Dr Margaret Henley at the opening of the Auckland Museum exhibition Our Game: A Century of Netball in Aotearoa New Zealand last September. Photo / Suzanne McFadden
Dr Margaret Henley at the opening of the Auckland Museum exhibition Our Game: A Century of Netball in Aotearoa New Zealand last September. Photo / Suzanne McFadden
Suzanne McFadden for LockerRoom.
Once or twice a week, Dr Margaret Henley rolls up the door on a windowless storage locker in central Auckland, pulls her plastic chair up to a picnic table and sifts through the history of netball in New Zealand.
She works alongside netball archivist and statistician Todd Miller, together trawling through the thousands of newspaper clippings, tournament programmes and photos, and hundreds of ageing video tapes and dog-eared scrapbooks – all holding priceless insights into the sport they love.
Henley often returns home with a plastic tub brim-full of memorabilia, spreading the past across her dining table.
The treasures she’s uncovering are reshaping the story of the 127 years netball has been played in Aotearoa, and revealing how deeply it’s woven into the tapestry of women’s social history.
Taonga like the British Metropolitan Police bobby’s whistle, gifted to Myrtle Muir – the first Silver Ferns coach and a woman who played a lead role in establishing Netball New Zealand a century ago.
Or the 1932 film reel shot at the national netball tournament, concealed inside a metal canister and smelling like vinegar when it was discovered in the garage of a famous Silver Fern.
And the real breakthrough: when Henley discovered netball – then called basketball – was first played on New Zealand soil in 1898, eight years earlier than previously believed. And even more remarkably, it was introduced by a pioneering young female teacher in Whanganui – not the male Presbyterian minister credited in history books.
Even so, it took Henley two years to learn the innovative teacher Miss Knapp’s first name.
Miss Jessie Knapp, netball trailblazer. Photo / Nelson Museum Tyree Studio Collection
“It’s a bit like detective work, I suppose,” says Henley, 73, who was a lecturer in media and communication at the University of Auckland until the end of last year.
“A little fuzzy thread sticks out and you give it a wee pull, and sometimes you can’t work out where it comes from, and other times it leads to another clue, another link. The more you pull out, the more of a picture you start to get of the sport.
“I look at all these plastic boxes and think there are so many stories in there, of so many women’s lives. And all of this could have been turfed out. It just can’t be lost.”
As Netball New Zealand’s centenary year draws to a close in May, Henley’s decades-long commitment to chronicling and preserving the sport’s history – all undertaken voluntarily – has been honoured with a Netball New Zealand Service Award. “Margaret has played a vital role in ensuring that the legacy of netball is carefully documented and able to be shared with future generations,” her citation reads.
Henley was a driving force in creating the recent exhibition Our Game: A Century of Netball in Aotearoa New Zealand at Auckland Museum, which has now been dismantled, and its treasures – like Dame Lois Muir’s 1963 Silver Ferns tracksuit and the minute book from the first meeting of the sport’s national body in 1924 – have been returned to storage.
Henley is uncertain what will happen to the artefacts and footage she and Miller are now archiving. Sports like rugby and cricket have national museums, but netball would need financial help and a permanent space to do the same.
For now, they’ll continue to sift through the plastic bins overflowing with memories, deciding between them what’s kept and what’s discarded.
Margaret Henley sorts through netball magazines in the Netball New Zealand storage locker. Photo / Todd Miller
Henley has been able to trace the origins of netball in Aotearoa back to Whanganui Girls College, where in 1898 (when it was Wanganui Girls College), a young teacher introduced the new game to her students, with day girls playing boarders.
Most historians have recorded that it was the Reverend J.C. Jamieson who brought a game he saw in Australia to Auckland in 1906, and teams were formed from the YMCA and Presbyterian bible classes.
But Henley’s sleuthing found evidence in parliamentary documents and local newspapers that it was the Wanganui teacher Jessie Knapp who – after most likely reading reports in papers and gazettes of the new sport sweeping America called basketball – saw how it could be adapted for girls in her school.
“A school inspector came to the school, saw four basketball teams playing and thought it was jolly good; wrote it up, and it was recorded in the Journals of the House of Representatives,” Henley says. “I worked out the teacher who introduced the game was a Miss Knapp, but it took me nearly two years to discover her first name.”
Henley then unravelled the intriguing back story of Jessie Knapp. She was born in the same small Nelson town of Spring Grove – and in the same year – as “the father of nuclear physics”, Sir Ernest Rutherford. Knapp shared a unique connection with the world-renowned scientist: both earned scholarships to attend Nelson Boys’ and Girls’ Colleges, where they excelled academically.
In an era when most girls left school around the age of 14 to work before marriage, Knapp stayed on to be mentored by headmistress Kate Edger, the first Kiwi woman to obtain a university degree. In 1890, at the age of 19, Knapp completed a Bachelor of Arts degree.
“I was able to contact her relatives in Nelson, who were so proud that she was an early, highly educated woman, but they didn’t know what she’d achieved in the history of netball,” Henley says.
The teams from St Luke’s Presbyterian Church on a netball court/paddock around 1906.
She’s also been able to trace exactly where basketball was first played in Auckland. There’s a grainy black-and-white photo taken around 1906, of the A and B teams of St Luke’s Presbyterian Church, dressed in their uniforms of white blouses and long black woollen skirts, with wicker baskets strung between tree trunks as goals.
She’s located the original “court”, a paddock on the Hood farm, off Armadale Road in Remuera – after finding an ad from Mrs Hood looking for domestic help.
Five years ago, Henley and Miller also uncovered the first name of the first New Zealand coach, Mrs H.D. Muir – otherwise known as Myrtle. They also found her grandfather was a Cantonese gold digger, who came to Otago during the gold rush era and lived in poverty in a Chinese camp.
Myrtle Muir was instrumental is establishing the New Zealand Basketball Association (now Netball New Zealand) in 1924, and coached the original 1938 Silver Ferns.
On display at the Auckland Museum was an ACME Metropolitan Police whistle, gifted to Muir (also an umpire), likely by the Victoria Basketball Association in Australia in 1946. Two years later, the Australian national team toured New Zealand for the first time, convincingly winning all three tests. It was always going to be lopsided: a nine-a-side version of the game was still being played in New Zealand (until 1959), while the Australians played the now universal seven-a-side.
Henley and Miller drove north to Waipu to collect the whistle from Muir’s granddaughter, who “absolutely treasured it”.
Henley’s passion for netball history came to the fore, she says, when she was researching for her doctorate into the evolution of broadcast images of netball as a women-only sport.
“I decided I had to do a chapter on the history of the sport and look at how it worked back then with major forms of media,” she says.
“But where I fell deeply in love with it was through my obsession with cinema newsreels. Before the 1960s, the only way women in New Zealand could see moving images of women playing sport was in the cinema. And there were only a few locally produced cinema newsreels – once or twice a year, little vignettes of women playing basketball. I tracked down every piece of cinema newsreel that’s been preserved.”
But Henley was baffled by the whereabouts of a 25-minute film, shot at the 1932 national netball tournament in Invercargill. For 20 years, it was played in netball associations throughout the country, travelling with a film projector, so women and girls – particularly in smaller towns –could see the top level of the game being played.
“I kept saying to everyone I met, there’s this film out there, and I can’t believe it’s been lost,” she says.
Henley and Miller finally tracked down the 16mm film in the garage of past Silver Ferns coach Yvonne Willering, inside a box of memorabilia given to her by Dame Lois Muir.
“After I had a little cry, Todd told me it smelled of vinegar,” Henley says, a sign that the acetate film base was degrading and releasing acetic acid. A film preservationist was able to salvage all but the first 10 seconds of film and digitise it.
Historians Margaret Henley (left) and Todd Miller with a replica woven basket used as the hoop in early netball games. Photo / Suzanne McFadden
Henley would have been too young to have seen the film as a child. Growing up in Wellington, she’d wanted to play netball from the age of 8, but there wasn’t a team at her school.
“So my mother started me a netball team with other girls from the Anglican church,” she says. “We’d go to the Hataitai courts every Saturday but we were so small and no one knew what they were doing, we would always get beaten.”
By 12, she was playing senior netball for Onslow. “It was a rich melting pot – we played against the typing pool and women who had rollers in their hair and freshly painted nails ready for Saturday night. You didn’t dare knock their rollers out,” Henley laughs.
“When I became an academic, I found there were men writing about netball, about the hyper-femininity and how it was so controlled, and that just sent me into orbit. There was nothing hyper-feminine about the way we played. It’s where I learned to stand up for myself. And I loved it.
“They didn’t understand how liberating it was for us to play. And the whole socialisation – all these women who ran it, organised it and umpired us, told us off and fed us. Everything was women’s labour for the interests and wellbeing of women and young girls. You were part of this living machine at every netball court all around New Zealand for decades and decades.”
The next “big, crucial push” in Henley and Miller’s project is to digitise the hundreds of VHS tapes of New Zealand netball footage from the 1980s and 1990s. She still has a VHS player at home so she can watch a lot of the tapes.
“Our job is to identify and preserve it, but also to recognise what it represents – a section of New Zealand society that evolved and built its own processes, protocols and its own cultural heritage. It looked after itself,” Henley says.
“The first phase is to identify, sort, collate and catalogue. Once that happens, it’s harder to ignore, dismiss or lose. Then it’s getting it digitised and then sharing it, getting awareness of it. That’s very important for me, that would be the most rewarding goal.”
Margaret Henley after receiving her Service Award from former Netball New Zealand president Dawn Jones. Photo / Suzanne McFadden
Although she’s no longer teaching, Henley is still a researcher, working with Professor Toni Bruce on their three-year Marsden-funded project, titled Netball’s enduring role in the intergenerational health and wellbeing of Aotearoa women.
“There are these whole areas of women’s social history that are still hugely under-researched, under-published, under-resourced and under-preserved. They’re just not saved,” Henley says.
“Ultimately, it belongs to the generations of women in New Zealand, and the dream is to be able to share it with them, make it easily accessible for them, in a way that they will get absolute joy from discovering their mothers, their aunties and their grandparents, who expressed themselves through sport.”
Henley loves working with Australian-born Miller: “We have shared heritage, my father was Australian,” she says, “and there are many points of sympatico. Our relationship is very rewarding and irreverent.”
The feeling is mutual. Miller – who received a World Netball Service Award in 2023 for his 30-year involvement in the sport – says working with Henley is a privilege, as someone he respects greatly.
“Her depth of knowledge and care for our sport to uncover and tell the history is unmatched,” he says. “It’s also incredible to have someone to call when you uncover a piece of information or image you’ve never see before – and she’s as excited as I am.”
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.
