Respectable professionals: The apparent contradictions of wood chopping as a competitive sport in Australasia 1870s to 1914

Abstract

Wood chopping emerged as a competitive sport amid the substantial bush clearances in Tasmania during the 1870s and soon took hold, under similar circumstances, in other parts of Australia and New Zealand. The sport became part of an extensive network of semiprofessional or ‘cash’ athletics throughout Australasia. Conventional wisdom would therefore suggest that it was firmly on one side of a rigorous binary opposition between middle-class amateurs and working-class professionals. However, such an interpretation underestimates, firstly, the sustained efforts of professional sports to enforce their own codes of morality and respectability, and secondly, the reality that relations between amateurs and professionals in Australasia were frequently co-operative rather than diametrically opposed. In this context, competitive wood chopping came to be highly regulated, to eschew gambling, to embrace elite patronage, and to be welcomed at showpiece events such as the Sydney Royal Easter Show. Its status was to a large degree due to the importance of bush clearances to notions of progress and the taming of the frontier in new world societies.