1932: A Funeral for the Rules

January 5, 2019

By AHNZ

Wanganui, 1932: Police and newspapermen led by a clergyman are pallbearing some football rules to the grave. Weird right?

For a change, I’m not going to try to unravel what’s going on here specifically. Instead, let’s take a moment to reflect on the importance and need for historical events to be re-experienced and re-interpreted by each new generation…

“But how was I to discover, in the documents of the past, references to things which were too ordinary, too commonplace, too far removed from the memorable incident for contemporary writers to mention them?”- Philippe Aries (1962)

This is my challenge all the time, rather than to swallow whole the received history and the white-washed assumptions. Aries’ book is awful but he did put this well. The best history gets into the schema, the mindset, of the people rather than just record happenings.

This seems a fruitful image to go with that point. You could perhaps archaeologically reconstruct a whole culture by analysing a picture like this.

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Image ref. Sir George Grey Special Collections: AWNS-19320831-40-5

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