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Pacific Islanders in Global Rugby Football – A Growing Wave

Article  in  International Journal of the History of Sport · July 2014

DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2014.922320

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Peter Alan Horton

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 The International Journal of the History of Sport

ISSN: 0952-3367 (Print) 1743-9035 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fhsp20

Pacific Islanders in Global Rugby Football – A

Growing Wave

Peter Horton

To cite this article: Peter Horton (2014) Pacific Islanders in Global Rugby Football – A
Growing Wave, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 31:11, 1329-1331, DOI:
10.1080/09523367.2014.922320

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2014.922320

Published online: 15 Jul 2014.

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 The International Journal of the History of Sport, 2014
Vol. 31, No. 11, 1329–1331, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2014.922320

INTRODUCTION
Pacific Islanders in Global Rugby Football – A Growing Wave
Peter Horton*

Australian Catholic University, Australia

Prior to the professionalisation of rugby union football, the code globally represented a
cultural dimension that facilitated and offered economic as well as social advancement for
many Pacific Island migrants who sought to improve their lives. The traditional
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‘professional’ rugby code of rugby league had long attracted a small number of Pacific
Islanders to the game in Australia, England and New Zealand but it was the
professionalisation of world rugby union football in 1995 and the subsequent birth of the
‘Super’ rugby union competition in the Southern Hemisphere that led to the acceleration of
the Pacific Islanders becoming a new racially defined group of diasporic sport migrants.
Players with a Pacific Island heritage (including Māori) now represent the most prodigious
single bloc in world rugby (both League and Union). It has previously been shown that this
phenomenon, this ‘wave’ of rugby talent, has travelled from the Pacific Islands, albeit in
many instances from the semi-periphery of New Zealand and New Zealand, across the
world to the elite and very lucrative club and provincial competitions of the British Isles,
France, Italy, Japan and of course New Zealand and Australia.1 Significantly, in recent
years many Pacific Island rugby players are also now well-established in the national
representative squads of their new ‘homes’ at all levels in both rugby union and rugby
league, including women’s rugby and seven-a-side rugby union football. The world’s most
successful national rugby union team, the redoubtable New Zealand All Blacks, has had in
recent years as many as 11 players with Pacific Island heritage in their starting line-ups.2
Gregor Paul suggested that for the next Rugby World Cup, to be held in 2015, this level of
representation could well be equalled and he asserts that ‘ . . . By 2015 the Pacific influence in
world rugby will be at unprecedented levels’.3 England, Wales, France, New Zealand,
Australia and Japan have national teams that are already well-served by Pasifika.4 Interestingly,
the national teams of the Pacific Island nations, particularly Samoa and Tonga, and Fiji’s seven-
a-side are also currently rebuilding their prowess; however, the situation regarding the
domestic competitions throughout the Islands remains a major concern.
The participation figures of Pacific Islanders in rugby league football are, if anything,
even more daunting than those for rugby union. In Australia’s National Rugby League
(NRL) it has been estimated that 40% of the players in the 25-man squads at the 15 clubs
emanate from the Pacific Islander and at the junior representative levels the number is over
50%.5
The composition of this collection of essays in itself reflects that the scope and
complexity of the current gaze at Pacific Islanders in rugby is now truly ‘global’. A

*Email: peter.horton@acu.edu.au

q 2014 Taylor & Francis

 1330 P. Horton

discussion of this topic three decades ago would have revolved around such topics as the
‘Browning of the All Blacks’6 and the issues surrounding the remittances sent out of New
Zealand and Australia by Pacific Islanders back to their island families and communities.
It is a rather simplistic notion to suggest that as the collective impact of the Pacific
Island rugby-playing diaspora has increased, so have the issues they confront and have
created. As the chains of interdependence, the cultural links and the lives of the players
and their families have become more complex, so has the investigation and analysis of all
aspects of the lives of these sport migrants. This collection, apart from addressing a highly
variegated array of topics, has been presented by a set of scholars from a wide range of
disciplines who have embraced an equally divergent set of methodologies in their writing.
The contributors, though steeped in their foundational disciplines and sub-disciplines of
sociology – sport history, anthropology, sport studies and social psychology – do not,
however, hide behind their favoured dogma but athletically stride across the borders of the
disciplines to carry their arguments. Robert Dewey, for example in his critical historical
analysis of the successes and eventual failures of the Pan-Island Rugby Alliance (PIRA),
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uses the lens of Tongan writer Epeli Hau’ofa as a backdrop for his study of the PIRA
team’s none-too-successful effort to confront the onslaught of the global professionalisa-
tion of rugby union football post-1995. Rugby historian Liam O’Callaghan initially tracks
the early tours of the Fijian Rugby team’s tours to Ireland in the 1960s in true
historiographical manner but in his analysis of the post-1995 era he shifts to a far more
critical approach using sociological studies of sport migration, globalisation and race.
One thing unites and, it is suggested, drives this cohort of scholars, and that is a very
real and apparent concern for the athletes who are at the centre of their studies as well as
the codes of rugby football that they play. It is hoped that the issues raised, such as Yoko
Kanemasu and Gyozo Molnar’s loud appeal for some meaningful formal support
programme for retired elite rugby players in Fiji, might be heeded. For example, they
found that many ex-players struggle to come to terms with the fact that they have
essentially been abandoned by the administrators of the game they served so well.
Kanemasu and Molnar also point out that no holistic development programme exists to
prepare the emerging elite players for ‘life after rugby’; surely such situations should be
addressed by the International Rugby Board who are after all the direct recipients of
the products of the labours of all professional rugby players worldwide. It is to be
hoped that this small but worthy contribution to the review of professional rugby per se
is read by those who have the power to correct any such inequities that exist across the
rugby world.

Notes on Contributor
Peter Horton is an Adjunct Professor at Australian Catholic University. He is a member of both the
‘African, Australasia and the Pacific’ and the ‘Asia’ Academic Editorial teams of The International
Journal of the History of Sport. He is also a member of the International Review Board of
International Sports Studies.

Notes
1. Horton, “Pacific Islanders in Global Rugby,” 2388.
2. Paul, “Plunder in the Pacific,” 29.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Lakisa, “The Pacific Revolution,” 8.
6. See Zavos, “The Browning of the Wallabies.”
 The International Journal of the History of Sport 1331

References
Horton, Peter. “Pacific Islanders in Global Rugby: The Changing Currents of Sports Migration.” In
Soft Power Politics – Past and Present: Football and Baseball on the Western Pacific Rim,
edited by Rob Hess, Peter Horton and J.A. Mangan. Special Edition of The International Journal
of the History of Sport 29, no. 17 (Nov. 2012): 2388– 2404.
Lakisa, David. “The Pacific Revolution: Pasifika and Mãori Players in Australian Rugby League.”
Unpublished Masters Diss., Southern Cross University 2011.
Paul, Gregor. “Plunder in the Pacific.” NZ Rugby World, 161, 29. Accessed April 8, 2014. http://
www.nzrugbyworld.co.nz/features/161/plunder-in-the-pacific
Zavos, Spiro. “The Browning of the Wallabies.” The Roar on Facebook. Accessed April 23, 2008.
http://www.theroar.com.au/2007/06/01/the-browning-of-the-wallabies/
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