Remembering Smithells: Past, Present, Future

In this article, I analyze a set of narratives about, and memorials to, Philip Ashton Smithells, the founder of physical education in New Zealand and a pantheon figure within the discipline. Rather than analyzing these narratives and memorials as stories and artifacts that accurately reconstruct Smithells and his ideas and practices, I conceptualize them as choices that create representations or interpretations that are independent of the truth. I also conceptualize the memorials to Smithells, which include a building, painting, photograph, lecture, and scholarship, as triggers for personal and collective memories. But neither narratives nor memorials can guarantee what individuals or communities remember and, in this sense, history, as representations of the past, is always fluid. Notions of choice and representation may unsettle those who regard history as synonymous with facts and truths and who seek the clarity of a definitive past. However, conceptualizing history as representations reminds us that our understanding of physical education, its origins and its founders, will continually shift with new reflections and as fresh ideas emerge, material conditions change, and events unfold.