Dialogue: How 'middle NZ' saw the 51 strike

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

New Zealand television doesn't do history well. Recent retelling of the civil unrest of 1951 and 1981 (2011 could be a bad year) has been skewed towards making the story match the pictures rather than the pictures match the story.

Social history must be rooted in its time to explain the various causes and give meaning to events. What were the basic issues, how did they emerge and what did various groups of people at that time think about them?

Lest we forget, the 1981 strife was a political affair and involved sport only incidentally. Rob Muldoon indulged his basest populist instincts. A poll now would reveal that a huge majority think the Government was entirely wrong, but Muldoon won an election at the end of that winter, albeit narrowly.

Enough people still remember that for the inadequacies of the coverage not to matter much but the background of 50 years ago needs filling out. The 1951 documentary seriously skewed history by giving a narrow focus to the events of that strife.

Would you have guessed after watching that documentary why the Holland Government won a landslide victory at the end of that year? Here's some background.

First: for many years after the end of the Second World War, the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation had been intensifying paranoia in many Western countries. Sneer at it now but it was very real then.

At exactly the same time as the strike was on, the Korean War was raging and Senator Joe McCarthy was viciously harassing liberals in the United States. The hawkish American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, sat in on a Holland cabinet meeting to drum up our support for the war in Korea. An unhealthy fear was manufactured among Western countries.

Second: a concern had been growing among what I shall reluctantly call "middle New Zealand" at work practices on the wharves, mainly featherbedding and "spelling". Watersiders actually worked not much more than half a day when spelling was in force and most New Zealanders despised them as arrogant and lazy. I had a few sitting-around days on the wharf as a seagull but the hardest day's work I ever did was also on the wharf.

Third: the life of workers had been improved gradually by union action and solidarity from hardship and deprivation since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Alone, workers were vulnerable against powerful management; together they had made substantial and just gains in pay and conditions. So, scabs had always been reviled. American writer Jack London wrote a verse vilifying them.

Fourth: the majority of people - and workers were the majority then - had come out of the Depression and Second World War determined to shape a more equitable society. The Welfare State was unquestioned, even by Holland's Government, which campaigned on its record of more generous benefits than Labour.

Fifth: The issues of the 1951 unrest were always obscured by the leaders: the self-serving hypocrisy of Fintan Patrick Walsh; the megalomania of Jock Barnes; the shallow, anachronistic imperialism of Sidney Holland, which earned him the nickname "Little Menzies"; and the dithering, confused Walter Nash.

These threads were not pulled together by the television history, which implied that the strikers were undermined by weariness from Government harassment and deprivation.

That played a part, but what was decisive was that the huge majority of ordinary New Zealanders, who might have started with some sympathy for the militant unions or perhaps were indifferent to their fate, lost all tolerance as the weeks dragged by and withdrew any moral support they might initially have given.

Most people were unaffected by the fascist-style curbs on the fundamental liberties of a substantial minority of their fellow citizens and acquiesced in their execution.

That was the most ominous warning 1951 gave us - how fragile freedom is when national paranoia is encouraged.

I was fresh out of school working on the Te Aroha News during most of the strike. One day, the local sergeant of police called on the widow I was boarding with and asked to see my room. She asked why. The policeman said he understood I was reading subversive literature.

A conventional woman in late middle-age with no sympathy for the watersiders, she said she didn't think it would be proper for him to visit my room without me there. He insisted. She asked whether he had a warrant. He walked away.

A lifelong habit of mine is to be impressed by an author and then read everything I can get. The target of my literary affection then was H.G. Wells. I had read most of his fiction and had come upon a pamphlet in which Wells reported a conversation with Joseph Stalin.

I mentioned it to someone I worked with, who mentioned it casually to the police. And suddenly I was a threat to the security of the nation. That's how dangerous and stupid it often became.