Māori Cricketers in New Zealand Cricket History

The missionary Henry Williams recorded a game of cricket being played at Paihia in the Bay of Islands in 1832. Three years later Charles Darwin, passing through Waimate in Northland, watched Māori playing it. That is two decades before New Zealand's first recorded first-class match and almost a century before the country played a Test.

Māori have therefore been playing cricket in New Zealand for as long as anybody has. What has not followed is a proportionate presence in the professional game, and the reasons are documented rather than mysterious: the school calendar, the pull of rugby codes, the cost and time demands of club cricket, and long stretches in which nobody in the sport's administration was looking.

This page sets out who the players are. It is a list with a caveat attached, because the list is necessarily incomplete, and the caveat matters as much as the names.

Why any such list is provisional

Cricket's record-keeping does not capture whakapapa. Scorecards record initials and dismissals. There is no register of iwi affiliation for first-class cricketers, and there never has been.

So a page like this can only include people who fall into one of three categories:

• players who have publicly identified as Māori, or whose iwi affiliations have been published in official announcements — which in practice means the last decade, since New Zealand Cricket began naming iwi in squad releases;
• players selected for a representative Māori side, which is a formal eligibility test and therefore a matter of record;
• historical figures whose descent is documented in New Zealand's national biographical and encyclopaedic sources.

Anyone omitted is not being denied. They are simply not in the record in a form that can be cited. That gap is itself part of the history, and it explains why the same handful of names is repeated in every account of the subject.

The nineteenth century: clubs, colleges and a calendar problem

Cricket reached Māori communities early because missionaries brought it, and it took root in places with mission and school infrastructure. By the 1880s there were formal Māori cricket clubs.

The most important institution was Te Aute College in Hawke's Bay, an elite Māori secondary school whose cricket first XI dates to the nineteenth century and survives in team photographs from the 1880s. Te Aute also produced much of the Māori political leadership of the following generation, which is why its sporting records are unusually well preserved.

Te Aute's cricket ran into an obstacle that had nothing to do with ability. Boarding schools closed for the summer, and the summer was the cricket season. A boy who could play was at home for the months in which the game was played, and there was no club structure in most rural districts to absorb him. Rugby, played in the school terms, had no such problem. That single scheduling fact does more to explain the divergence between Māori participation in the two sports than any cultural explanation.

The early arrival of the game in New Zealand generally, missionaries included, is set out in the origins of cricket in New Zealand.

Rona McKenzie, 1954

The first Māori to captain a New Zealand cricket team was a woman, and she did it thirty-six years before the man usually credited as the first Māori international.

Rona Una McKenzie, of Ngāti Awa, was born in 1922 and died in 1999. She played seven Test matches for New Zealand between 1954 and 1961 and captained in every one of them, including the 1954 tour of England, which was New Zealand's first away Test series in women's cricket. She was an all-rounder: right-handed bat, right-arm medium pace.

	Record
Tests	7, all as captain, 1954-1961
Runs	295 at an average of 22.69
Highest score	61
Wickets	8 at 26.75
Best bowling	4 for 18

Those are the numbers of a competent Test all-rounder in an era of very few matches — seven Tests across seven years, which is the whole international programme a New Zealand woman could expect in the 1950s. She continued in the game afterwards as a coach, manager and administrator.

Her name now attaches to the taonga contested at the Māori Wāhine Nationals, which is the most direct piece of continuity in the whole subject. The wider story of the women's game in the country is in the history of New Zealand women's cricket.

Adam Parore, 1990

Adam Craig Parore, born in Auckland in January 1971, is routinely described as the first Māori to represent New Zealand at cricket. The claim needs the qualification that McKenzie preceded him by decades in the women's game; what is accurate is that he was the first Māori man to play Test cricket for New Zealand.

He did it on 5 July 1990, aged nineteen, against England at Edgbaston. He then kept wicket for New Zealand for twelve years.

	Record
Tests	78, between 1990 and 2002
One-day internationals	179
Test dismissals	204 — 197 catches, seven stumpings
Standing	New Zealand's record for Test dismissals by a wicketkeeper

Parore's career divides in two. He came in as a young keeper with an uncertain bat and left as a genuine Test number six who had also kept through the Fleming era, standing up to the seam attacks discussed in the guide to New Zealand's underdog cricket identity. He was combative, occasionally difficult, and never a comfortable fit with the sport's self-image, which is part of why he is remembered vividly.

In 2011 he climbed Mount Everest, which as far as anyone has established makes him the only Test cricketer to have done so.

The 2001 side, and the twenty-two years after it

A New Zealand Māori men's team was assembled for the Pacifica Cup in Auckland in 2001, playing its first match against the Cook Islands on 3 February. It was, for more than two decades, the only time a senior representative Māori cricket side took the field.

The squad included two players who went on to international careers: Jesse Ryder and Peter McGlashan. Ryder became one of the most naturally gifted batters New Zealand has produced in the professional era and one of the most frustrating to select. McGlashan kept wicket in eleven Twenty20 internationals and four one-day internationals for New Zealand.

Others recorded as having represented the Māori side include Adam Parore, the fast bowler Daryl Tuffey, and Suzie Bates, who has since had one of the longest international careers in the women's game.

The 2001 tournament did not produce a programme. Rugby's Māori side plays regularly and has done for over a century; the cricket equivalent was a one-off. Nothing in the record suggests obstruction — it simply was not resourced or repeated.

The schools tier that came first

Before the senior tournaments there was a schools programme, and it is the part of the structure that actually feeds the rest.

New Zealand Cricket established Māori secondary schoolboys and schoolgirls sides in 2017, open to school cricketers of Māori whakapapa and framed explicitly as representing whānau, hapū, iwi and kura rather than a province. The boys' team played its first fixture in March 2019 at Karori Park in Wellington against a Governor-General's XI. A schoolgirls' side followed, playing alongside the boys against the same opposition, and Maia Lewis was appointed to coach the inaugural girls' team.

Three organisations put the fixture together: New Zealand Cricket, the New Zealand Cricket Players' Association and the New Zealand Secondary School Sports Council. The stated reasoning from the board was blunt — that Māori are under-represented in cricket and that the sport needed to say so and act on it.

The programme was built with a marae stay and cultural preparation alongside the cricket, which sounds like presentation and is not. A teenager whose experience of the sport has been a suburban club where he is the only Māori in the side is being offered something structurally different, and the retention argument for doing it that way is the same one rugby has relied on for a century.

The 2020s revival

The pattern changed in the middle of the 2020s decade with the establishment of national Māori tournaments run through the major associations rather than as one-off representative fixtures.

The men's tournament

The inaugural Māori National T20 Tournament was played over Easter weekend in 2023, with five regional sides: Tāmaki Makaurau Māori, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Māori, Northern Districts Māori, Central Districts Māori and Te Waipounamu Māori, covering the South Island. Tāmaki Makaurau won it.

The squads were drawn from Hawke Cup cricket, provincial A and age-group sides, and the Māori secondary schoolboys programme — meaning it functioned as a genuine selection tier rather than an exhibition. Jesse Tashkoff, newly contracted by Wellington, played for Te Whanganui-a-Tara, captained by Mikaere Leef. Dusan Hakaraia and Jock McKenzie led Tāmaki Makaurau. The Central Districts side, drawing on the region covered in the guide to cricket in Central Districts, brought through Jerome Robinson and Samuel Payne.

The Māori Wāhine Nationals

The first Māori Wāhine Nationals followed in Hastings from 13 to 15 October 2023, five teams in the Twenty20 format, playing for the Rona McKenzie Taonga.

The playing standard was higher than a first-year tournament might suggest, because much of New Zealand's women's professional game was represented. Among those involved:

Player	Note
Kerry Tomlinson	Central Districts batter, player-coach at the Wāhine Nationals
Jess McFadyen	Capped White Ferns wicketkeeper, Wellington
Sam Barriball	Twenty one-day internationals and eight Twenty20 internationals for New Zealand
Holly Topp	Long-serving Northern Brave player
Caitlin King	Wellington Blaze bowler, captained Te Whanganui-a-Tara
Skye Bowden	Auckland pace bowler
Harriett Cuttance, Zarah Moana	South Island seamers

The domestic sides these players come from are covered in the guide to women's domestic cricket in New Zealand.

Aotearoa Māori Wāhine at the Pacific Cup

In January 2024 an Aotearoa Māori women's side played the Pacific Cup in Auckland — the first senior representative Māori cricket team of either sex since 2001.

Kerry Tomlinson captained. Jess McFadyen and Skye Bowden were joint vice-captains. The head coach was Maia Lewis, of Ngāti Whātua and Ngāti Māniapoto, herself a former New Zealand women's captain, which gave the side a direct line back to McKenzie's role. The opposition came from Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Cook Islands — the regional structure described in the guide to New Zealand cricket's Pacific Island connections.

What the list tells you about the country

Three things, none of them flattering to the sport's past and none of them hopeless.

The first is that the bottleneck has been structural, not about talent. A game whose season falls in the school holidays, whose clubs require a subscription and a full Saturday, and whose strongest structures sit in a particular set of city suburbs will systematically under-recruit from communities the rugby codes reach first. The mechanics of that are set out in the guides to the school cricket pathway and the club cricket system.

The second is that the women's game has been ahead of the men's here for seventy years and continues to be. A Māori woman captained New Zealand in 1954. A Māori woman coached the first revived representative side in 2024. The men's team of 2001 did not lead anywhere for over twenty years.

The third is that a tournament tier changes things in a way that a one-off fixture does not. Regional Māori sides selected from Hawke Cup and provincial A cricket give a young player a reason to be identified, an annual fixture to be picked for and a squad list with their iwi on it. Whether that produces the next Parore is not yet answerable. It has already produced a record where there was none.

Career figures for the internationals named here are in the player index, the short-format competition most of these players appear in is covered in the Super Smash guide, and the rest of the game in the country sits on the cricket in New Zealand hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on New Zealand Cricket squad announcements and tournament releases for the Māori National T20 Tournament, the Māori Wāhine Nationals and the 2024 Pacific Cup; Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, for nineteenth-century Māori sport and for Te Aute College; published biographical records for Rona McKenzie and Adam Parore; and official match records for the Tests, one-day internationals and Twenty20 internationals cited. Iwi affiliations are given only where they have been published by New Zealand Cricket or in national biographical sources. The list of Māori cricketers here is expressly not exhaustive, because cricket's records do not capture descent and no complete register exists. Nothing on this page is computed by this site.