by Michael King
Prime Minister Fraser and External Affairs Secretary McIntosh protected both Sutch and Costello from external demands that they be sacked. After National assumed office late in 1949, however, new Prime Minister Sidney Holland was more responsive to both British and American warnings about communist ‘spies’. He forced Costello’s ‘resignation’ in 1954 (with difficulty, because Costello was not of a mind to co-operate), and he and other National ministers prevented Sutch from becoming head of the Department of Industries and Commerce, until the Nash Labour Government came into office in 1957.
The accusations which raised a question mark over Sutch’s loyalty to New Zealand were especially ironical in view of his deserved reputation as the country’s leading economic and cultural nationalist. He was widely seen as being, along with long-time Treasury Secretary (1939–55) Bernard Ashwin and industrialists Sir James and J. C. Fletcher and Wolf Fisher, one of the twentieth-century ‘nationbuilders’ who set out to diversify the New Zealand economy and reduce its almost total dependence on pastoral products. Economist Brian Easton has written:
Sutch saw the need to foster industry and employment within New Zealand, and to earn foreign exchange by exporting a diversity of goods and services to many countries, as well as conserving foreign exchange through import substitution. Production had to be of high quality, be well designed, and make full use of human resources. Thus he was a tireless advocate for the development of a national culture. People were at the core of his developmental vision: children were a key to the future, and women were entitled to equality both as a right and because they contributed to the broad social and economic development. Full employment, education and the welfare state provided human resources. He saw a role for the state, but it was a Fabian one, for he advocated decentralisation and was concerned with human rights.[3] The loyalties of other New Zealand officials were challenged over the same period that Sutch was under the observation of the FBI in New York. Ian Milner, son of the ultra-imperialist Rector of Waitaki Boys’ High School, Frank Milner, left the Australian Department of External Affairs under suspicion of having spied for the Russians. The strongest evidence for this suspicion emerged in 1954 in a ‘confession’ to Australian security officers by Vladimir Petrov, a defector from the Russian Embassy in Canberra. This accusation was seen at the time as adding weight to previous suspicions about Milner’s loyalties, which had resulted in his being placed under surveillance by British and New Zealand security authorities in the 1930s and 1940s. Petrov also claimed that there was a spy in the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Department, which immediately brought other officials under suspicion.
In New Zealand, Cecil Holmes, a communist working for the National Film Unit in Wellington, was dismissed in 1948 after accusations that he had promoted ‘communist-inspired’ agitation within the ranks of the Public Service Association. A court later found that the sacking was unlawful, because Holmes was only a probationer, but rather than seek reinstatement he left New Zealand for Australia. In the Holland era, an External Affairs employee who had worked with Costello at the Moscow legation, Douglas Lake, lost his job on suspicion of being a communist. This decision created some embarrassment for the Government, as Douglas Lake’s brother, Harry, was a National Member of Parliament and, from 1960 to 1967, National’s Minister of Finance.
Several other left-wingers, including two Wellington law graduates, were forced out of External Affairs on the ground that their political and ideological opinions allegedly cast doubt upon their loyalties and sense of discretion (one went on to become president of the Wellington District Law Society). On matters such as these, Prime Minister Holland was inclined to accept the recommendations of what McIntosh regarded as poorly researched and unduly paranoid police reports, including one which identified a group known as the Vegetable Club – which met in the office of a Wellington law firm to discuss politics and distribute vegetables at wholesale prices – as a probable communist cell on account of the left-wing views of many of its members.
One civil servant frequently came under suspicion during the McCarthyist period but survived none the less. Jack Lewin came to prominence as president of the Public Service Association and was involved in the Cecil Holmes case. Lewin too was a left-winger, and he was a pugnacious and sometimes discourteous advocate for union causes. But there is no public evidence that he was ever a communist. He retained his Public Service career in part because of the protection of ministers who admired him, such as Walter Nash, and in part because he was exceptionally able in his work. He completed a distinguished career as Government Statistician and, finally, head of the Department of Industries and Commerce.
Little hint of the Government’s ‘cloak and dagger’ considerations or activities leaked out to the public at large, who at this time mostly valued conformity and predictability in the behaviour of fellow citizens.[4] Clothes of the day tended to be drab by previous and later standards, and short-back-and-sides haircuts were part of the national male uniform, while rugby, racing and beer did represent for most men the extent of recreational options. As Miles Fairburn has noted, creativity was largely recognised only in ‘sport, war, growing grass [and] do-it-yourself hobbies and pastimes …’ Even rugby, which did generate passion, especially during the Springbok tour of New Zealand in 1956, was played unimaginatively – in 1959, thanks to ‘the Boot’, fullback Don Clarke, the All Blacks won a test against the British Lions by six penalties to five tries (tries at this time being worth only three points). There was little variety in food and, apart from a small number of Chinese restaurants in the main centres, nowhere to eat out other than hotels or ‘greasies’ – dining rooms that served fish and chips or steak and chips.
Home recreation of the time was limited largely to gardening, reading and radio. The 1950s was the last decade in which magazines – New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, the orange-covered Free Lance, the pink-covered Auckland Weekly News – played a major role in the country’s national life, along with radio. Housewives – and this was still the career destination of the vast majority of women – tuned into the ‘soaps’: Dr Paul and Portia Faces Life in the mornings, Aunt Jenny’s Sunlight Stories in the afternoons. Children hurried home from school to hear the late-afternoon serials, Superman and The Air Adventures of Biggles. Whole families gathered around for the evening favourites: Dad and Dave, Journey into Space, Take It from Here. The personalities of radio – celebrities whose sole claim to recognition was that they performed well in that medium – became much-loved national figures: Aunt Daisy, Selwyn Toogood, Winston McCarthy. Each came to be known by his or her signature phrase.
The only apparent interruption to the even tenor of New Zealand life in the 1950s was the atmosphere of moral outrage and panic that surrounded hearings of the ‘Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents’ and the release of the committee’s Mazengarb Report in 1954. The inquiry was launched as a result of police and newspaper allegations of adolescent sexual activity in Wellington’s Hutt Valley. The Minister of Social Welfare, Mrs Hilda Ross, had no doubt about what was behind the depravity. ‘Laxity, terrible laxity, has produced the scandal which is now before us,’ she warned. ‘If minds are fed with lustful images flowing from trashy magazines and unclean reading matter, then the nation [can] expect the degradation revealed in the police files.’
The report, named for the committee’s chairman, lawyer Oswald Chettle Mazengarb, was sent to every home in the country that had a child on the family benefit. Its thrust was to confirm existing social and moral values. It laid the blame for loose sexual behaviour on the absence of working mothers from the home and on ‘oversexed or morally degraded’ young women, who allowed young men to have their way with them. The committee unanimously condemned the availability of contraceptives to adolescents (none of the girls involved in the incidents which sparked the inquiry had become pregnant) and asked Parliament to legislate for a ban, which it did. The committee also asked that girls who permitted males to be sexually intimate with them be
charged with an offence, a recommendation the politicians did not take up. Figures printed in the report revealed that juvenile offending in 1954 was scarcely worse than at any other time in the previous two decades and, indeed, was better than it had been during the war years.
Apart from the temporary drop in overseas reserves which triggered the Labour Government’s ‘Black Budget’ in 1958, and its highly unpopular reimposition of severe import controls, the 1950s was generally a prosperous decade – especially after the Korean War created a sales boom for New Zealand wool. Agriculture remained the country’s dominant industry, though the manufacturing and forestry sectors were beginning to expand, particularly after David Henry opened the New Zealand Forest Products mill at Kinleith in 1952, and J. C. Fletcher the Tasman Pulp and Paper plant at Kawerau in 1955. City suburbs mushroomed, initially without vegetation or parks, which gave them a raw and impermanent feel and led to the detection of such social problems as ‘juvenile delinquency’, as defined in the alarming but rapidly forgotten Mazengarb Report, and to ‘suburban neurosis’, a term coined to describe the depression some young wives experienced as a result of isolation from adult company and purposeful activity. Politicians shared the desire of the nation as a whole to enjoy the good times and not rock the boat. When American rock and roll reached New Zealand via film and radio towards the end of the decade, it represented a minor revolt of youth against the comfortable and secure world of their parents. As a rebellion, it did not persist: real rebellion awaited the 1960s and 1970s.
[1] It could be said, of course, that the Ballantyne’s department-store fire in Christchurch in 1947, which killed 41 people, and the Tangiwai rail disaster on Christmas Eve 1953, in which 151 people died, represented portents of another kind.
[2] The country was not to have a New Zealand-born Governor-General until Sir Arthur Porritt in 1967. His successors too were New Zealanders, and – unlike Porritt, who was the Queen’s physician – had spent their working lives in New Zealand.
[3] New Zealand security officials, including those of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service established in 1956, continued to have suspicions about Dr Sutch’s loyalties. In September 1974, when Sutch was chairman of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council, he was observed holding clandestine meetings in Wellington with a staff member of the Russian Embassy. Police arrested and charged him under the Official Secrets Act with obtaining information that could be helpful to an enemy. In February 1975 a jury acquitted him of that charge, and he died in September that year.
[4] Indeed, the very existence of the Security Intelligence Service was treated as a state secret until Keith Holyoake returned to office as Prime Minister in 1960.
Chapter 26
Land under Pressure
Poet-politician of the 1890s, William Pember Reeves, was speaking for most of his Pakeha compatriots when he wrote:
We stand where none before have stood
And braving tempest, drought and flood,
Fight Nature for a home.
In Reeves’s view, Maori had been and still were irrelevant in the development of the land. That task was being undertaken by Pakeha settlers who were in combat with nature, and their ultimate mission was to turn as much of New Zealand as possible into an agricultural landscape, thus realising Julius Vogel’s vision for New Zealand as the ‘Britain of the South’ in function and appearance. Those parts of the country that were not suitable for farming might, it was hoped, yield up other resources such as minerals and timber.
The consequence of this view was that, for more than a century, mature native forest was regarded both positively as a source of timber or firewood and negatively as an impediment to agriculture; coal and gold as mineral resources to be exploited as rapidly as possible; rivers and lakes, from the early twentieth century, as potential sources of hydro-electricity; and land as a surface to be covered as far as possible with grass, which was in turn to be converted into food for human consumption in the form of meat, butter or cheese, or into wool. No thought was given to the replacement of native trees with native trees, although from the 1920s the New Zealand Forest Service began to experiment with plantings of exotic trees, such as Pinus radiata, for future harvest, especially in areas such as the central North Island plateau where successive volcanic eruptions seemed to have rendered the land unsuitable for grass farming.
Not until the middle years of the twentieth century would serious questions be raised about whether the strategies New Zealanders had adopted to generate food, shelter, income and energy from their country made the best possible use of the land. Indeed, most would have agreed with the agricultural scientist and Director-General of Agriculture, A. H. Cockayne, who likened New Zealand’s land area to ‘a magic hat which, while still retaining its original size, allowed the conjurer to draw out a seemingly never ending stream of objects …’[1]
Yet there had been a few – very few – cautionary and prophetic voices. In 1940 Herbert Guthrie-Smith, writing a preface for the third edition of his magnificent work of environmental history, Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, posed questions that his fellow farmers might have found surprising. ‘[Am] I absolutely happy [about] my substitution of domestic breeds of animals for native lizards and birds; my substitution of one flora for another; my contribution towards more quickly melting New Zealand through erosion into the Pacific … Have I then for sixty years desecrated God’s earth and dubbed it improvement?’ He did not answer these questions but left them dangling for the troubled consideration of his readers. They were in the nature of a final testament, for weeks after asking them he was dead.
In the late 1940s, the writer Frank Sargeson, visiting the King Country farm his uncle had broken in from bush more than 30 years earlier, found Oakley Sargeson full of doubts as to whether the life-long experience had been worth it. The grasses he had sown so carefully were being overrun with weeds. Land at the back of the property was being recolonised by bracken fern and scrub – and then by the ‘second growth’ trees which eventually sheltered the growth of larger ones. The fences on steep slopes were being wrecked by landslides. ‘And from the high boundaries there were the long, long views across the waves of ridges … with more bush removed, and more faces grassed, and more, many more scarrings from slips and slides … [All], as my uncle remarked, challenging us to take note that the big question of grass-farming country of such character was still not answered let alone understood. Or even asked.’
Writer Helen Wilson, casting her mind back in 1955 over her life of more than 80 years, wrote that her country had been ‘too desperately poor to deny the present for the benefit of the future’ – meaning that thoughts of immediate gain rather than conservation for future and sustainable use had determined such decisions as the use the country made of its timber and over what period of time. Another forty years on, scientist Geoff Park would pose the key question more bluntly: ‘what happens ecologically when humans decide to channel a whole ecosystem’s productive energy into themselves?’ For that was precisely the decision that four or five generations of colonial nationbuilders in New Zealand had made.
The most crucial area in which this focus had been apparent was in the so-called ‘grasslands revolution’ – the process by which a combination of bush clearance, the introduction of vigorous strains of exotic grasses and mixed use of herbicides and fertilisers had resulted in the conversion of 51 per cent of the country’s surface area into grasslands (and the percentage would have been even higher but for the alpine spine of the South Island). These measures, allied with the temperate climate which allowed farms to carry stock all year round, was the key to the high levels of meat, wool, butter and cheese production which gave New Zealand a standard of living ‘ranked between the fifth and the third highest in the world’ from the 1920s to the 1970s (‘and this Arcadian state’, the poet M. K. Joseph had observed, ‘is built on butter fat’).
All this had been achieved, however, in a country characterised by a paucity of fer
tile soils, instability and high rainfall. Initial prosperity had been based on the artificial fertility produced by burn-offs and the inherent but shallow ‘virgin fertility’ of the soil itself. Once these were worked out, most farms, especially those in hill country, remained fertile only through the application of ever-larger quantities of fertiliser. New Zealand had access to enormous quantities of inexpensive phosphate from 1919 as a result of its joint mandate (with Britain and Australia) over Nauru and nearby Ocean Island. Both islands were ruthlessly stripped of guano and rock phosphate, without any regard for the welfare of their inhabitants, to feed the farms of the mandate member countries. After World War II, the aerial top-dressing industry enabled that fertiliser to be spread widely, cheaply and efficiently. New Zealand’s annual application peaked in 1985 at more than 3 million tons, or 2 per cent of the world’s total. At that point it began to fall away because the fourth Labour Government removed the subsidies that had encouraged such high usage.
The question which agricultural scientists had begun to ask by the 1970s was whether New Zealand farming was being pushed beyond its ecological limits. Part of this concern arose from the increasingly self-evident observation that grass was unable to hold land on hill-country farms and some river flats in the way that forests had, and that as a consequence, as Herbert Guthrie-Smith had noted, large quantities of New Zealand were being flushed away each year by erosion. Another source of alarm was the growing realisation of the continuing toxic effects on the food chain of such herbicides as DDT and 2,4,5-T mixed in with superphosphate top-dressing. The equation was further complicated by a calculation that New Zealand sheep and cattle produced as much organic waste as 150 million people, and by documentation of the deleterious effect that dairy effluent was having on rivers, lakes and estuaries.
The potentially negative effects of so-called ‘scientific farming’ were acknowledged in the authoritative 1990 book Pastures: Their Ecology and Management, edited by R. H. M. Langer, emeritus professor of plant science at Lincoln University. This warned about the environmental degradation caused by traditional farming methods and advocated a greater use of indigenous grasses and, wherever possible, preservation – or re-creation – of indigenous landscapes and trees. It even reassessed the value of gorse, a prime target of pesticides, pointing out the plant’s ability to fix nitrogen and to act as a nursery for regenerating bush. While these considerations were being weighed, farmers were beginning to plant trees in significant quantities, especially such rapidly growing and high-return species as Pinus radiata, while others in drought-prone Hawke’s Bay, Marlborough and Central Otago were beginning to replace animal farming with horticultural crops such as grapes and olives. The evolving effect was one of more careful and more thoughtful husbandry.