Word: zealand
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There was always the chance that Sonny Bill Williams would be special. Old-timers remember his maternal grandfather, Bill Woolsey, as one of the toughest men to wear the New Zealand rugby league jersey. Williams, who's part Samoan, started playing at the age of eight for Auckland's Mt. Albert club and was soon turning heads with precocious displays of power and skill. He was in primary school when spotted by a scout working for the Australian National Rugby League club Canterbury, which brought him over to Sydney's southwest when he was 15. Three years later, Williams...
...Williams is one of a host of Polynesian players who are shaking up a century-old game in both Australia and New Zealand - and transforming rugby union as well. As recently as the 1980s, players of Maori or Pacific Island descent were rare in the elite ranks of union and league in Australia, and well outnumbered in New Zealand. Broadly speaking, union, amateur until 1995, was the exclusive domain of affluent private-school alumni, while league was the professional game of the white working class. The few Maori or Islander players who broke into the latter were often racially abused...
...quarter of the ranks of the NRL. To put that in perspective, a group that has a 1 in 200 representation in the Australian populace has a 1 in 4 presence in the country's premier winter sports competition. It's a similar, if less striking, picture in New Zealand, where Maori and Islanders comprise 17% of the population, yet of late have made up more than half the players in the country's five provincial rugby sides. The trend is set to accelerate. In Australia, the proportion of Polynesian players in high-level junior rugby league teams is even...
...Dusseldorf. The three festivals he's attended have introduced him to a wider network of artistic influence. "We are the most western part of the Pacific, which is tied together through traditional designs," says the Thursday Island-born artist, who has traced Torres Strait motifs back to the New Zealand Maori via "the Solomon Islands, Palau and across to Hawaii...
...Samoan rapper King Kapisi would no doubt chime with these sentiments. For the King, a.k.a. Bill Urale, returning to the Pacific his family left to live in Wellington, New Zealand has brought mixed feelings. In the muscular rhythms of songs like Screams From Da Old Plantation, Urale presents Pacific culture as something to be contested, interrogated and recontextualized. "The thing I don't actually agree with," he says, "is how religion has become part of Samoa's culture. Personally, I think that culture and religion should be apart. Culture should be culture and religion should be religion. I'm just...