South Taranaki town Pātea to celebrate 150 years of rugby with jubilee weekend

Pātea is celebrating 150 years of rugby over King’s Birthday weekend, May 30-31. Pictured are Patea Rugby and Sports Club chairwoman and treasurer Kate Murdoch (left) and jubilee committee member Jacq Dwyer. Photo / Fin Ocheduszko Brown

Pātea is gearing up to celebrate 150 years of rugby.

The Patea Rugby and Sports Club is planning a weekend of festivities on May 30-31 to honour the occasion.

All junior and senior rugby teams will play in Pātea and a jubilee dinner will be held on the night of May 30.

An old-timers match will be played on May 31 against an invitational team, with international referee and former Pātea junior rugby player Paul Williams refereeing the game.

The club’s chairwoman and treasurer, Kate Murdoch, said it was special to celebrate the rugby club’s history.

“There’s not many clubs these days that can say that they’ve got to 150 years,” she said.

The club – originally known as Patea Football Club – was established in 1876, but Murdoch said rugby had been played in Pātea for a few years before that.

Jubilee committee member and South Taranaki historian Jacq Dwyer said Robert Collings Tennent was heavily influential in establishing a rugby club in Pātea.

“He was a real mover and shaker in rugby,” Dwyer said.

“He would have just got all of the guys together and said ‘right, we actually need a club that can play and be official’.”

Tennent was the founder of New Zealand’s first rugby football club, Nelson Football Club, in 1868 and was the principal influence in rugby first being played in Wellington.

In 1874 he was transferred to Pātea to manage the new Bank of NSW branch.

Patea Football Club’s first game was against Hawera-Waihi Club on July 22, 1876, and the scoreline was 1-0 to Hawera-Waihi, as goals (tries) counted for one point in the early days.

“It was like a soccer game, and it was apparently a really hard game,” Dwyer said.

“It sounds like Hāwera had the weight advantage but they said Pātea were everywhere; they were fit but didn’t have the weight – perhaps they were too busy working hard and losing lots of weight.”

Murray Wills and Alistair Scown are the club’s two former All Blacks of note.

Wills and Scown will be donating their All Blacks blazers at the jubilee.

Sergeant Taurua Pehimana, a Pātea-born, World War I soldier with the first Māori Battalion, was another notable figure for the club.

Sergeant Taurua Pehimana (back left), with the 1913 Patea Football Club junior rugby team.

In 1996, the club merged with the Waverley Rugby Club to form the Border Rugby Club, starting a 16-year amalgamation of the clubs.

In 2012, rugby was brought back as the Patea Rugby and Sports Club.

The clubrooms were renamed the Murray Wills Sports Centre.

Murdoch said the club could have “fallen apart” in 1996.

“Some key people were a big part of that: my father-in-law Jim Murdoch was key with the merge and also key in bringing the club back to Pātea,” she said.

“He could see the writing on the wall within Waverley; they wanted to go back and play in the Whanganui competition.

“It didn’t meet the needs of the people in the Pātea community so he had the foresight to set up the sports trust.”

The majority of committee members from 2012 are still on the committee today, Murdoch said.

In 2026, the club has a senior men’s rugby union team, a senior women’s rugby union team, three junior rugby union teams, a senior men’s rugby league team, four junior rugby league teams and four junior netball teams.

Murdoch said that is “pretty massive for a sports club in a town of this size”.

Murdoch said rugby league has been big in Pātea for quite a few years and the league club amalgamated with the sports club three years ago.

The club has previously had involvement in senior netball, tennis, cricket and squash, in order to “go with the demand of the community”, Murdoch said.

Kate Murdoch (left) says the club is the "hub of the community". Photo / Fin Ocheduszko Brown

Murdoch said the club is the “hub of the community” in Pātea, with everyone involved sharing high levels of passion for the town.

“There is massive pride and I see that in my own kids. My eldest wants to come back and play for Pātea, my daughter has said, ‘I’m 16 now, I want to play senior women’s rugby for Pātea’,” she said.

The Pātea pride was highlighted when the senior men’s team won the division two championship in 2024 for the first time since 1951.

“When we drove in, the townspeople lined the street to come in, we had a police escort coming into town – it was massive,” Murdoch said.

“I think I kicked everyone out of the clubrooms at 4 o’clock in the morning, we were here all night.

“That’s what it meant for a town like this, those wins are massive.”

She said the club had worked hard to ensure there were no barriers for players and inclusivity was strong.

Murdoch thinks the dedication of people within the club and rural nature of the community would be major factors in the club continuing.

“We tend to stick together and come together as a community ... our biggest thing now is player numbers, that is becoming harder and harder,” she said.

“It goes in cycles, we’ve had years where we have thought ‘gosh, we are not going to have a team this year’ and then we get it together.”

Murdoch said, like many clubs in New Zealand, Pātea sometimes struggled for volunteers and funding could also be challenging.

She said a combination of keeping players interested in rugby and having a solid volunteer base would be critical in the sustainability of the club.

Dwyer will be publishing a book later this year about the history of rugby in Pātea.

Fin Ocheduszko Brown is a multimedia journalist based in Whanganui.