History of Children’s Play in New Zealand

History of Children’s Play in New Zealand
The late 19th Century was a period in which many influences affected children’s play:
• The possibilities of adventure presented by the natural environment;
• The difficult living conditions and social structure of the times;
• The rugged conditions of school life;
• The organized community events including sports, picnics and parties;
• The New Zealand wars.
It was a frontier period in the history of children’s games. Adults handed down to children their
methods of play. Traditional games handed on by Maori parents included kite flying, poi
dancing, spinning tops, string games and jackstones or knuckle bones. Toys and games
equipment tended to be hand made especially in the poorer families.
Adventure outdoors meant building huts or boats, making dams in the creeks, finding bird nests,
climbing trees and exploring.
Picnics for children became an important part of community recreation. These special occasions
were organized on public holidays including New Year’s Day, Anniversary Day, and Queen’s
Birthday. The types of games played were Rounders, Prisoner’s Base, Drop the Handkerchief,
Nuts and May, Kiss in the Ring, Oranges and Lemons, Quoits, Cricket and Skittles.
At school children played with a ball and sticks made out of manuka or other available materials.
Early footballs were made from a pig’s bladder. Cricket and Rounders were played with solid
wooden bats. To start with only girls played hopscotch and an old tin was used. Later boys
joined in as well. Skipping, hoops and yoyos became popular with boys and girls. Marbles were
played using chips of marble to begin with, but around 1900 they were being made from glass.
Names such as taws, glassies, stonies and agates were given to the marbles depending on colour
and size. Knucklebones used to be a boys game, but later both boys and girls played. The aim
was to see who could get the most knuckles on the back of his/her hand. Tops came in various
forms. There were peg tops, whip tops and a hand twirled bone top. Stilt races were a
challenge! Some stilts were so high children could not get on them without the aid of a tree.
They were used in a practical sense in the flood waters.
Indoor games included Musical Chairs, Charades, Proverbs, Consequences, Postman’s Knock,
Blind Man’s Buff, Hide the Thimble, Simon Says, and Card games. Children acted, recited and
sang songs. Around 1900 social evenings,
school concerts, and picnics flourished. Dressing up in fancy costumes was a very popular
activity. People made their own amusements.
During the 20th century children’s games became more varied but many games continued with
minor changes. Better provision was made for football and cricket coaching. Gymnastics, cadet
drill and physical training were regularly practiced. Gradually new sports were introduced as
people could afford the time and money required to set up the facilities. Tennis courts and
swimming pools were built in town centers.
Informal outdoor games such as Cowboys and Indians, Tag, Cops and Robbers continued to be
popular. Spontaneous and organized picnic increased in popularity, as cars improved access to
the bush and the beach. Families, schools, businesses and communities joined for picnics.
Organised picnics always included games and contests to keep everyone amused. Some of the
most popular games involved songs and chants. Skipping games involved a series of complex
actions to accompany the chants. A well-known example of the 1940’s was
I am a girl guide dressed in blue,
These are the actions in must do,
Stand at ease, bend my knees,
salute to the king, bow to the queen,
never turn my back on the Union Jack!
Indoor games and pastimes continued to flourish in the 20th century. New innovations included
scrapbooks and postcard collecting, transfers in sheets to decorate possessions, painting in
painting books and over magazine pictures. Stamp collecting, card games and board games,
playing with dolls, tin soldiers and soft toys continued to be popular.
Dolls
Dolls have been around since the earliest times and have been used throughout recorded
history for ceremonies, good luck charms, ritual purposes as well as playthings for children. One
of the earliest dolls was an Egyptian rag doll found with other simple toys in a child’s grave.
Most of the ancient dolls that have survived have been made from durable materials such as
pottery (bisque), hardwood, stone or ivory. Dolls from earlier times were also made with straw,
cornhusks, material and wax. In some countries these dolls are still made in the traditional ways.
Teddy bears and other soft animal toys became popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Many early British immigrants to New Zealand brought with them dolls and other toys for their
children. Wooden dolls were one of the earliest playthings available to the children of colonial
New Zealand. The “Karetao” was a Maori puppet made from wood. Rag dolls, ‘bisque’ and china
dolls, papier mache dolls and even wax dolls were all popular before the days of plastic.
Newspapers of the
1840’s carried advertisements for toys, and Christmas boxes from Britain often contained toys.
Photographs of 19th and early 20th century New Zealand children often show them clutching a
doll. Along with dolls came doll’s houses, miniature furniture, toy china and household
equipment. Doll’s clothes were often elaborately made.
Children learn about relationships through playing with dolls. For many young children dolls
become their confidantes and friends. Dolls allow children, the most powerless group in our
society, to exercise power and act out their feelings about the adults in their world.
Early Commercial Toys
By the mid 18th century toys were increasing as their educational value was recognized. New
industrial techniques meant that toys could be mass-produced more easily.
Paper started to be used for board games and beautifully engraved cutout models. Most people
could afford paper toys since they could be bought as flat sheets, then cut out and made up at
home. There were paper soldiers, paper rooms with cutout figures and paper dolls with
detachable clothes. Later on pictorial alphabet cards, dissected map puzzles (early types of jigsaw) and history puzzles became popular. Paper puzzles have continued in various forms
through to the present day.
The first mass-produced metal toys consisted of soldiers made in Germany. (Lead soldiers were
earlier). By the 1890s toy manufacturers in Britain and Germany were concentrating solely on
soldiers and entire encampments modeled on the British army were packed in cardboard boxes
and sent to New Zealand. Other firms started to make metal toys with simple clockwork
mechanisms. There were equestrians performing on horseback, walking bears and other
expensive toys.
Cast metal toys included moneyboxes and banks. The laughing Negroes with moveable arms
that picked up a coin were made in cast iron and many have been kept to this day. Pressed tin
toys such as cars, carriages, boats and trains have become keepsakes in many homes and
museums too. Musical instruments such as whistles, drums and cymbals were made from tin as
well. Many of the tin toys had moveable parts that were worked by a simple clockwork
mechanism or a string-pulled flywheel. Optical toys such as the stereoscope were plentiful in
New Zealand. A stereoscope gave an illusion of a 3-dimensional picture. The phenakistoscope
was probably the earliest toy to produce the effect of moving pictures.
Wooden Toys
An English firm G & J Lines first produced rocking horses between 1895 and 1919 and many of
these were exported to New Zealand. Firms in America exported wooden horses to New
Zealand as well. Their main draw back was the amount of room they took up and many ended
up in hospitals or Plunket Society rooms. Toy firms in England and America made velocipede
horses and horses for fairs and steam circuses also.
Other wooden toys that were bought or made in New Zealand were wagons, trains, carriages,
carts and a variety of pull-along toys. Later the ‘buzzy-bee” became an icon for New Zealand.
Toy yachts and steamboats were popular water toys, and children’s buckets and spades were
originally made of wood.