Play: from Waikato Street to the world

Brian Sutton-Smith was brought up at number 12 Waikato St. He went on to become the world’s foremost theoretician of children’s play. He published numerous scholarly works which are still in print, a parenting guide, and controversial children’s novels based on his early life in Island Bay. He gained the first doctorate in education in New Zealand, and ended his life as an emeritus professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Sutton-Smith received lifetime achievement awards from the Association for the Study of Play and from the American Folklore Society. 

His obituary in the New York Times (is he the only one from Island Bay to be so noted?) said he: 

‘also had a foot planted in folklore and as a result cast a wide scholarly net, taking in jokes, riddles, stories and street games as well as toys, board games, organized sports, computer gaming and even daydreaming …“Something about the nature of play itself frustrates fixed meaning,” Professor Sutton-Smith wrote in 2008. “Just as some scholars spend their lives consumed by the metaphysics of literature or history or philosophy or theology — you name it — I came to spend mine in search of the metaphysics of play.”’

In a 2008 article in the American Journal of Play, Brian Sutton-Smith recalled his early experience of play, and his use of it in writing controversial books children:

“We, my friends and I, lived in Island Bay, which was a seaside suburb south of the city of Wellington. Off the coast a picturesque little island sat out in the middle of our bay, protected from us explorers by some pretty rough tides.

We kept instead to the hills surrounding the bay, to Windy Wellington, where we leaned into the turbulence, which—when the wind blew full speed—could bring us to a standstill as we walked headlong against it.

From the tops of these hills, so we told ourselves, you could look east eight thousand miles at Chile or west a thousand miles at Australia. Away from the wind, under the endless rows of pine trees the Labour government planted during the economic depression of the 1930s, we occasionally disturbed lovers embracing on soft pine-needle beds. We sometimes swung on a rope above the prickly gorse and yelled out the name of the legendary kid who had fallen into the dense growth and—so the story went—died in the hospital where he was taken afterward. We looked for the cow dung found everywhere back then, when the hills were thick with farms. We stretched our hands wide across the dry top of the patty, then we flipped it over so we could smash the sloppy underside into each others’ faces, a feat we more often dreamt of than accomplished. Perhaps most of all, we liked to creep into the deserted and (so we imagined) haunted house high on one of the more spectral rises. 

There, we tiptoed around, looking for ghosts we never found. But then they never found us either, to our relief and perhaps also to our disappointment.

… the impulse to use the rough and tumble play of my youth as a starting point for my thinking about play actually got me into some considerable trouble early in my career. When I taught a standard three class (ages eight to nine) as final part of my teacher training in 1948, I discovered there were very few books by New Zealanders for children of that age. I began to write my own history about the play of a group of local boys (my brother, two friends, and me), which I read to my kids at the school in Brooklyn, a nearby suburb of Island Bay. 

I called the book simply Our Street and thought of it as whimsically realistic. It began: ‘Once upon a time there was a middle sized boy named Brian and he was called “Brin.” Now there was nothing unusual in this because very few boys are called by their own name. Sometimes they are called “Snowy,” and sometimes they are just called “Stinker,” but they are hardly ever called what they really are. So Brian was quite an ordinary sort of boy.’

A rough and tumble aspect runs through Our Street, which is perhaps even more evident in a second book called Smitty Does a Bunk that I wrote some years later for 10- to 11-year-old children.

My Our Street stories invoked from the children an excitement about their own story writing, an excitement they had not voiced previously. These children were reading for the first time about kids like themselves, kids who used the same slang they used, who played the same games they played, who shared the same excitements and similar personal experiences. One of these children told me; fifty years later: ‘For my child generation your book changed the whole nature of our personal understanding of books. Most of our prior readings were about British children with all the concerns with social status that those books usually contained and which were foreign to typical Kiwi community life.’ 

…When my stories began to appear as a series in these official school journals in July 1949, there was an immediate public outcry against them.

Some of the criticism came from the locally elected authorities on the regional Education Boards. Some came from members of the Headmasters’ Association…These folks complained about the slang and the grammatical deficiencies they saw in the stories. Members of the opposition party in parliament also criticized the stories, contending that the Labour Party, then in power, approved the kind of antisocial behaviour portrayed in these readings for school children. Members of the Labour Party responded in support of the stories, arguing they were New Zealand’s answer to the tales of, say, Mark Twain or Charles Dickens. As a result of the public brouhaha, the monthly school journal ceased to publish Our Street after the first three chapters. But the heated discussion, which much occupied the newspapers of the day, led—perhaps not so surprisingly—to Our Street being published as a book in 1950. And I later wrote two sequels, both children’s books; one the aforementioned Smitty Does a Bunk (1961) and the other entitled The Cobbers (1976).