When a koru-eating shark became netball’s emblem

The year 1991 was a watershed in New Zealand netball history.
Who can forget the final of the Netball World Cup in Sydney – the first played indoors and broadcast live into Kiwi homes for the first time? When trans-Tasman rivalry kicked up a notch as Australia pipped New Zealand by one goal in what remains one of the greatest games in the sport.
That same year, a competition to find a name for the national team turned up the Silver Ferns. The organisation running the sport was renamed Netball New Zealand.
And high school art teacher Sally Hollis-McLeod came up with a logo encapsulating the new era. A logo that’s still relevant 33 years on – even if it was at first decried as “a shark eating a koru by moonlight”.
“When I look back there were a few things that changed the direction of the sport quite markedly that year,” says Dawn Jones, then president of the New Zealand Netball Association Inc.
“Once we got the name ‘Netball New Zealand’ sorted, we thought, ‘Well, we can’t possibly use that awful logo we’ve got’.”
Jones pulls out an old tournament programme sporting the archaic logo – a kiwi perched on a leather ball with laces.
At the time, Jones was also the principal of Diocesan School for Girls in Auckland, so she approached Hollis-McLeod, the school’s art teacher. “I asked if she’d like the challenge of designing a new logo for Netball New Zealand’,” says Jones. It turned out to be a challenge she relished.
Today Hollis-McLeod lives in the quiet village of Kohukohu on the edge of the Hokianga Harbour, on an orchard with two paddocks and four sheep.  She’s semi-retired from a career that included book designer, illustrator and art director.
“Dawn was very visionary,” Hollis-McLeod recalls of Jones, who was made an icon in the inaugural Netball NZ Hall of Fame this year.
“When she asked me to design the logo, she gave me a sketch someone had drawn which looked like a pair of underpants hanging out of a circle.”
The main elements of the sketch, though, were a hoop and a ball. But Hollis-McLeod felt the “dynamism” of the sport needed to be represented in the design, too.
“I felt dynamism was important as netball is a quick game, with diagonal movement,” she says. “This made me think of a ‘game plan’ as a metaphor and structure.”
That was portrayed by the zigzag running through the middle of the design. 
“The zigzag pathway comes from when you think about playing netball, starting with the centre, looking this way to this person, and then it goes across to that person; that felt quite natural,” says Hollis-McLeod, who played netball at Wellington East Girls College, then for the Kia Ora club in the capital once she left school.
“What was also important was reflecting people and place – hence the fern and the Pasifika stylisation.”
Jones and the NNZ staff were more than happy with the first, and only, design Hollis-McLeod put forward. “It was markedly different from what we’d had before,” Jones says. “So we presented it to council, and they approved it.”
But not everyone was impressed. Hollis-McLeod has kept a clipping from the NZ Listener, titled ‘If the logo fits’.
“According to the press handout, Netball New Zealand’s new logo ‘reflects the growth, dynamism and the place/the people. It is obviously a Pacific logo and yet the fine traditions of New Zealand sport are acknowledged by the Silver Fern, at left. In this interpretation, however, the fern contains the zigzag of game strategy. The other rib at the front, at right, describes a clear arc from earth to air, tipped by an unfolding koru, breaking through the remains of a (lightly described) circle reminiscent of a goal. The logo does more than use part of the plant to represent sport. In a sport-loving country, it celebrates energy.”
“Phew, and we thought it was just a shark eating a koru by moonlight!”
Rather than being insulted, Hollis-McLeod found the magazine’s response “amusing, as they looked closely enough to construct their own metaphor.”
Hollis-McLeod made a slight adaptation to NNZ’s insignia for a silver badge, and was then asked to screenprint silk scarves with the logo. She remembers it was a task carried out one stormy winter’s night in the Diocesan School fifth form art classroom, with the help of Waiheke screen-printer Daphne Mitten; much of the painting was done by hand.
“We did it in one night and it was chaos,” Hollis-McLeod laughs.
The silk scarves were made for the New Zealand team – the newly-minted Silver Ferns – who went to the 1991 Netball World Cup in Sydney. Jones still has hers.
The Silver Ferns moniker was born out of a nationwide competition.
“At that point, the only New Zealand sports teams with names were the All Blacks and the Kiwis,” Jones recalls. “When we discussed it, the best we could come up with was the Silver Ferns. We weren’t sure if we could do better, so we put it out to a competition.”
The public response was huge – there was barely room to move in Jones’ lounge, with the piles of name suggestions mailed in.
“Three other people came up with ‘The Silver Ferns’ too. We got ‘The Tuis’ and all kinds of birds. But we still liked Silver Ferns, so we split the prize between three winners,” Jones laughs.
But a sports media company told Jones they were making a terrible mistake: “They said it would remind people of butter [the Fernleaf brand] and trains [the Silver Fern railcars].”
But it was too late to change it, anyway. Cathy Campbell, who hosted the Countrywide Bank Grandstand sports TV show, announced the new name on air. (The late Campbell also fronted live netball coverage and was the first woman to anchor a Kiwi sports show). The national media then picked up the name and ran with it.
To this day there have been 187 Silver Ferns, with three uncapped players in the current squad to meet England Roses at the end of this month.
A trip overseas convinced Jones that the name of the sport’s organisation, the New Zealand Netball Association Incorporated, was “very old fashioned… So we talked about changing the name to Netball New Zealand.”
Another major change that year was moving the sports headquarters from Wellington to Auckland.
“The reason we were based in Wellington was that we dealt with the government to get our funding,” Jones says. “But Anne Taylor [the previous president] had done a very good job at initiating sponsorships, and the sponsors were all in Auckland. And TVNZ had just moved to Auckland, and we were starting to get into television broadcasting. So moving to Auckland was the right decision.”
It seems every call made for netball back in 1991 was the right one.