In this extract from Black in Fashion: Wearing the colour black in New Zealand, from the New Zealand Fashion Museum archive and shared with Viva, the late sports journalist and author Ron Palenski, ONZM, explains how the colour came to be adopted by our sporting teams and what it says about our athletic identity as a nation.
The abbreviated New Zealand team at the boycotted Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980 marched in the opening ceremony behind a black flag that bore the Olympic rings and a silver fern. “Ah,” someone said as the tiny team made its way around the Lenin Stadium, “the flag of protest.”
But no, it was pointed out, not a flag of protest at all. Black in this instance was the colour of nationalism and identity. Most New Zealand sports decided to heed the Government’s urging to stay away from Moscow, but not all of them did. New Zealand was not one of the 65 countries that boycotted the games because of the Soviet Union’s military presence in Afghanistan.
The remnants of the New Zealand team chose to march behind the Olympic association’s little-seen banner rather than the national flag. In a sense, it was a protest; a protest at the Government’s interference in what was seen as a right by sportspeople to compete where and when they wished. But it was more a reflection of black being the national sporting colour of New Zealand.
Black had been beautiful for New Zealanders since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Acceptance of it was wide and enduring; inquiries about why it was so have been much less prevalent.
It seems to be commonly understood that black became New Zealand’s national colour – or black with a silver fern motif became emblematic of New Zealand – because of its adoption by rugby and, because rugby was the dominant sport, others adopted and adapted it. That is generally true, but not specifically so.
The black of the jersey led to the neologism “All Blacks” and a whole lot of other sports (eventually) followed with nicknames of their own, all of which could be traced back to the original. The silver fern (Cyathea dealbata) has remained an integral part.
This is an attempt to unravel some of the mystery about why New Zealanders celebrate such a funereal colour and to dispel some of the myths that have grown up around it. It is only an attempt because there seems to be no definitive answer – no one person decreed that black should be the national colour of New Zealand and then recorded for posterity the why and the how. It was one of those things that developed from the people of the country rather than from the institutions of state.
A British Prime Minister of the nineteenth century, Benjamin Disraeli, was once quoted as saying: “Individuals may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.” An American historian, Karen Cerulo, took issue with this. Like all politicians, Disraeli told only part of the truth, she said. Equally important to a nation are its symbols, rituals and traditions. “These elements constitute a nation’s identity,” she wrote. So it is in New Zealand.
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In the beginning, the national rugby jersey was not black and the fern leaf was not silver. The sport of athletics was the first to have black and silver as “corporate colours” (not that such a phrase existed at the time) and rugby was a mere second. The first New Zealand rugby team were chosen in 1884, though they were not truly a national team. New South Wales had sent a team across the Tasman in 1882 and a reciprocal visit was agreed for two years hence. This was eight years before the formation of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union so the tour organisation fell to individual provincial unions. It was entrusted to a well-heeled Dunedin merchant and sports enthusiast, Samuel Sleigh, who underwrote the costs and became the manager of the team that comprised players from Otago, Canterbury, Wellington and Auckland.
Sleigh was a member of the Dunedin club, one of the first two rugby clubs in the city, and its jersey was blue, just as the jersey colour for the Otago provincial union founded three years before was also blue. It seemed to be no surprise — if lack of public comment was any indication — that the jersey for the first New Zealand team was also blue. It had a gold fern leaf (Otago’s colours are blue and gold) embroidered on the left breast. Thus adorned, the first national rugby players went to New South Wales for a record of nine matches played, nine won.
It was during this period of New Zealand’s development, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, that a distinctive national identity – that of a New Zealander rather than a transplanted Scot or a wandering Englishman – took on a greater shape. The country’s flora and fauna began to be adopted as symbols of identity as well as used in advertising. A factor in the national blender was the development of sports organisations, the bringing together under a national umbrella of clubs from throughout the country, all the better for uniformity of rules and regulations and for national championships.
Among the first was the New Zealand Amateur Athletic Association, formed – after urging from people in Timaru – at a meeting in Christchurch on July 29, 1887. It did not initially hold annual championship meetings, mainly because of the time and difficulties of travel. Rather, it determined that specific events held throughout the country would be regarded as championship races. So winners would be recognised, and the association decided they should be given caps to wear in future races. The association’s founding secretary, Leonard Cuff, decided the caps should be black with silver piping and the association’s monogram in silver on the front. They were made to Cuff’s instructions by a Christchurch draper, C.P. Hulbert’s, of High St. As far as can be determined this was the first instance of black and silver being associated with sport on a national basis.
The first national athletics champions entitled to wear the cap were found over the summer of 1887–88; during the same summer, news emerged that a well-known footballer, Joe Warbrick, was writing to teammates and opponents throughout the country, suggesting that a national Māori team get together to play a British team due to visit during the winter. If the Māori team were successful, Warbrick said, it could be possible for the team to go to Britain. The English team, a private money-making venture of a type fashionable in Australia and the United States at the time, came and went but did not play a national team. Apparently, Warbrick could not agree with the promoters on where such a match might be played and how gate-takings would be split. Since Warbrick was a player representing other players, he could not be a party to making money from any game (and indeed, had to write to the Canterbury Rugby Union to protest his innocence).[5]
The team brought together by Warbrick became known as the New Zealand Natives and went on an odyssey of 107 matches in New Zealand, Australia and Britain. Warbrick decided against calling them a Māori team because shortly before they left for Australia, they realised they were short of some key players so five Pākehā were added. It was thought they were all born in New Zealand, hence the team name of Natives, but in fact some were not. It was Warbrick’s team that did most to establish black as the national jersey colour with a silver fern.
Why black? Samuel Sleigh, the organiser of the first national team in 1884, was by this time living in retirement in England and was a member of the English rugby union’s committee. He agreed to organise the programme of matches for the Natives and assured the English union the New Zealanders were all genuine amateurs and would not benefit financially from the tour. Warbrick had been joined in the New Zealand end of the organisation by an English migrant living in Wellington, Thomas Eyton, who on a visit to Britain in 1887 saw rugby that he did not think “vastly superior” to what he had seen in New Zealand. Back in Wellington, Eyton heard of Warbrick’s plans and contacted him. He went on the tour as a promoter and later wrote a book about it. All three principals – Warbrick, Eyton and Sleigh – would have known the jersey colours of the international opponents they would meet on tour: white for England, scarlet for Wales, dark blue for Scotland, emerald green for Ireland. Logic suggests it would have made little sense for the New Zealanders to adopt any of those colours, even though they all knew the first team in 1884 wore blue. Warbrick was a member of that team so was well aware the first jersey was not only blue but also had a gold fern leaf on it.
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Advertise with NZME.Some of the Natives were from Wellington, which wore black, and the team were based for their first few weeks in Hawke’s Bay, whose colours were black and white. In an effort in 1925 to establish how and why black was chosen, a reporter from the Evening Post in Wellington spoke to one of the surviving players, George Wynyard. He told the Post he was present when Warbrick chose black and it was because it was the “most suitable in colour to withstand the wet and sloppy playing fields which were likely to be experienced in England”. A player who declined to join the Natives because of family circumstances, Jack Webster, agreed with Wynyard.
Whether Warbrick knew of the athletics caps cannot be known, but in the small world of 1880s New Zealand sport, it is likely that he did. How they influenced his choice of colour for the rugby team cannot be known.
The lucky fern
The same story in the Post came up with a novel reason for the silver fern. The Wellington team were on their way to Greytown to play Wairarapa in 1887 and stopped at Hayward’s Farm in the Hutt Valley on the way, according to one of the players, Michael Hyland. ‘Miss Hayward gave one of our boys a fern leaf and asked him to wear it for luck,’ Hyland was quoted as saying. Two of Hyland’s Wellington teammates were Tom Ellison and Davy Gage, both members of the Natives, and as a result they suggested the silver fern for the Natives’ jersey. It’s a nice story but takes no account of the fact the fern leaf had already been used on the 1884 jersey.
Ellison played a significant role in the continuing evolution of the national colours though. He is regarded as one of the most influential figures of nineteenth-century rugby: he helped devise different, more structured methods of playing and he was in the forefront of fruitless arguments that New Zealand was so far from England that it should not be bound by the same amateur regulations. Ellison, originally from Otākou on the Otago Peninsula and one of the first Māori to qualify for the bar, was a Wellington delegate at the meetings which resulted in the formation of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union in 1892. At the first annual meeting the following year, he successfully moved that the national team’s colours should be a black jersey with a silver fern and white knickerbockers. A couple of months later, he was chosen to captain the first national team picked under the auspices of the NZRFU and therefore the first to wear the colours Ellison proposed.
But rather than leading, Ellison and the NZRFU were following. Athletics had developed from its championship caps to a full national uniform of black and white with a silver fern on the chest. This was first worn by a team, including the founding secretary, Leonard Cuff, that went to Sydney in 1890 (and astounded New South Wales people by winning seven of the 11 events they contested). The following year, a rugby club called Zealandia was formed in Sydney by expatriates, including Edward “Mac” McCausland, who had been one of the Natives. It decided on a black jersey with a silver fern leaf.
The energetic Cuff was a national long jump champion as well as the NZAAA secretary; he’d played rugby for Canterbury and cricket for Canterbury and New Zealand. He organised and led a New Zealand athletics team to Britain and France in 1892 and they too wore black with a silver fern.[10] So when Ellison proposed the new uniform to rugby in 1893, he was proposing a uniform that was already well established and was not simply copying what the Natives had worn five years before.
The new rugby uniform led in 1893 to the national team being called the All Blacks for the first time, contrary to the popular belief that the nickname was foisted on the team that toured Britain in 1905–06 by British newspapers. It was common in the late nineteenth century for teams to be referred to by their jersey colours – before the New Zealand team, the Natives and Wellington were often called in print “the Blacks”; Otago were the Blues; Canterbury the Red and Blacks and Auckland the Blue and Whites. It was but a small step to extend that for the national team, despite the white knickerbockers, to All Blacks. The first reference came when the first team led by Ellison were preparing to play NSW a second time, having lost the first. A preview in the weekly Auckland newspaper, the New Zealand Observer and Free Lance, carried the comment:
“Next Saturday, the deciding match against New South Wales takes place and with this last success fresh on their memories, they should require nothing more to urge them on and despite the gruelling they got at [the] last meeting, I expected to see the all blacks [no capitals, no quotation marks] come out on top with a substantial majority.”
All the British tour did 12 years later was to give the nickname much wider publicity and usage. The fact it existed before the British tour was tacitly acknowledged by the first British newspaper to use the phrase on tour:
“The ‘All Blacks,’ as they are styled by reason of their sable and unrelieved costume, were under the guidance of their captain (Mr Gallaher) and their physique favourably impressed the spectators.”
One simple paragraph, published the day after the All Blacks’ first game, destroyed the myth that somehow the name came about because of a printer’s intervention: the story went that so impressed was a reporter that he wrote the New Zealanders played like “all backs” but a helpful printer inserted an “l”. This version of events came from one of the players, Billy Wallace, and because he was the longest-lived of them, it was given authority as a primary source. But Wallace was wrong. He said the printer’s intervention came at the Daily Mail but it did not mention the words “All Blacks” until well into the tour and well after the Devon paper used them first.
Beyond rugby
How the All Blacks were named, whether the idea was British or New Zealand, became important because more than any other nickname for a national sports team, it came to be associated with what defined New Zealand.
Although athletics could be said to have been in on the ground floor first, rugby’s dominance ensured it became the flagship for the national colours. Practically all other sports, and many other activities besides, adopted the same colours for their own. An early dairy exporter, the New Zealand Dairy Produce Control Board, said in 1925 that it was introducing a Fern Leaf brand for export to Britain because “of the quality it stands for”.
Unlike in Australia, where the national colours of green and gold were enshrined in law in 1984, nothing similar has happened in New Zealand. There was an attempt in 1925 by the New Zealand Rugby Football Union, flushed with the success of the All Blacks’ unbeaten tour of Britain and Ireland over the northern winter of 1924–25, to get the Government to protect the black jersey and the silver fern as well as the name “All Blacks”.
Some sports saw the sense in what rugby tried to achieve but most argued that such devices belonged to the country and should be used by anyone, not just rugby. If rugby could not have the silver fern to itself, it argued that its use should be confined to amateur teams – although in New Zealand, even teams in professional sports such as football were still, for all practical purposes, amateur. The New Zealand Football Association took umbrage at rugby’s suggestion, arguing, “We use the fern leaf, which is the emblem of New Zealand.”
Rugby may have been a little surprised by the reaction from boxing. Its chairman was Pat McEvedy, a Wellington doctor who, while training in London, played for British rugby teams that toured New Zealand in 1904 and 1908. He returned to take up a practice in Wellington and was a member of Wellington and New Zealand union committees before moving to boxing. As far as the union’s plea for protection for the name “All Blacks” went, he said, that was a name bestowed on the 1905–06 team and should be used only for it. He also said that whatever the New Zealand law prescribed, once a team left New Zealand territory it could call itself what it liked.
Perhaps a little chastened by what it learned from its kindred sports, the New Zealand union quietly dropped the idea and, in fact, the name “All Blacks” was not registered until 1986 when a stylised rather than a generic silver fern was introduced. This was at the beginning of the age of sports marketing, in which every device had a price and they were not to be shared by anyone else.
For a long period, at least until World War II, the national football team were invariably known as “the soccer All Blacks” (they still wore black) and the national rugby league team were known as “the professional All Blacks”. The latter did not become known officially as the Kiwis until after World War II. (Rugby also gained a Kiwis team in 1945–45. The 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force rugby team were nicknamed the Kiwis at the players’ request). The first league team in 1907 were also known for a time as the “All Golds”, a play on the All Blacks name and the supposition that the new converts to league were playing for money. This name was coined in Sydney rather than in New Zealand.
The silver fern, usually on a black background, was never challenged as a national sporting uniform, not even in the early 1990s when the Olympic committee experimented with “modern” designs for its athletes. The first New Zealand team at an Olympic Games was in Antwerp in 1920 and its members wore the familiar uniform; but even before that, when New Zealanders combined with Australians as Australasia, the silver fern still featured. The green vests worn by athletes in London in 1908 had an Australian coat of arms on the chest with two ferns and a kiwi underneath. It was probably the earliest representation of New Zealanders as “Kiwis” because New Zealand, unlike Australia, tended to stay away from animal or bird names for its sports teams (with the league Kiwis a notable exception).
A silver fern flag, a prototype of some favoured by agitators for a new national flag, was flown as early as 1910 on the banks of the Zambezi River. Dick Arnst was the world professional single sculls champion and took it with him when he withstood a challenge on the Zambezi from an Englishman, Ernest Barry. The unlikely venue was chosen by a South African millionaire, Abe Bailey, to promote the attractions of investing in what was then northern Rhodesia.
The All Blacks spawned a great variety of sports team nicknames, most of them of fairly recent vintage. Sports nicknames seem to fall into two distinct categories: those which have evolved naturally through use, such as the All Blacks, the Kiwis and the All Whites, and those which have been devised and launched on an unsuspecting public such as Black Caps (cricket) or Black Ferns (women’s rugby). Badminton even tried to introduce the name ‘Black Cocks’ for its national men’s team in 2005 but it predictably did not last long.
Whether inspired, dull or just plain stupid, practically all sports team nicknames are derived directly or indirectly in some form or another from All Blacks. There are the Black Sticks in hockey (men and women), the Silver Ferns (netball), the White Ferns (women’s cricket), the Tall Blacks (basketball), the Kiwi Ferns (women’s league), the Black/White Sox (softball) and so on, ad nauseam. What’s also striking about the nickname phenomenon is that some international teams of durable ability and standing, and a decent sense of history, have snubbed the idea. The Australian cricket team remains an acceptable mouthful, as do the England (or Scottish or Irish) rugby teams, or the England football team.
An enduring power of the silver fern as an all-purpose national motif came in 1934 when the Wellington Horticultural Society organised a poll on New Zealand’s most popular flower. Kowhai topped the poll, with 586 votes, well ahead of pohutukawa and rata, each with 389. But organisers said the poll was skewed by a large number of informal votes for the silver fern.
And perhaps an example of how black came to be not just indelibly associated with rugby but also something of a fashion statement itself, a New Zealand rugby official was quite adamant about the future when he announced a change in apparel sponsorship in 1997. Asked what form the new jersey under the new sponsor would take, he replied: ‘Black, black, black.’
Black in Fashion: Wearing the colour black in New Zealand, edited by Doris de Pont, was produced by the New Zealand Fashion Museum and published by Penguin in 2011. It is now out of print.
Sources: Cerulo, Karen, ‘Symbols and the World System: National Anthems and Flags’, Sociological Forum, vol. 8, no. 2, June 1993; Sleigh, Samuel, The New Zealand Rugby Football Annual for 1885, Otago Daily Times, Dunedin, 1885; Christchurch Star, July 30, 1887; NZ Referee, May 4, 1888. Greg Ryan, Forerunners of the All Blacks – The 1888–89 New Zealand Native Football Team in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 1993; Eyton, Thomas, Rugby Football Past and Present – the Tour of the Native Team in Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand in 1888-89, Wm Hart, Palmerston North, 1896; Evening Post, June 15, 1925; Observer, March 28, 1891; Palenski, Ron ‘The Naming of the All Blacks: Unravelling the Myth’, Sporting Traditions, vol. 26, no 1, May 2009; Devon Express and Echo, September 16, 1905; Evening Post, May 30, 1925; Cashman, Richard, Sport in the National Imagination – Australian Sport in the Federation Decades, Walla Walla Press, Sydney, 2002; Evening Post, May 6, 1925; Deverson, Tony ‘Sporting New Label’, NZWords, vol. 2, no 1, January 1999; Evening Post, September 21, 1934, p. 11.
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