white-settler—Pākehā—narratives of nation has been well docu-mented.2 As Simon During noted, rugby has been a particularly important social space for (apparently) reconciling the contradictory claims of the settler national imaginary—at once distinct from, yet connected to, the colonial center. Rugby union, During continued, emerged as a key “sym-bol of mate ship, intrepidness, coloniser-colonised reconciliation. All this without the game losing its imperialist aura ” (1998, 35). Premised as it was on masculine, heteronormative, often bourgeois, white settler–Pākehā values, rugby was thus a critical site for synthesizing competing narratives of European heritage and imperial ties with those of distinctiveness and settler fortitude and for asserting the benevolent success of the colonial endeavor at the outer edges of the British Empire (During 1985). As James H Liu and his coauthors noted, New Zealand is a country i