1949: Meeanee Rodeo

February 20, 2020

By AHNZ

On October 22nd, 1949, the week of the Hawke’s Bay Show, the Meeanee Young Farmers Sports Club organised a day of rodeo at their domain. A clever idea to have some fun and tap in to a bit of existing traffic already attending the larger event.

Whoever these clever young men were, they also had the wisdom and connections to get the National Film Unit in on it. This video led the newsreel in the following week’s (I assume) Weekly Review. View it below.

‘Meeanee’ is not a Maori place name but a colonial one, going back to the military settlers of that place who had served in British India. Today it’s just another burb of Napier but back in 1949 it was its own country town with its own identity. They had a licensed hotel, post office, telephone line, and general store for their orchardists and farmers and visitors. Of course, being so close to Napier, it wasn’t much longer until it became assimilated and homogenised…

“Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.”- Oswald Spengler

The time period of this rodeo was part of what AHNZ calls Upham Honour Culture. New Zealand was feisty and physical, the very sort of thing war times require of us. Very soon we would turn to Mt Everest Dignity Culture. Both phases were heavily influenced by the new predominant cultural capital of the West- America. Rodeos like this one had roots with USA cowboy culture and are still with us today. ‘Americana’ became ‘Kiwiana’. The Americans had come to charm us in person in 1908 and there had also been a similar wave of Zane Gray Cowboy Culture sweeping our way 20 years after that and 20 years before this Meeanee Rodeo¹. The image (above) comes from a kid from 1897 who would grow up to be part of our Boer War Honour Culture period.

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1 Of course it’s 20 years. The TMC being a theory of 20 year culture cycles. The next Honour Culture period is set to strike during the decade of the 2020s.

Ref. WEEKLY REVIEW 428; NZ Film Archive

Ref. Gisbourne Herald; Papers Past

Image ref. New Plymouth Cowboy Kid, 1897; New Zealand Graphic; Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections

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