by Michael King
Younger refugees fared rather better. Margot Philips became an important painter, Maria Dronke a well-known actress and voice teacher, Peter Munz a leading historian, Harry Seresin a restaurateur and theatrical entrepreneur, Fred Turnovsky (manufacturer) and Denis Adam (insurance broker), patrons of the arts, and Paul Heller an expert on international aviation law. Beyond individual contributions to national life, however, these people introduced a wide circle of New Zealanders to European food and wine and manners, and strongly supported artistic activities such as theatre and chamber music. They were a major leavening agent in the culturally more diverse New Zealand society that began to open up after the war.
Among the non-Jewish refugees, Count Kazimierz Wodzicki arrived in the country in 1941 as consul-general for the Polish government-in-exile in London. After the war he stayed on to become New Zealand’s first professional ecologist and do valuable work for Victoria University and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. He and his wife, Maria, were the major movers in the project which brought 700 refugee Polish children and around 100 adults to New Zealand in 1944.
While such talent flowed into New Zealand from Europe, however, much of the homegrown variety continued to leave the country, or not return after the war, in order to secure career advancement. This was sometimes because, as in the case of the pre-war anthropologists Raymond Firth and Reo Fortune, their subjects were not at that time taught in New Zealand universities. The loss of Peter Buck, the only Maori ethnologist of distinction, to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and Yale University was an especial tragedy. Of this phenomenon, the American scholar Margaret Mead was to say: ‘[It] is New Zealand’s role to send out its bright young men and women to help run the rest of the world. And they go, not hating the country of their birth but loving it. From this … base they make their mark on the world.’
Mead may have been exaggerating the degree of ‘love’. But she was thinking of the likes of Katherine Mansfield, Buck and Fortune (to whom she was briefly married), all of whom wrote and spoke respectfully and affectionately of their homeland once they were no longer living there. Another expatriate, John Mulgan, who had gone to Oxford in the 30s and joined Oxford University Press (OUP) shortly before the war, expressed similar feelings when he encountered his fellow countrymen fighting Germans in the North African desert.
They had confidence in themselves … knowing themselves as good as the best the world could bring against them, like a football team in a more deadly game, coherent, practical, successful. Everything that was good from that small remote country had gone into them – sunshine and strength, good sense, patience, the versatility of practical men.
Mulgan, to the intense regret of all who knew him, died by his own hand just before the war ended. But others of his generation, such as journalist Geoffrey Cox and writer and publisher Dan Davin (who took Mulgan’s place at OUP and became a kind of unofficial high commissioner for New Zealand culture in Britain) remained on that side of the world and enjoyed careers of distinction. They were followed by such scholars as Robert Burchfield, who became editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and they interacted in Oxford with a so-called ‘New Zealand mafia’ already there, classicist Sir Ronald Syme, medievalist Norman Davis, publisher Kenneth Sisam and language scholar Jack Bennett.
Scientists too went abroad for further study – space engineer William Pickering, physiologist Maurice Wilkins, chemist Alan MacDiarmid, cardiologist John Williams, astrophysicist Beatrice Tinsley, and many others – and often found that the only way they could advance in their careers of teaching and research was by joining well-endowed universities or institutes in Britain or the United States. Psychologist John Money also moved to America in 1947 to do a doctorate and stayed on to become a world-renowned sexologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a sucessor, some said, to Freud and Kinsey.
The dramatic expansion of New Zealand universities in the 1960s, and hence of university jobs, would help reduce the immediate post-war ‘brain drain’, though by that time relatively low academic salaries were creating other kinds of recruitment and retention problems. But opting for the enlarged platform of opportunities offered by countries with bigger populations and more substantial resources would always remain an attractive option to a proportion of New Zealand scholars. Writers and artists, on the other hand, tended, in the wake of Frank Sargeson’s example, to remain in New Zealand, like poet James K. Baxter; or, as in the case of Charles Brasch or Janet Frame, to return to it after a period abroad. From the 1960s, when international travel was so much faster and cheaper, it became possible for writers and artists to have their so-called OE (overseas experience) but still be primarily based in New Zealand. Unlike in the first half of the century, the great New Zealand painters of the second half, Colin McCahon, Toss Woollaston, Ralph Hotere – who, like their writer counterparts, had dismissed romanticism – did their major work at home.
While local art and literature did not begin to flourish strongly until the 1970s, the post-war Labour Government, thanks largely to Peter Fraser’s personal interest and his good relations with the head of the Department of Internal Affairs, Joseph Heenan, did make real progress in laying the foundations for national cultural institutions. The National Orchestra (later the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra) was established in 1946 with costs to be borne by the National Broadcasting Service (which would, in return, retain broadcasting rights). That same year the New Zealand Literary Fund was set up on the recommendation of historian J. C. Beaglehole and Heenan to provide subsidies for local writing and publishing. One of its earliest grants went to the quarterly literary journal Landfall, established and edited by Charles Brasch, scion of a family of wealthy Jewish merchants well known for their support of culture. For the rest of the twentieth century and beyond, Landfall would more than any other single organ promote New Zealand voices in literature and, at least for the duration of Brasch’s editorship (1947–66), publish essays, fiction and poetry of the highest standard. Another precedent was set in 1947 when Frank Sargeson was given a literary pension drawn from Art Union lottery funds. A further sum was set aside in the Internal Affairs budget, at Fraser’s instigation, for scholarships for New Zealand artists, actors and musicians to study abroad.
The major constitutional development of the post-war years went almost unnoticed at the time by the public at large. On 25 November 1947, the New Zealand Parliament finally ratified the Statute of Westminster, which gave the country complete autonomy in foreign as well as domestic affairs. In one sense this was no more than formal recognition of a position that had existed since World War I. But the measure had considerable symbolic value. New Zealand was no longer a colony, nor a ‘dominion’. It was a fully independent member of the British Commonwealth. That it had taken so long to get the statute before the New Zealand Parliament (all the other dominions had ratified it earlier, most of them in 1931) indicated how reluctant New Zealanders were to take this step and how imperial feelings persisted into and through the years of World War II.
Between 1946 and 1949, Labour’s electoral tide went out. The Government had become less interested in continuing social reform and more focused on trying to retain the ebbing support of the floating voter. Internal Affairs and Social Security Minister Bill Parry was speaking for many of his contemporaries in cabinet, the former Red Feds, when he told a meeting of civil servants in 1947: ‘I don’t understand you young blokes. Labour has achieved the programme it battled for, it was battling for before some of you were born … Everything is done.’
National, by contrast, led by the brash Sidney Holland and his energetic farmer lieutenant Keith Holyoake, was hungry for power and an opportunity to bend the country’s institutions in other directions. ‘If you want to condense our policy,’ Holland told an audience in 1948, ‘it is the private ownership of production, distribution and exchange.’ But Holland, like most New Zealand politicians, was pragmatic, not ideological. Although his party’s programme would be aimed prima
rily at businessmen and farmers and their supporters, he had decided by 1949 to retain social security. Two previous election losses had brought him to the conclusion that the welfare state was an institution most New Zealanders wanted to retain.
Other policies that verged on being bipartisan, at least at the level of party leadership, related to defence and foreign affairs. As the 1949 election approached, Peter Fraser was determined to reintroduce conscription. He had become convinced that Russian intransigence in the United Nations and elsewhere would lead to futher global conflict, most likely centred on the Suez Canal and oil reserves in the Middle East, and he wanted New Zealand armed forces to be better prepared for combat than they had been in 1939. While the Prime Minister convinced his cabinet of this necessity, he failed to carry his caucus and the Labour Party at large. His compromise was to submit the conscription proposal to public referendum at the same time as the election. Conscription won, but Labour lost (it was, after all, a policy favoured by National too): 34 seats to 46. And National, after being out of office for fourteen years, would retain power for sufficiently lengthy periods in the coming decades to believe that it was, after all, the natural party of government.
One of the new Government’s earliest measures was the appointment of a ‘suicide squad’ of new members specifically to vote the Legislative Council or upper house out of existence. This was a surprising move to come from a conservative Government, and many of Holland’s cabinet and supporters assumed that it would lead to the creation of a more effective senate (indeed, a committee set up under the chairmanship of Education Minister and former law professor Ronald Algie proposed exactly that). But Holland and his successors were never convinced that there could be circumstances in which the will of an elected House of Representatives should be thwarted, and consequently the New Zealand Parliament has remained unicameral since 1950.
Crises of greater magnitude gained the Government’s attention, however – one external, the other internal. Chinese communists had won their civil war in 1949 and created the People’s Republic of China. That victory, coupled with the descent of an ‘Iron Curtain’ across Eastern Europe after World War II, gave credence to the myth and the fear of communist expansion. When, in 1950, the New Zealand Government was asked by the United States to support American-led United Nations intervention in the Korean civil war, it agreed to do so – the first of several actions the country was to take in the 1950s in the interests of ‘containing’ international communism.
A body of 1100 men, subsequently raised to 1550, sailed for Korea in December 1950 as ‘Kayforce’. It was in effect an artillery regiment with all the services necessary to maintain it on a war footing. The New Zealanders went into action for the first time on 21 January 1951 south-east of Seoul and were involved in sporadic conflict until mid-1953. The Royal New Zealand Navy was also committed to the war, and its entire fleet of six frigates and 1350 of its men served in Korean waters. By the time of the ceasefire in July 1953, Kayforce had lost 38 men killed and 79 wounded and had one soldier taken prisoner. The navy lost two men killed and one wounded. This contribution won New Zealand credit in both the United Nations and the United States and earned the country a visit in 1953 from Richard Nixon, the American Vice-President.
Anxiety about communism also lay behind the Government’s strategy for dealing with its second potential crisis, the waterfront dispute of 1951. National had come to office threatening to abolish compulsory unionism, though this was not favoured by employers. In particular, the new Government was worried about the power of the more militant unions, grouped in the Trade Union Congress in opposition to the more moderate Federation of Labour. The federation faction was led by the deeply conservative and authoritarian Fintan Patrick Walsh, whom one historian has called ‘the nearest thing [New Zealand had] to an American-style industrial gangster’; the congress was headed by Jock Barnes and Toby Hill of the Waterside Workers’ Union.
The dispute itself began when shipowners refused to give watersiders a 15 per cent pay increase. Watersiders retaliated by banning overtime work, and the employers began to lay off wharfies who declined overtime. When the union refused arbitration, the Government activated the 1932 Public Safety and Conservation Act, which included a prohibition on publicising the waterside workers’ case and penalties for those who paid or fed or otherwise assisted families disadvantaged by the strike. The armed forces were moved in to work the wharves and maintain the flow of exports to Britain. The striking union was deregistered and its funds seized. All this was done with the support of Walsh’s Federation of Labour, but some other unions went out on strike in support of the wharfies. The dispute – called a ‘strike’ or ‘lockout’ depending on where sympathies lay – lasted 151 days.
The Labour Opposition handled the issue poorly in Parliament. Walter Nash, who had succeeded to the leadership on Peter Fraser’s death in 1950 even though he was himself almost 70 years of age, made the mistake of saying that Labour was ‘not for the waterside workers, and we are not against them …’ And when the Opposition suggested that the Government lacked the support of ‘the people’ in its tough crackdown, Holland called their bluff and ordered a snap election. The electorate, worried about alleged communist domination of the militant unions and told that the election was about ‘who governs, elected governments or trade unionists’, returned National with an increased majory, 54 seats to 26.
Anxieties about communist expansion, especially in South-east Asia, also underlay the Government’s decision in 1951 to join the ANZUS defence pact with the United States and Australia. In this agreement, each of the member countries undertook to come to the aid of the other two if they were threatened with aggression or invasion. In fact, of course, it represented the preparedness of the United States to defend New Zealand and Australia. It also implied – as did the Manila Pact or SEATO (South-East Asia Treaty Organisation) agreement – that Australia and New Zealand would support American military initiatives in the region.
This obligation would be called upon in 1965, when the Americans sought allies for their war in Vietnam. Before that, in 1956, New Zealand sent troops to Malaya as part of a Commonwealth brigade fighting communist insurgents there. The Special Air Service squadron – an elite commando-type paratroop group – was formed for this mission and patrolled dense Malayan jungle for two years. It had numerous engagements with guerrilla bands until it was replaced by a full infantry regiment, and it was retained as the New Zealand armed forces’ ready-response elite unit. The Royal New Zealand Air Force also committed two squadrons and the navy volunteered a vessel at the Singapore naval base. By the end of the ‘emergency’ (as it was called) in 1960, the New Zealand Army had lost ten men killed and 21 wounded, and the air force five dead and two wounded.
Involvement in this campaign and participation in the treaty signings which preceded it indicated that, for the immediate future, New Zealand would regard South-east Asia as the frontline for its policy of ‘forward defence’. The existence of ANZUS and SEATO, allied with the refusal of New Zealand to support Britain militarily in the Middle East over Egypt’s seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956, also signalled that the United States, not Britain, would now be the country’s major partner in bilateral defence arrangements.
One clear symptom of the extent to which the New Zealand Government had adopted the Cold War mentality of its American allies was the appearance of McCarthyism in Wellington over the same period as this phenomenon plagued the United States more publicly. It was to have damaging and in some cases catastrophic effects on the careers of some civil servants who were believed to be communists or just of left-wing political persuasions. The implication was that they could not hold such views and remain loyal to the Government and the country that employed them.
There had been hints of such attitudes in the twilight years of the Fraser Labour Government. The American Federal Bureau of Investigation had raised doubts about the allegiances of economist William Ball Sutch at the time he was sec
retary-general of the New Zealand mission to the United Nations. The accusation, passed on to the New Zealand Government and Department of External Affairs, was that Sutch had been conducting clandestine meetings with Russian delegates at the UN.
Over the same period, in the late 1940s, British security agencies became concerned about Desmond Patrick Costello, first secretary and then chargé d’affaires at the New Zealand legation in Moscow. Costello, a brilliant linguist, had attended Cambridge University in the early 1930s and there was suspicion that he had been recruited to spy for the Russians (as had, it later became apparent, his fellow Cambridge students Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt). Certainly Costello had joined the Communist Party while he was a student in England, and in 1940 he was dismissed from a lecturer’s post because of his close association with a student convicted of a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
Paddy Costello, as he was known to his friends, found his way into the New Zealand Army during World War II and, together with the former Rhodes Scholars Dan Davin and Geoffrey Cox, onto the intelligence staff of General Bernard Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand forces. From there he was recruited by Alister McIntosh for the Moscow legation because of his fluency in Russian. In addition to his student activities, what appears to have aroused the suspicion of British security officials was the extraordinarily well-informed intelligence reports that Costello sent to Wellington on such matters as the development of the Soviet atomic bomb. It was believed that he would not have been able to glean such information ahead of other security and diplomatic missions unless he had an unusually close relationship with Soviet authorities.