Word: polynesian
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...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...
...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 higher than...
...been a gradual historical process and that we are connected to the past - are hardly the stuff of dazzling scholarly insight. But his encyclopedic survey of the forces and events that have connected individuals, societies and cultures is nimbly paced and punctuated by lively anecdotes - of catamarans plying Polynesian seas, of Catholic converts in Mexico bearing icons made in Macau of missionaries martyred in Japan, and of the armless boy in an Indian trade delegation who awed imperial Rome by shooting arrows with his toes...
...with the knife could still be inside," says Stevenson as the officers wait for backup. Dogs are barking behind the house as though the offenders are fleeing over the back fence. The officers strap on pistols, and with a dog handler as backup, approach the house. A large, angry Polynesian man clad in a singlet and long baggy trousers opens the door. "Hey, you need a warrant," he yells as the officers walk into his house. "Not for this," says another officer. Another man, tall and thin, emerges and glares at the police, swearing, then starts head-butting the support...
...while New Zealand continues its dark tradition of what actor Sam Neill dubbed the "cinema of unease," perhaps most closely identified with Jane Campion's The Piano, Conrich has detected more recently "a wave within a wave." From the Samoan slapstick of Sione's Wedding to the Polynesian hip-hop of the cult animated TV series bro'Town, a distinctly Pacific flavor is adding warmth and a sense of humor to New Zealand screen culture. "I feel like we're in the middle of a real cultural boom," says No. 2's novice director Toa Fraser, whose father hails from...