Obituaries

Judy Henstock (Huri Murupaenga)

- Lindy Nolan

Judy Henstock, a long term New Zealand resident of Australia, was a member of CAFCA for several years in the 1990s. Like too many of our members, we never met her but we were in regular contact on projects such as a documentary that she planned to make about the impact of Rogernomics on her homeland. I am indebted to my longstanding Sydney friend and comrade, Lindy Nolan, for this obituary and specially written poem. Ed.

New Zealand born journalist Judy Henstock Murupaenga died in Sydney in November 2005. Born in 1943, the daughter of leading communists Alec and Mollie Ostler*, she was involved in struggle from a young age. As a television and print journalist she was a passionate advocate for truth and justice, once being forced out of Broken Hill in New South Wales after a particularly incisive expose of corruption. She warned of the severe media censorship enveloping New Zealand and, increasingly, Australia. She was a long-standing subscriber to Watchdog which she praised for its fearless analysis of the foreign domination of Aotearoa, particularly by US transnationals.* Mollie Ostler was also a CAFCA member. Her obituary is in Watchdog 96, April 2001, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/96/9obitu.htm. Ed.

Judy did not just document injustice, she was involved in numerous struggles throughout her life. Although dogged by severe illness during her last decade, she was involved in many local and international struggles, most notably against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and anti-terrorism laws. In the 1990s she joined the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), convinced that fundamental change was not only necessary but inevitable.

Just days before she died, despite severe illness, she marched against the new industrial relations laws being introduced by Prime Minister John Howard at the behest of the Business Council of Australia. The placard that she had carried in the march was still at her doorway when she died. Judy is survived by a daughter, Raewyn, sons, Vincent and Mark, and nine grandchildren in both Australia and Aotearoa.

Totohe

Hey Huri

Got your message

You out marching again?

What are you thinking,

That you can change the world?

You getting mixed up with that

Civil liberties mob,

Those do gooders?

You out in the streets and shops,

Talking listening learning again?

Always asking, “Why?”

You want the truth,

Bugger slogans and empty phrases

You want facts!

Baking up a battle with that Maori bread

Imbued with your warrior spirit.

“Totohe! Press forward, challenge!” you say.

You waste nothing.

Everything is precious to you.

Your deft hand

Throws a cloth over an old couch

Transforming, creating

Turning junk to

Treasure

Even now.

Not like those multinational bosses,

Oh, you didn’t like them!

Making others’ lives a misery, stealing their resources

Working them like slaves, wasting them at war.

And those big blokes didn’t like

You , Judy.

Your spin was not their

Webs of lies

Just an orb of truth

Sparkling dew-dropped

In the garden’s morning light of

Futures possible.

Why won’t you stay at home, now,

Sit gentle in an armchair?

But your phone call tells us,

“I haven’t got time for that!”

You march painfully down that road for workers’ rights

Fiery woman, Huri, your banners out for all to see,

Placed in a doorway

Your farewell message.

“Never mind!” you say.

“Keep fighting,

Find the way.”

At peace on the marae of minds’ inspiration

The big tangi that celebrated you

Farewelled you.

From Reinga

Your spirit travels on in us

Over seas of common humanity

The truth you sought

Growing like the gardens you

Tended with love.

Your life

A signpost.


Wes Cameron

- Murray Horton

In Watchdog 62 (September 1989) I wrote: “The first demonstrations I went on against the Vietnam War featured several trade union speakers. Four linger in my memory – Wes Cameron, Dave Morgan, Gordon Walker and Hugh McCrory. They played a signal role in broadening my understanding of the central importance of the biggest single sector of the population – the Working Class. All four stood out for particular reasons – Walker for sheer size, Cameron by a voice like a concrete mixer, Morgan by a concrete mixer voice with an Aussie accent. And McCrory, the slightest, most self-effacing of them, by his broad Scottish accent…”.

That was from my obituary of Hugh McCrory. Gordon Walker quit the union movement and moved to Australia decades ago. Dave Morgan moved to Wellington and went on to be the national leader of the former Seamen’s Union for more than quarter of a century. It is now part of the Maritime Union of New Zealand (with whom CAFCA continues to have a very active working relationship) and Dave is in semi-retirement from the union movement.

The second of that quartet of Christchurch union leaders who so impressed me back in 1969 has now died. Wes Cameron died in May 2006, aged 77, in Timaru. Wes had been out of the union movement and Christchurch for 20 or so years, I hadn’t seen him in decades and I didn’t know him personally. Unlike Hugh McCrory or Dave Morgan, CAFCA never worked with Cameron’s union, the Meat Workers. His involvement with that union spanned from the late 1960s until the mid 80s, rising from rank and file freezing worker to delegate to branch president to fulltime organiser to Canterbury secretary. Those were the days when the freezing works were a key, indeed probably the key, part of the economy and industrial disputes there were bitterly fought, involving the Government as well as the meat companies and farmers. National Prime Ministers routinely fulminated about the freezing workers “holding the country to ransom” (funnily enough, they never directed that invective at the transnational meat companies or the farmers).

In The Thick Of That Era Of Militant Unionism.

Those were the days when unions were to the forefront of progressive political struggles – I knew Wes because of his involvement in the epic campaign against the Vietnam War, and the other big issues of the day, such as the battle against New Zealand’s sporting ties with apartheid South Africa, the campaign for a nuclear free NZ, and the original anti-bases campaign. He, Morgan, Walker, McCrory and many other union officials were heavily involved in all of those. It was a different style of trade unionism to what is on offer now, one reflecting the vastly different society of those times.

From 1974-85 Wes was president of the Canterbury Trades Council, which used to hold regular, well attended meetings where the big issues of the day, both industrial and political, were discussed and action taken. Many’s the time I attended and/or spoke at a Trades Council meeting. Today there is no such body and no such meetings. Wes was a nationally important union leader, being a long time executive member of the former Federation of Labour (FOL). In 1979 he unsuccessfully stood for FOL President (the late Jim Knox got the job). In 1985 he was considered a front runner for the post but opted instead for the position of employees’ representative on the former Arbitration Court, a post he held until retirement in 1987. Wes joined the Labour Party at 15 and was a National Councillor in the 1960s and 70s. He unsuccessfully stood for nomination in the former Lyttelton seat and also seriously considered putting his name forward for the safe Sydenham seat (that went to Jim Anderton, who still holds the renamed Wigram seat today). Along with anyone else in Labour with a conscience and a spine, Wes became bitterly disillusioned with the Rogernomics Labour government of 1984-90. “He resigned from the party in 1990 and dabbled with the Alliance. He courted New Zealand First in later years” (Press obituary, 20/5/06, “Penchant for people and poetry”, Mike Crean). He was President of Timaru Grey Power during the last decade.

Like so many other union leaders of his era, Wes was comfortable describing himself as a socialist (invariably, the enemies of the trade union movement labelled him a communist, which he wasn’t). He learned Russian at night school and made several visits to the former Soviet Union; he admired the Chinese leader, Chairman Mao Ze Dong and had his portrait hung up in his office. I remember him as a very approachable, very down to earth man. I have two vivid memories of him. At the height of the 1975-84 Muldoon government, when Piggy routinely claimed that all militant union leaders were both Poms and Commos, Wes told me that the only foreign influence within the trade union movement that he was aware of was the Vatican. The other time, I was waiting for the lift in the Trade Union Centre and the door opened to reveal the region’s top unionist, one of the most powerful men in the country at that time, standing there in his suit, tie and Beatlesque haircut, contentedly eating a pie out of a bag. Wes truly was a man of the people, a wonderful orator (an art which has been lost by today’s union leaders), and a leading figure when the organised working class was actively involved in all the great issues of the day, in the workplaces and on the streets. His death is another reminder of an era that is gone and which has not been replaced. Obviously, unionists in his day did not have to contend with the full-on attempt to destroy unions which was the 1991 Employment Contracts Act, and everything else which has been used to attack unions and workers in the past 20 years. That is another story. But it certainly would be good to have some union leaders with Wes’ flair and charisma to inspire today’s 18 year old activists, as he and his colleagues inspired me all those years ago. It is vital that those links be made.

 

DEATHS IN THE FAMILY

- Murray Horton

CAFCA expresses our condolences to Nicky Hager, a longstanding member, on the recent death of his mother, Barbara Hager, aged 75, in Wellington. I asked Nicky to write a couple of lines. Instead, he sent his four page funeral eulogy and asked me to do the choosing. So here’s a tiny extract: “This was also the time when she became active in politics. She and our father were first National, then Labour supporters but in the late 1970s their home became a base for the Horowhenua Values Party – predecessor of the Green Party. In 1982 she became the first woman president of a political party in New Zealand”. The eulogy tells a fascinating life story and if you’d like to read it, contact Nicky at nicky@paradise.net.nz

CAFCA expresses our condolences to Paul Evans, a member for two decades, on the recent death of his father, Harold Evans, aged 90, in Christchurch. Harold Evans was the Christchurch magistrate (the equivalent of today’s District Court Judge) of the 1960s and 70s who became a fulltime political activist, culminating in global fame as the father of the 1990s World Court Project, which led to that body declaring the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons to be against international law, in most instances. I never worked with Harold as a peace activist; my dealings with him were decades earlier when I was one of the “criminals” who appeared before him, more than once, in the dock of the Number One Magistrate’s Court (Owen Wilkes was the most prominent of my fellow “criminals” from the movement to appear before Harold). We had a lot of fun in the process. Kate Dewes’ obituary of Harold will appear in the next issue of Peace Researcher, which can be read online at www.converge.org.nz/abc.


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