Helen Clark: Rebirth of a rebel

* This exclusive extract is from Helen Clark's
biography, Helen: Portrait of a Prime Minister, by her media adviser, Dr Brian Edwards.

Sex, booze and rock'n'roll were not for serious student Helen Clark. But, even at the age of 18, she was showing the willpower and intellect that would take her to New Zealand's top job.

It was not at all taken for granted in the Clark household that any of the girls would go to university. In Head and Shoulders (by Virginia Myers) Helen says that her parents were surprised that this was what she and Suzanne wanted to do. No one in the Clark family had ever been to university before, and primary school teaching was a more likely and more common career for intelligent young women of the time. But schoolteaching held little appeal for the 18-year-old, who wanted "something more stimulating than Training College".

And, increasingly, what Helen wanted, Helen got. Her refusal to play the organ or indeed attend church at all at Te Pahu was evidence of the emergence of a more determined and wilful personality than had previously been seen either by her parents or her teachers. George [her father] might have had occasion to think back to those "blue eyes staring at me" and his prediction that he "might have a certain amount of trouble".

No doubt some of this can be put down to that commonest cause of friction between parents and their children - teenage rebellion. But Helen had also had five years experience of life in New Zealand's largest city, a very different existence to that of her parents in the small rural community of Te Pahu. Changes were also occurring in her thinking and in her perception of the world around her. She was becoming interested in politics, a different brand of politics to that of her parents. George and Margaret were staunch National Party supporters. They were farmers and the farming community was the backbone of the Party. Te Pahu was no different from anywhere else. "In our whole area," says Margaret, "you knew just the one or two who happened to be Social Credit or Labour. The rest were just en bloc National."

The unions were the farmers bete noir: "There was a strike in Horotiu one year and I reckon it cost me 20,000," George recalls. "You couldn't get your stock into the works, and they ate the grass others should have had, and so it went on and on down the system. That's why we were National Party."

On social and moral issues George and Margaret could also have been fairly described as conservative. Their oldest daughter, on the other hand, had begun in her final years at Epsom to see the world in a quite different light. Her ideas on the issues of the day - Vietnam, apartheid, nuclear weapons - were tending to the radical and left-wing, and she began to bring them home.

"Her ideas were diametrically opposed to ours in many ways," Margaret states. "I suppose she thought our ideas were ancient."

So Helen's visits home increasingly became occasions for arguments with her father, arguments which, Suzanne recalls, were heated and upsetting to the other members of the family: "It was awful. They used to argue terribly, mainly at the tea table. Helen would come home from boarding school and they would argue. She was very left-wing and my Dad, at that stage, was very right. And of course he loved an argument."

No one, including George himself, takes issue with that. He genuinely loved to argue.

George: "My father would argue for the devil of it. He took the opposite side."

Margaret: "I remember a minister saying about arguments, that they're often a display of ignorance on both sides."

"No they aren't."

"Yes, they often are."

"It's dialogue. I enjoyed these debates with Helen."

"I don't agree with that. They were often quite unpleasant."

"But you can still enjoy them."

"People listening don't enjoy them."

"You didn't have to listen."

Often the family didn't listen. Jenefer recalls her reaction to this "dialogue": "Dad can be quite an argumentative person, quite contrary. If you think one thing, he'll then try another train of thought. He just loves what he likes to call 'discussions', but for Mum and us they were arguments. Mum hated it, the arguing. She didn't take part in it. Sandra and I would leave the room. We just didn't want any part of it. It was disrupting our normal, happy family life."

So while his wife and three younger daughters abhorred unpleasantness of any sort, George may well have been delighted when his oldest daughter returned from boarding school, spouting ideas that were diametrically opposed to his own. Here was a chance to flex his neglected dialectical muscles. And Helen was a worthy opponent, both intellectually and in her own determination not to give way. She was an arguer, too.

Her father, it seems fair to say, looked forward to these "discussions" with his daughter, but to Helen it almost began to feel as if he were lying in wait for her when she came home, welcoming the opportunity to provoke another joust. Like her mother and sisters, she began to find these encounters unpleasant. Whether George was aware of it or not, a breach was developing between him and his daughter.

In 1968 Helen enrolled at Auckland University. She took History, German, English and Political Studies: "Political Studies was sort of an add-on. A lot of people didn't do four subjects in the first year, so I added that on. I think I'd met people in the 7th form at Epsom who said, 'Oh, Political Studies is really interesting'. And I thought, well, my family's got an interest in politics and I'll probably find it interesting. It was sort of like that."

The "add-on" was to bring Helen into contact with students and staff who would have a major influence on her thinking, her career and her life. But in this first year her concentration was almost exclusively on study: "I've never been a morning person. I used to hate any lectures before 10 in the morning, but I'd come in by bus and spend the day at the university until the library closed at 10 at night. You would tend to take a chair in the library for the day, and then you'd pop out to your lectures, get a cup of coffee or lunch, that sort of thing."

She was a serious student. The traditional student pursuits - sex, booze, rock'n'roll - were not for her. She didn't drink, smoke, gamble or go to parties. She joined no student clubs or organisations during her first year.

She was there to study, to learn and to do well. Her sole indulgence appears to have been the movies. But even here her tastes were towards the serious, the political and the instructive: "I was always interested in anything with a current affairs perspective. So films like Costa- Gavra's Z I found tremendously interesting. You see, when I was a student, Greece had a dictatorship. There were movies about that. And apart from that there was quite a strong cinematic strain coming out of Germany, movies looking at the German experience through the eyes of young radicals who had gone completely over the edge, the sort of Red Army. I was interested in anything with a current affairs perspective, and there were a lot of movies at the time that built on those themes.

"I was also always very interested in films about what was happening in Latin America. I've always been interested in Latin America. While I was at university in 1970, Salvador Allende became Chile's first socialist president, only to be overthrown and killed in the Pinochet coup three years later. I was always tremendously interested in Allende and in the events after the coup. Which is why I took time I really didn't have last year to go to the swearing-in of the new Chilean President, Ricardo Lagos, the first left-wing politician to lead the country since Allende was murdered. It was a very emotional occasion and people from social democratic parties around the world came to support the new President. It was fantastic."

* Helen: Portrait of a Prime Minister, by Brian Edwards, Exisle $44.95.