The more things change, the more they stay the same!

A century-old letter

In June 1919 the Taranaki Herald published a 'Letter to the Editor', sent in by Walter Nash, who was at that time working in New Plymouth and helping with the development of the infant local branch of the Labour Party.

It was quite a long, detailed letter responding to an Editorial about ecnomic affairs that the paper had printed a few days earlier.

The main point of Nash's commentary was that workers made up two-thirds of the workforce, but only enjoyed 40% of the income, whereas capitalists, who were a very small proportion, enjoyed a much larger share.

Nash wanted to know why workers should be expected to work harder without the extra financial incentive that the owners of wealth received to allow their capital to be used.

It was an argument for more equality of incomes, for a living wage, and by implication a fairer tax regime.

Sound familiar?

This is basically the same point that politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders have been making, and their academic supporters like Robert Reich and Bryan Gould have been arguing for, during the debate that has raged around this issue over the last few months.

Since Nash's day the width of the inequality gap has been reduced until its low point in the seventies and eighties, but since then it has increased again to its present size, which is very much what it was a century ago.

Perhaps we need a mechanism which will not only right the imbalance, but will also self-correct regularly so that things will not get out of kilter again.

What do you think?

Howie Tamati''s Proposal

The L-shaped Pa

New Plymouth District Councillor Howie Tamati has written a letter to the Taranaki Daily News suggesting a change to the Council's plans. It had been suggested that a small reserve in a locality known as Brixton should be sold. Howie wants it kept as a memorial. This seems pretty sound to me.

The Brixton reserve is where the first battle of the Taranaki War was fought in 1860. Each year a group of nearby Waitara people meet to remember the British soldiers who fought in the wars at the memorial in Waitara, and then move to Brixton to remember the Maori warriors in the same way. Howie wants a signboard erected to explain the significance of the site.

Brixton is important for more than just one battle. It was the site of what became known as "the L-shaped Pa". The Maori tacticians built it to this plan to protect the defending forces from the cannon that the British had brought up. And it was successful to the extent that the defenders were able to hold out against the attacks. This and other plans were developed by Maori for trench warfare long before they were used in the similar situations in Northern France during the Great War.

Anzac Day again reminds us that we make a major celebration about the courage, determination, and achievements of our forces in the World Wars and since, but never celebrate the earlier achievements of both sides in what was our provincial "civil war". And we are still, in 2016, sorting out the aftermath of that attempt to fix our problems by fighting, even longer after the events themselves! Not that we acknowledge all the consequences of the World Wars either, though some families live with them every day.

I think we need signage in many more places than just Brixton to remind us of our history. In the last few years several excellent boards have been put up giving the history of different sites and localities.

 Here are three examples.

This signboard is at the beginning of the Te Henui Walkway and gives a potted history of that locality in the centuries leading up to the arrival of British settlement.

Secondly, this is the view you get as you approach the signboard on top of the hill behind our house.

Originally the pa of Wharepapa, the top was flattened and a fort built by sailors from |HMS Niger in 1860. This was one of a ring of forts which formed the outer defences.

Inner defences consisted of a ditch around the little town. From here to the site of the nearest ditch was about 1 kilometre. There were two other forts in the outer ring between here and the ditch.

Getting closer, you realise there is a variety of information on the signboard, both words and pictures.  The top photo, which is dated about 1900, shows our part of the neighbourhood and it is possible to spot our house almost in the exact centre of the shot.

And here is another sign, this one on the edge of the old railway bed above the Huatoki River, explaining the history of this locality, including the two nearest pa sites.

But as well as battle and pa sites there are street names all over the district which have more than local significance.

Fitzroy Road marks the line drawn by Governor Fitzroy's advisers to show the border of the land bought by the New Zealand Company for its New Plymouth settlement, a much smaller acreage than the company had claimed. But Fitzroy was also the first real modern meteorologist: he invented isobars, weather maps and weather forecasts.

Hobson was not only our first governor and the initiator of the Treaty. He helped to clear the Caribbean of a new infestation of pirates long after Blackbeard had been defeated. And he surveyed and drew the charts of Port Philip Bay at the time of the founding of Melbourne in 1836.

Buller Street commemorates the MP Charles Buller, who was Lord Durham's secretary and drew up the report recommending self-government for Canada.

Hussey Vivian was a junior general under Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo and later a member of the UK Cabinet.

Eliot Street remembers the family of one of the first Parliamentary leaders in the struggle with Charles I that led to the Civil War in Britain.

Lemon Street is named after Charles Lemon, one of the first to suggest that statistics might help us sort out the origins of diseases and so develop the science of epidemiology.

All of these, and lots more, deserve signs to explain their importance.

It is entirely appropriate that we should remember the twentieth century wars, and have great exhibitions about them, if ever we are going to rid our world of the scourge of war. I watched "All Quiet on the Western Front" over the weekend. How anyone who had lived through that experience could contemplate another war twenty years later I cannot understand.

But the elephant in the room at Anzac Day is the similar barbarity of the nineteenth century conflicts on our own soil, with enemies who were then and are now even more linked by ties of friendship, family, business and neighbourliness. It feels like a psychotic blockage to even discussing the issues as a civilised and sane society.

Is it too much to hope that our District Council and its citizens will give Howie Tamati's suggestion more support than some other recent proposals?

This month's sketches

Around and About

Spencer (grandson, 5) and I have gone sketching together on a couple of occasions recently. The weather has been sunny and almost windless for several months this autumn, and sketching outside has been fun.

The other day we were sitting in the back yard with our pencils and paper, and here is my attempt at what Spencer called: "Those four balls", in fact he did the arrangement for me to draw. The smallest one needs some repainting!

Today I was down town for a meeting and before walking home I sat on a rubbishbin outside the Bus Terminal and sketched a couple of older buildings in Egmont Street. The wooden building on the right was for many years the home of the RSA here and since then has served as headquarters for the City Life Church.

The concrete building was originally the home of Hooker Bros, the transport company, but it is best known now for Frederic's Restaurant, named for Frederic Carrington, the original surveyor who chose the site of the European settlement here and drew up the plans for the central part of the city.

Our Sketching Group for U3A has recently been visiting the Te Rewarewa Bridge, where I chose on one occasion to concentrate on the harakeke which were then in flower.

Another day I sat at Macdonalds and sketched the building just across the street. It is known to everyone as the Perry Dines Building. For many years it was the home of Massey University for Taranaki, but a few years ago it was deemed an earthquake risk (it is the same construction as the PVC Building in Christchurch), so it has lain empty waiting for demolition.

On the first Sunday morning of the month we have a seaside market at Ngamotu Beach.

While Margaret was examining some of the stalls, I captured this quick impression of one of the streets.

A musician was entertaining us all in the first tent, and above us the sky showed one or two darker clouds.




Finally, a side-on shot of the Te Rewarewa Bridge, soft pencil and charcoal, This is a much easier angle to catch than the end-on view, because there are no straight lines in this bridge! Hundertwasser would have loved it!

Push or Pull

Why did they come?

My friend Tom is writing his family history and has sent us the first chapter to read. It is about the first couple in his family to make the journey from the United Kingdom to New Zealand.

This sort of project always raises the question: why did they make the decision to carry out this amazing change? Was it push? or was it pull?

Tom goes in to the details of why his ancestors left Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century; anyone who has heard of the Potato Famine will have an idea about it.

I have been fascinated by the questions for many years and have tried to give some of the background in my own family history (see earlier posts). But Tom's work has made me think again: did I give enough weight to the Pull factors.

Because in the Gaze family story, the Push factors were there. A young man with a growing family and working in a family business where he was a younger brother and therefore not likely ever to own much of the enterprise, looks for better prospects somewhere else.

Charles Gaze had already looked at the possibility of securing army contracts for his saddlery skills in the Crimean War Theatre. Both that and the Indian "Mutiny" were over by the late 1850s. Land Wars in New Zealand were top of the headlines, so that's where Charles set out for, arriving in Auckland the week the first shots were fired at Waitara.

He got a contract to make haversacks for the army at Otahuhu, so his plan was spot on! He was obviously prepared to look anywhere, so if we had not ended up in New Zealand, we might have grown up in Russia or Turkey or India!

On the other hand my great-great-grandfather, Joshua Robinson, came partly on Pull factors with a much more romantic flavour. He had grown up on the story of Robinson Crusoe and was dreaming of life on an idyllic spot like his hero. At the same time, like many in his era, he had been filled with the desire to help the less fortunate races who lived in less civilised places. 

But there was a more realistic factor too: he met a man in a cafe in London in 1841 who wanted to recruit him, an experienced builder, to set up a sawmill near Auckland. So he managed to overcome his wife's reluctance and they set out before the first organised settler groups for the new colony.

Another great-great, John Bigelow, could have made a living anywhere in the world: he was a shipbuilder in a small fishing village on the northern coast of Nova Scotia. Why he chose to come here out of the rest of the world I can't fathom. 

But his brother-in-law, who had the money, and owned the ship he had built for the voyage, wanted to come this way (perhaps because of gold-rush stories) so in 1860 to the Tasman coasts they came. The ship itself was wrecked a few hundred metres from here a few weeks later.

Robert Goodwin from Northamptonshire, whose daughter married my grandfather, came a generation later. He grew up in a community strongly independent in politics and religion, with a democratic tradition. The progress towards real effective democracy was taking too long for Robert. 

He worked as a slater, building and fixing roofs for the wealthy owners of manor houses. His grandfather had lived through the enclosures, where the wealthy landowners had turned their tenant farmers off the land, and fenced the land for sheep-farming. So there was plenty of Push Factor in his case.

But I have never heard anything about the reasons why he chose New Zealand, although I used to hear my grandmother talk about the voyage out when she was sixteen. He made a real mistake, because no slate rooves existed, except one, in Auckland. He managed OK as a plasterer making ornate ceilings.

So that is perhaps the next project for me.

Meanwhile, we'll wait expectantly for Tom's chapters as they arrive!

A great writer

Hemingway in Love

I have just read this memoir of a relationship with Ernest Hemingway, written by one of his close friends and confidants.

Many years ago, when I was much younger, I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. I recognised the succinct style which he typifies. I enjoyed the story. I also have come to recognise in the title, and in some of his other titles, the point he was making that we are all involved in some of the world-changing events of our lifetimes, even though they may be taking place a long way away. Other examples would be the dropping of the first atomic bomb, or the events of 9/11.

When he was writing, in 1940, I believe Hemingway was pointing out that the Spanish Civil War was a precursor to the Second World War, a trial run if you like. 

And I believe that the Old Man and the Sea, which I read a few years afterwards, also has a kind of "universal hero" aura about it. 

I didn't recognise this feature in A Call to Arms. I read this novel about Hemingway's World War I experiences in Italy later still. Perhaps if I re-read it some day I might see it differently, but thinking back I wonder if the events it describes were too close to Hemingway for real comfort, and he had not, understandably, been able to process them so completely.

Finally, many years later, in fact only a couple of months ago, I got round to reading The Sun Also Rises, his first effort. (See my post of 21 November last)

Hemingway in Love is basically about Hemingway's marriages, about his relationships with all four of his wives, though the process of the break-up of his first marriage, and his developing relationship with his second wife, takes up most of the attention of the book. In fact one could say that Hemingway's regret (remorse, guilt?) about his treatment of Hadley, his first wife, was the main theme of the book.

This memoir is an account, presented as verbatim, of Hotchings' chats with Hemingway during the 1950s while he was visiting the older man in France, Cuba or Key West, where he owned a house, or even during a fishing trip reminiscent of the Old Man and the Sea.

The light the book throws on the novels is not great; it mainly relates to The Sun Also Rises, and for my money does not add a great deal to what we learn from that novel itself. Hemingway admits that his friends, depicted in that first novel in thinly disguised form, were incensed that he had paraded them, warts and all, before their crowd of acquaintances in Paris and elsewhere, and most of them hardly spoke to him again! He misjudged the thinness of the disguises he used -- that is what we learn from Hemingway in Love.

Here is a very human writer, who shows us his strengths and his weaknesses as a human being. For that, as a start, his books are worth reading. Try them!

Celebrating the Past

A Reunion for 1976

Last weekend Margaret and I travelled to Northland to attend a reunion of the 1976 intake of students at Bay of Islands College in Kawakawa, where we were both teachers.

On the way up we stopped for a walk and rest at Rangiriri, close to a large roadworks project straightening State Highway 1.

This is the view looking east from the school gateway.

When we got to Paihia, we stayed in a cottage at Te Haumi, the beach immediately before Paihia town.

This the view looking up the harbour towards Opua and the wharf and marinas. When I lived there a group of us built a boat ramp at the other end of this beach, to ease the pressure on the ramp at Waitangi. Our old concrete slab is still there. I don't know how much use it gets now, but it certainly improved our popularity with the locals in those days.

This is the view at the northern end of the beach one afternoon, complete with doggy-doos bin! We are looking across the Bay to the area between Opua and Russell.

We spent a morning in Kawakawa sitting in the Trainspotter cafe watching the train run down the middle of the State Highway, and then visiting the Grass Hut shop, where we bought a calendar of prints by Hundertwasser. The shop is owned and run by one of our former pupils.

The reunion itself was fun: the students are now in their mid-fifties. We were also able to re-acquaint ourselves with the school buildings, and with the ten or so fellow-teachers who are still young enough to turn up.

On the way home, we had a stop at Orewa.

This was an older shop on the main road along the beachfront, towards the Auckland end.

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This Friday the U3A Sketching Group met at the Te Rewa Rewa Bridge to try our hands at getting it on paper. It proved to be a real exercise in perspective because of its curvaceous design!

So I walked down the walkway a little way to get a more side-on view and eliminate the perspective problems.

Saturday we took the grandchildren to the Multi-ethnic day at the racecourse. Some of the time we sat in the grandstand and watched the dancers performing on the stage. I did a quick, rough sketch of the scene:

Historical Project

Over the past couple of months I have been working on a project which has absorbed a lot of time and energy.

This year is the centenary of the founding of the New Zealand Labour Party, and I have undertaken to try to arrange the mounting of an exhibition to celebrate our history in New Plymouth.

Along the way I have found a lot of interesting material. Not all is suitable for exhibition.

But we have fastened on the building of the first State Housing precinct as a suitable peg to hang the exhibition on, because it is tangible, interesting, and contributed a lot to the development of our city.

After a lot of trawling through old newspapers, I have found the reports of the opening of the first houses in New Plymouth in May of 1938. Others working alongside me have located models of state houses from the Auckland University School of Architecture, and maps and plans from the Housing Corporation archives in Wellington

So we are making some progress on that front.

Some of the other details are interesting too. The branches here were kicked off by none other than Walter Nash, who lived here from 1916 to 1920. Labour supporters were active in the local body and general elections of 1918 and 1919.

Nash was also a key person in setting up community support arrangements for people suffering in the influenza epidemic. And probably his most successful project here was in carrying a vote on changing the rating system to unimproved value.

After twenty years of effort, the party eventually managed to elect its first MP, Fred Frost, who had been a clergyman. He served from 1938 until 1943. That parliament was extended to five years because of the war. When he was beaten in 1943, his unpopularity was partly due, so the records say, to his turning up at an event in shorts and open necked shirt!

He was elected in the strong swing to Labour in 1938, just weeks after the first state houses were occupied, and while the drive to build plenty of them had not been halted by the war. So those houses are an important symbol of Labour Party history here.

These three houses featured in a photo in the Taranaki Herald the week they were occupied in May of 1938.
They do not appear to have changed a great deal in their shape in the eighty years since.