by Michael King
The electorate, however, and many in the Labour Party, thought it was time for Nash to take a well-earned retirement, and that meant that his Government, still attracting political flak for overreacting to the balance of payments crisis in its 1958 ‘Black Budget’, had to go too. In the general election at the end of 1960 National was elected by 46 seats to Labour’s 34. And the party’s leader, Keith Holyoake, began his long reign over New Zealand politics – twelve continuous years as Prime Minister, exceeded only by Seddon’s fourteen and Massey’s thirteen.
Holyoake was an able and energetic farmer who had originally entered Parliament as its youngest member (aged 28) in a by-election for Motueka in 1932. He lost the seat in 1938, and returned representing Pahiatua in 1943. Had it not been for that five-year absence he might well have beaten Sidney Holland for the National Party leadership in 1940. He became Holland’s deputy, however, and after the 1949 election Minister of Agriculture, and an unusually successful one. In 1954 he became the first New Zealander designated Deputy Prime Minister, which up until that time had been an informal arrangement. His succession to the leadership and prime ministership only ten weeks before the general election in 1957 left him too little time to establish himself in those roles and Labour won narrowly, 41 seats to 39.
By the time he resumed leadership of the country in 1960, Holyoake, by then aged 56, certainly seemed more vigorous than the faltering Nash – though voters were divided on whether the ‘mannered façade, the fruity voice [and] the booming bonhomie’ were assets or liabilities.[1] In the pre-television era, he shone in platform presentation and debate, and was a powerful speaker in Parliament and a master of its standing orders. As television became a more potent medium for political discourse through the 1960s, however, Holyoake’s larger-than-life mannerisms came to be seen as exaggerated and pompous.
Holyoake’s greatest strength as a politician, and the one that kept him in the top job for more than a decade, was his ability to seek and find consensus among his colleagues in cabinet and caucus. The party campaigned on a ‘Steady Does It’ slogan in 1963, and that summed up Holyoake’s modus operandi for the whole of his second prime ministership. He saw his role as ‘chairman of the board’ and conservator of the status quo, and because his first years in office saw sustained prosperity that posture struck a responsive chord in the electorate.
By the second half of the 1960s, however, circumstances had begun to alter and with them the public mood. A variety of factors leavened the change. One was a collapse in wool prices which reduced overseas earnings and led to a tightening in the economy and increased unemployment. A more major one, however, was television, which New Zealanders had long been told they would never get because their country was overly endowed with mountains and valleys. Despite the geographical problems, transmission had begun in Auckland in 1960 and nationally in 1961. Over time the television set would become a standard appliance in every home and the medium would make New Zealanders more conscious of world politics and conflicts, and more vividly aware of national politics, as news and current affairs programmes gradually became more comprehensive and more professional in their presentation. One effect was an eventual decline in the career prospects of politicians who did not shine in the medium, such as the Leader of the Opposition, Arnold Nordmeyer, Holyoake himself and his deputy and later successor, ‘Gentleman Jack’ Marshall. Conversely the medium would bestow a rapid rise in the visibility and authority of younger politicians who handled it well, such as Norman Kirk and Robert Muldoon.
Another feature that changed the political climate was the war in Vietnam. The Holyoake Government’s view of defence was identical to that of its immediate predecessors. It was based on three principles: ‘forward defence’, which meant keeping aggressors as far from New Zealand shores as possible; collective security, which recognised that New Zealand was too small in size and resources to defend itself alone and therefore needed defence pacts with larger powers such as Britain or the United States; and close co-operation with its nearest neighbour, Australia. These principles lay behind the earlier despatch of New Zealand troops to Korea in 1950, Malaya in 1956 and Malaysia in 1964, and they also ensured that when the United States asked for a contribution to its war against communist forces in Vietnam the New Zealand Government was likely to agree. And agree it did.
Prime Minister Holyoake went on television in May 1965 to announce that New Zealand would send an artillery unit to Vietnam to assist the South Vietnamese Government and its American and Australian allies. (Interestingly Britain, which was associated with these countries as a member of SEATO, supported the Americans in principle but declined to send troops – a further indication of the extent to which New Zealand was no longer in close collaboration with what had been the Mother Country.) ‘If South Vietnam falls, I am sure that other countries of South-East Asia … will be the next targets for communist expansion,’ Holyoake intoned, thus accepting the Americans’ domino theory. Subsequently the New Zealand contribution to the war would be enlarged to include infantry rifle brigades, a Special Air Service troop and a medical team: 3890 men in all.
There were several notable features to this development. One, it was the first time a New Zealand leader had appeared on prime-time television to make an announcement of national importance. Second, the Labour Opposition did not support the troop commitment, identifying the conflict as a civil war and thus ensuring that for the first time New Zealand was pursuing a major foreign policy without bipartisan political support. And third, the Vietnam war, which was never declared as such, was to divide New Zealand as never before. Hardline anti-communists felt that the country’s contribution was token – which it was – and insufficient, while anti-war activists, encouraged by the Opposition’s stance, believed that the country should play no part in the conflict other than a humanitarian one. Within days of the Prime Minister’s initial announcement his suite in Parliament Buildings was invaded by protestors – the beginning of a seven-year-long protest campaign which, as in the United States and Australia, would divide families, communities and the nation as a whole. Television, which would bring the realities of the war nightly into the living rooms of the nation, as well as the spectacle of local or international protests against the war, served only to heighten the controversy.
The potent combination of protest and television coverage of it sparked what conservative commentators such as William Buckley would call a ‘contagion of protest’. For the rest of the decade and on into the 1970s, there seemed to be a superabundance of causes that would bring people out into the streets: the arrival of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the first visit to New Zealand of an American president in office (1966); visits from American Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and Secretary of State Dean Rusk; students protesting against the level of university bursaries; the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia; the decision to install an Omega navigation beacon in the South Island; the closure of some parks in Auckland to public use; the proposal to raise Lake Manapouri to generate additional electricity; the continuation of sporting contacts with South Africa; and, through the 1970s, issues of Maori, women’s and homosexual rights.
While all these causes simmered away, coming and going from public view, the lifestyles of the young – and in some cases the not so young – were mutating in highly specific ways and at an unprecedented rate. The widespread availability of the oral contraceptive to married and unmarried women made pre- and extra-marital sex more acceptable and marital sex less fraught. Popular music was becoming louder, more exciting, more promiscuous – a process given impetus by the Beatles’ visit to New Zealand in 1964, which spawned a rash of imitative local bands such as the Librettos and Ray Columbus and the Invaders (though music on offer by the end of the decade made the Beatles look and sound innocuous). It became fashionable to experiment with recreational drugs, especially marijuana, which began to be grown in quantity in New Zealand for the first time. With the abolition of six o’clock closing of hotel bars in 1967 and an even
tual relaxation of restaurant licensing laws, alcohol became available at more civilised hours and in more civilised circumstances than it had been in the days of the ‘six o’clock swill’. Long hair, previously regarded as effeminate on men, spread like an epidemic, affecting even All Blacks. Clothes became more colourful and imaginative; the mini-skirt and trouser suit arrived for women, flared trousers and brightly coloured shirts and ties for men.
The heroes of radio were steadily eclipsed by the dominant faces on television: chef Graham Kerr, current affairs star Brian Edwards, who, astonishingly, began to interrogate public figures on behalf of the public, and a rising politician named Robert Muldoon, who shot from backbench obscurity to national visibility in 1967 when he was given responsibility for overseeing the introduction of decimal currency. The same year Muldoon became National’s Minister of Finance and from that time his face was rarely off the screen. The immediacy of television was seen again in April 1968, when the inter-island ferry Wahine grounded on Barrett’s Reef in Wellington Harbour and subsequently sank with the loss of 51 lives. The drama unfolding on television shocked the nation as a whole.
While television was also the chief purveyor of new global ideas and trends in such subjects as conservation and opposition to war, a simultaneous source of new ideas and information was the increasing contact that individual New Zealanders were now enjoying with Britain, Europe, North America and Asia. The key to this explosion of travel opportunities was the jet aircraft. The grandparents of the ’60s generation had taken as long as three months to transplant themselves from Europe to New Zealand, and for most of them there was no return voyage because of the unavoidable time and expense involved. The World War II baby-boomers coming to maturity in the 1960s and 1970s could make the same journey in just over 24 hours.
Regular jet services between New Zealand and the United Kingdom began in 1963, when BOAC flew its first Comet 4 aircraft into and out of Whenuapai Airport in Auckland. As the decade progressed, the Comets were replaced by Boeing 707s and the number of routes and airlines flying them increased dramatically. New Zealand bought out Australian shares in the TEAL company in 1961 and this airline became Air New Zealand in 1965. By the end of the decade it was ordering DC-10 jets for the American and Asian routes, and from 1973 it won the right to fly to London.[2] With Air New Zealand and other overseas airlines operating in and out of the country – including Pan-Am, UTA, BOAC (later British Airways), QANTAS, American Airlines – New Zealanders were spoiled for choice and competition kept prices relatively low. The rate of travel shot up as young New Zealanders in particular claimed what came to be seen as a right: OE or overseas experience. And they brought home first-hand information on how other world centres, especially London, were living the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and their aftermath.
As that decade began to merge with the 1970s, it seemed to some as if the maelstrom of change was gathering momentum rather than diminishing. Book censorship had been liberalised by the Indecent Publications Tribunal, set up in 1963, and previously forbidden works by such writers as D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller were now readily available for those who were interested. New Zealand writing began to display new life and vigour and the local offices of London-based publishers – Collins, Heinemann, Hodder & Stoughton – began to publish New Zealand fiction and non-fiction in some quantity, forcing the two established New Zealand publishers, A. H. & A. W. Reed and Whitcombe & Tombs, to expand their own lists. Among the writers who began prolific careers in this decade are the poets Bill Manhire, Ian Wedde, Vincent O’Sullivan, Lauris Edmond and Sam Hunt; the story writers and novelists Owen Marshall, Elizabeth Smither and Fiona Kidman; the playwrights Mervyn Thompson, Roger Hall, Robert Lord and Greg McGee; and the children’s writer Margaret Mahy. They joined those working from the previous decade and earlier – Maurice Gee, Marilyn Duckworth, Bruce Mason, Alistair Campbell, C. K. Stead, Janet Frame – who were establishing that it was possible to build a career in New Zealand based on serious writing. Ngaio Marsh had earlier set precedents of her own by dividing her life between England and New Zealand and making a living and a worldwide reputation from crime fiction. Only a small proportion of this output (four novels out of more than 30) was set in New Zealand. More importantly, perhaps, Marsh devoted a considerable part of her time in Christchurch from the 1940s to the 1970s to theatrical production, especially to the plays of William Shakespeare. Many of her protégés, including Mervyn Thompson, Elric Hooper, Jonathan Elsom, James Laurenson and Sam Neill, went on to enjoy distinguished careers of their own as actors, writers or producers. Ronald Hugh Morrieson had lived long enough to see his macabre novels based on small-town New Zealand life published in Australia, but not long enough to see them taken up in New Zealand after his alcohol-related death in 1972. Barry Crump was still around and keeping his hand in writing popular fiction in the ’70s, but nothing matched the quality or the commercial success of his 1960s best-seller A Good Keen Man. The poets Fleur Adcock and Kevin Ireland were writing in England but continuing to publish in New Zealand, to which Ireland would eventually return in 1986.
New Zealand painting too began to flourish as the protégés of the McCahon and Woollaston generation – Don Binney, Pat Hanly, Gretchen Albrecht, Robin White – were taken up by dealer galleries who promoted their work with a zeal not seen previously. Woollaston and McCahon themselves benefited from the florescence as their foundational work began to be taken seriously for the first time by the public at large and to fetch prices that represented a fairer return on their talent and effort. Particular painters – Grahame Sydney, for example, working in Otago and Central Otago, Peter Siddell in Auckland, Brent Wong around Wellington, Marilyn Webb in Fiordland – came to be associated with regions which drew out of them their most iconic work. In the case of Sydney, Wong and Siddell, this was produced in a largely realist mode. And yet there was nothing ‘photographic’ about these paintings. Sydney’s in particular were evocative of the ethos of the landscapes as he experienced them and of the mood of the artist.
New Zealand literature and history began to be taught seriously for the first time in universities, and when new universities were established in Hamilton (Waikato) and Palmerston North (Massey), it was the first such increase since the turn of the twentieth century. Even conservative institutions such as the churches were affected: the Catholic Church experienced local controversy over its new post-Vatican II vernacular liturgy and a papal ban on the oral contraceptive; and members of the Presbyterian General Assembly brought Professor Lloyd Geering to trial – unsuccessfully – on a charge of heresy.
In the early 1970s, two broad but powerful forces coalesced from social and ideological seeds released in the late 1960s: the counter-culture and women’s movements.
The counter-culture in New Zealand developed out of that of the Yippies in the United States, which in turn was a product of the civil rights and anti-war campaigns there. Books such as Jerry Rubin’s Do It, Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It and a variety of titles by Buckminster Fuller, found a ready market among the New Zealand baby-boomers, many of whom were disenchanted with the very things that their parents had sought to establish after World War II – the security of the nuclear family, suburban mores, lifetime jobs, conformity, predictability.
The most influential leaders of the movement in New Zealand – though they were ‘leaders’ because of their fluency and charisma, not in any sense of running a structured organisation – were Auckland protestor Tim Shadbolt, whose book Bullshit and Jellybeans (1971) was the local equivalent of the Rubin and Hoffman volumes; Alister Taylor, who published Shadbolt’s book and other subversive volumes such as the Whole Earth Catalogue and The Little Red School-Book; James Ritchie, a Waikato University ethnologist and psychologist who had strong professional links with Berkeley in California and the American counter-culture movement; and poet James K. Baxter, who, a few years before his death in 1972, left suburban comfort to establish urban communes in Auckland and Wellington and a r
ural one at Jerusalem on the Whanganui River.
Baxter was both an appealing and a tragic figure. His poetic gifts, so vividly on show in Beyond the Palisade when he was eighteen, had continued to enlarge in range and power. By the 1960s he was, with Allen Curnow, the country’s pre-eminent poet. But he was always troubled by a Calvinist conscience that made it impossible for him to enjoy the fruits of his libidinous and alcoholic propensities. He converted to Catholicism in 1958 and soon after swore off alcohol, and in 1968, after two years on the Otago University’s Burns Fellowship, he left his family to work with the ‘mokai’ – the unprivileged or tribeless young people who were having difficulties coping with the materialism and the competitiveness of urban culture. While Baxter was influenced by all the ingredients of the counter-culture, including its literature and its strong anti-war message – he had come, after all, from a family of pacifists – he sought to develop a New Zealand lifeway that embraced Maori spirituality and social concepts. His early death at 46 prevented the fulfilment of that vision. But among the rich legacy he left his country was some of its most haunting poetry:
Alone we are born
And die alone;
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
Over snow-mountain shine.
Upon the upland road
Ride easy, stranger:
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger.
Being by its very nature informal and unstructured, the counter-culture movement never sought to institutionalise itself. The nearest it came to official sanction was when the Kirk Labour Government announced its ‘ohu scheme’ in 1973, to help groups to live and work communally on rural land, kibbutz-fashion. The programme was not in the long term a success, in part because almost all the participants found living communally considerably more difficult than they had imagined, and in part because in some instances a refusal to commit to a disciplined work ethic and a liking for recreational drugs, especially marijuana, proved inimical to the need to provide food and shelter and emotional security for the adults and children who made up the ohu ‘families’.