Australia, Oceania, Pacyfic

Vigoro is among the games in Australia played by women. Originally, the game combined the elements of tennis and cricket, but its modern-day form is more like a combination of baseball and cricket. John George Grant invented Vigoro in the year 1901 as a sport that required the players to use tennis rackets and wicket involving six stumps. George Grant invented the game at the start of the 20th century and introduced it into the curriculum of New South Wales in the 1920s.
Vigoro originated from an Anglo Norman word, vigorous. The word means active and strong in body. The word appeared in print for the first time on March 23rd, 1931 on Sydney Morning Herald.
The first major organized game of Vigoro was played by men before the MCC committee at Lord’s Cricket Ground, where court tennis star Eustace Miles’ team defeated the team led by Bobby Abel, the famous Surrey cricketer, winning by an innings. The earliest iterations of Vigoro saw the usage of tennis racquets, large rubber balls and six stumps in place of cricket’s usual 3-stump wicket. After some initial buzz, as it turned up in venues like Queen’s Club and Crystal Palace in the early half of the 1900s, English interest in the game began to subside. But a lack of English establishment did not mean extinction for Vigoro.
It found great press on Australia where it was introduced following the First World War This dissemination can be pinned on Ettie Doge, who had inherited the copyright of Viogro from John Grunt upon his death. Wife to a merchant who sold Vigoro equipment in South Wales (Dodge & Co.), Ettie was the second and long-time president of New South Wales Woman’s Vigoro Association since 1919, and also founded the AAA (All Australian Vigoro Association), taking up the role of the foundational president in 1932 to promote Vigoro in Australia.

Waka ama have been widely used in the smaller islands of the Pacific for centuries, but had become very rare in New Zealand by the time the first European explorers arrived. Although there were occasional sightings of waka hourua (double-hulled canoes), used for fishing and as work platforms, waka ama were seldom noted.

When British explorer James Cook was passing Māhia on the North Island’s east coast on his first voyage to the Pacific in 1769, his ship was approached by a number of canoes. The artist Sydney Parkinson noted, ‘Several of the canoes had outriggers; and one of them had a very curious piece of ornamental carving at the head of it.’ On Cook’s second voyage, in 1773, more canoes were seen at Queen Charlotte Sound. Georg Forster recorded that some ‘had an outrigger, or narrow piece of plank, fixed parallel to one side of the canoe by means of transverse poles, to prevent their oversetting.’ However, both men noted that outrigger canoes were relatively rare even at the time, and later observers such as missionaries did not mention them at all.
Physical evidence of waka ama in New Zealand is limited to a single, very old, canoe dug out of swampy ground on the Taieri plains, Otago, about 1895. Its hull shape is unlike any other known Māori canoe, and it appears to have been made with stone tools. The only known example of an ama (outrigger) was found at Moncks Cave, near Sumner, in the late 19th century.
The absence of waka ama may be due to the many large trees in New Zealand compared with other Pacific islands. Unlike their Polynesian forebears, Māori waka builders were able to build hulls that were wide and stable, and did not need ama to help keep them upright.

Woodchopping called woodchop for short, is a sport that has been around for hundreds of years in several cultures.
On Antipodes, it has been said that the sport we now know as woodchopping originated as the result of a bet between 2 men in a bar in Ulverstone, Tasmania in 1870. Jack Biggs from Warragul, Victoria and Joseph Smith form Ulverstone, had a wager for £25 to see who could fell a tree the fastest.
Many of the axemen of today still work within the timber industry, which is of course no longer reliant on manpower for harvesting. As the years have passed the sport has developed into a much more sophisticated affair which includes, Underhand chopping, Standing Block Chopping, Treefelling, Single and Double handed Sawing and Axe throwing.