Billy Wallace: A True Rugby Legend

Description

In the history of New Zealand sports, few players have achieved the legendary status of Billy Wallace - one of the first, and most gifted, rugby players to ever be associated with the game.

Denis Dwyer has been passionately involved in sport since he played for an Oamaru junior rugby team in 1951. Now he is a recreational walker and a volunteer at the New Zealand Rugby Museum in Palmerston North. It was the donation of Billy Wallace's massive scrapbook to the museum by his grandchildren in 2019 that triggered this biography. His previous publications include New Zealand on Foot, New Zealand Adventures by Rail and the biographies Black Jersey, Silver Fern: Tom Ellison - First Maori to Captain the All Blacks and The Good Citizen: The Story of the Remarkable Tom Ryan: All Black, Artist, Entrepreneur, Sailor, Adventurer. Denis also has a personal rugby connection to the Wallace era - his grandfather Jack Dwyer, whom he remembers well, was a playing contemporary of Billy Wallace for Otago.