A Play Biography
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Abstract
I began searching for the meaning of play and games in 1949, and this is the story of how I found it. But it didn't begin easily. When I first presented my official credentials to the Headmaster of my first school to be visited, in "Scottish" Dunedin, he said with Calvinistic fervor: "Chaps like you are a damned nuisance. The Education Department says we should assist you but you are really just wasting our time. No wonder we can't get anything done." Nevertheless, he allowed me into the classrooms to listen to the children and into the playgrounds to watch them play their games. I carried on this way for several years, ending up having information from about 50 schools, much of the time traveling free all over the country, up and down the mountains, due to the courtesy of school physical education specialists, and often sleeping overnight in their cars which were sometimes frosted over in the morning. The first time on the road lasted about six weeks and ended with a bout of shingles. Listening to informants all day long and sleeping in ice boxes is not great for one's health. Still, my visits to Teachers' Colleges, to old peoples' homes, to Early Settler Associations, and my advertisement of the project in newspapers, magazines and by radio brought about a thousand reports. I used these along with written biographical materials from the Alexander Turnbull Library to recover the history of children's play in New Zealand during its first hundred years from 1840 until 1950.
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