The Brisbane School Race That Sounds Made Up!
Forget running around a school oval. In 1930, children at North Pine State School at Petrie were competing in a race involving a needle and thread!
The event appears in a contemporary report in The Brisbane Courier and the newspaper actually records the winners.
The school's breaking-up picnic was held in the school grounds on Friday, 12 December 1930, with an afternoon sports programme supervised by head teacher W. H. Chappell.
There were plenty of familiar events:
Flat races Egg-and-spoon races Three-legged races Sack races Potato races
…and then there was:
THE THREAD AND NEEDLE RACE!
According to The Brisbane Courier of 17 December 1930, the results were:
BOYS C. Robinson C. Geiss
GIRLS A. Sutherland R. Mitchell
But here's where the story gets even more interesting.
We don't actually know exactly how North Pine's version of the race worked.
The 1930 newspaper report lists the event and its results, but doesn't give the rules.
However, the name wasn't unique to Petrie. A 1931 sports programme for the Cunard liner RMS Scythia describes a Thread and Needle Race in which a man ran to his "nominator", received a thread, threaded a needle and then returned to the starting point.
So it's quite possible the Petrie children faced a similarly fiddly challenge but we won't pretend we know the exact rules used at North Pine.
And that's what makes this little newspaper discovery so much fun.
This wasn't some modern invention designed to make school sports day more interesting. Thread-and-needle races were genuine novelty events of the period, appearing alongside things such as egg-and-spoon, sack and potato races.
The 1930 North Pine programme gives us a wonderful glimpse into what a Queensland school sports day could look like nearly a century ago.
There were athletic races, certainly but there was also plenty of emphasis on fun, coordination and novelty.
And somewhere on that Petrie school oval in December 1930, C. Robinson and A. Sutherland were apparently proving that they were the fastest needle-threaders in the school!
Would you have been any good at this one?
And if your parents or grandparents ever mentioned unusual school sports from the old days, we'd love to hear about them!
SOURCES: The Brisbane Courier, 17 December 1930, p.16, “North Pine State School”, Trove; History of Petrie State School — Sports & HPE; History of Petrie State School — Picnics; RMS Scythia Deck Sports Programme, 10 January 1931, Gjenvick-Gjønvik Archives
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