Harry Charles Evison, who died in Christchurch in October 2014, aged 90, was very much his own man and it was therefore no surprise to me that his approach to his own death was unique. A generic e-mail was sent by one of his sons, saying: “In accordance with his wishes, there will be no funeral or memorial to his name”. It quoted Omar Khayyam: “I came like water and like wind I go”. It also attached the photo of Harry which illustrates this, and several pages that Harry had written himself, entitled “Data For An Obituary”. This was no dusty old document that his family had found in the bottom of a drawer - he wrote it in 2014, when he was already 90. The old bugger had written his own obituary! My admiring wife said: “This is what you should do; get the official version out first”.

So, for the first time ever, Watchdog is running a self-written obituary (below). Apart from the subtitles which I added it is all Harry’s words and opinions. I would only correct one bit of it – he refers to his years as Manager of the Otago University Students Association’s Clubs and Societies Centre as “the user pays years”. In fact, those years (1980-83) were during Piggy Muldoon’s government, which featured things like the wage/price freeze and were later immortalised by the Rogernomics’ propagandists as when the country was “run like a Polish shipyard”. The user pays mania came after the election of the Lange government in 1984.

CAFCA Member For 33 Years

But, Harry, you’re not going to get away so easily. Apart from anything else your auto-obituary makes no mention of CAFCA. Harry was a member continuously from 1981 (when we were called CAFCINZ and it cost $3 to join) up until his death in 2014. And he was a generous member; invariably including a donation with his sub ($100 was the most recent amount we received from him, in 2013). He was also a member of the Anti-Bases Campaign, having joined in 2010 and had renewed his sub as recently as August 2014 (he died in October). He was also a generous donor to ABC, including to the appeals for the annual protest at the Waihopai spy base. And from 1993 until June 2014 he was a very regular and generous donor, totalling more than $2,500, to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income. A couple of his donations were for unusual sums – one of $68 and, most strikingly, one of $313.07. I can’t remember the reasons for them now – something to do with my then hourly pay rate, I think – but, as I said, Harry was very much his own man.

For somebody who was a CAFCA member for 33 years, you’ll find precious little mention of him in Watchdog. A name search on our Website throws up only two or three mentions and one of those was in the ABC’s Peace Researcher. But those few mentions in PR and Watchdog shed light on Harry’s views, which he maintained right through his long life, and which he regularly expressed in letters to the Press. Dennis Small quoted one, in PR: “Early on in 2010 it was noticeable that building up to Anzac Day and beyond, the mainstream media seemed to be bent on creating a climate of what remarkably smacked of warmongering sentiment. Prominent Christchurch historian, social commentator, and World War 2 veteran, Harry Evison, drew attention to this in a letter to the editor of the Press (24/4/10). He observed that: ‘The present spate of American movies portraying war as heroic, and the extraordinary surge of attention to wars of all kinds, seem to be conditioning people for another world war, like 1914 all over again’. Harry criticised the Press for portraying ‘NZ heroes in the First World War when on the very next page we see the head of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff calling for another war’, this time on Iran” (Peace Researcher 41, July 2011, “Media Warmongering [Part 1]: Signs Of Things To Come”, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/41/pr41-006.htm).

I quoted another one of his innumerable letters to the Press, on another subject:  “The real political reason why the powers that be, both in NZ and the US, hated Sutch’s guts and wanted him discredited and imprisoned as a traitor and spy, were most succinctly stated by renowned Christchurch historian, Harry Evison, in a letter to the Press (12/10/06): ‘The Press omits to mention the most serious offences Dr William Sutch committed against the free market principles that have captivated New Zealand since his death. Besides visiting Russia and reading Marxism, he outrageously questioned whether selling New Zealand’s economic assets to transnational corporations was good for the country. Worse still, he was a Leftwing historian. Right-thinking journalists ignore his writings, and knighted historians like Keith Sinclair very properly exclude him from their bibliographies. Yet two of Sutch’s books, ‘Colony Or Nation’ (1966) and ‘Takeover New Zealand’ (1972) actually deplore the loss of New Zealand’s economic independence through the foreign acquisition of our assets. Sutch even claims that New Zealand would be better off standing on its own feet economically. What would Feltex workers think? The SIS should be warned that there are still people who regard Dr Sutch as a greater patriot than his detractors’. Harry hits the nail on the head” (Watchdog 113, December 2006, “Speaking Ill Of The Dead: The Vicious Smear Campaign Against Bill Sutch & Jack Lewin”, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/13/12.htm). Both these letters to the editor are noteworthy as they were both written when Harry was in his 80s and in poor health. He wrote letters to the editor for decades – the first time I ever became aware of him was when he wrote to the paper deploring police violence against protesters at the former US Air Force observatory atop Mt John (Mackenzie Country) in 1972.

Historian For The People

Harry was a famous historian and one who wrote his books for the people, not academics. One of them won the New Zealand Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1994. But none of them were reviewed in Watchdog, for the simple reason that 19th Century New Zealand history is not our subject, even if it is a Marxist history. Harry, of course, was not happy about this. The last time I ever saw him was at my 60th birthday party* on our back lawn in those chaotic first few weeks after the February 2011 killer quake (which had covered him in cascading books at his Redcliffs home). The combative old bugger berated me at my own party for not reviewing his final book, saying something like: “Aren’t you interested in colonialism and racism?” (which is rather like the famous question: “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”). *Harry is the fourth guest from that party to have subsequently died and been the subject of a Watchdog obituary – the others being Larry Ross (130, August 2012, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/30/17.html), Will Foote and John Case (both in 137, December 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/37/14.html). 

I didn’t totally ignore his books. Under the heading “Book As Precious As The Pounamu Of Its Title” I reviewed “Te Wai Pounamu The Greenstone Island: A History Of The Southern Maori During The European Colonisation Of New Zealand” (the one that won the Non-Fiction Book Award) in the December 1993 PSA Journal, for which I was a regular reviewer and writer throughout the 1980s and 90s. To partly and posthumously redress the lack of Watchdog reviews of Harry’s books, I’ll reproduce it in its entirety (it’s not long): “The North Island land wars have commanded the attention of historians and novelists; Te Wai Pounamu (the South Island) has been regarded as a sideshow in issues of race, land and imperial conquest. This definitive book should dispel any misconceptions about that.

“Harry Evison, a Pakeha, started researching the subject, for a thesis, 45 years ago. He was Ngai Tahu’s historian during its landmark Claim before the Waitangi Tribunal, and this is a continuation of that work. Evison is a fastidious historian, and a political progressive. That combination has produced a huge, fascinating book that subjects to damning scrutiny just how the largest of our islands passed into the hands of settlers, sheep barons, and men of God. He does not exempt the Maori from criticism. In the early 19th Century, British and Maori societies were evenly matched for barbarism and rank stupidity (or, more accurately, the stupidity of rank). One killed and ate the losers in the annual fighting season; the other hanged, flogged and transported its unwanted poor. Both British and Polynesian systems were feudal, and both were headed by chiefs with stifling notions of honour.

“Southern Maori, which means largely, but not exclusively, Ngai Tahu, had problems before the British and the Akaroa French arrived. They were tiny in numbers, scattered around a huge, rugged and inclement island. The southern land wars did not involve Europeans (with the exception of the so-called ‘Wairau Massacre’). All the damage was done by Te Rauparaha, whose genocidal ferocity decimated the population, literally consuming a reasonable number of them. Once Pakeha arrived in Te Wai Pounamu, the world was never going to be the same. Firstly, the tiny Maori population was a huge obstacle in itself; and it was reduced even further, possibly halved, by imported common European illnesses such as measles. The British did not need to resort to war to conquer the South. They did it by good old fashioned trickery, lies, broken promises, and a few forged signatures.

“A position was created with the terrifying title of Commissioner for the Extinguishment of Native Claims. Millions of acres were bought for a pitiful few hundred quid. In some cases, the promised payment was never made at all. Once removed from their greatest asset, the land, and confined to barren scraps, Ngai Tahu sank into long-lasting and severe rural poverty. The problem is only starting to be redressed at the end of the 20th Century. Of course, this massive land theft was all done for the highest of motives, of ‘civilising the savages’. Evison cites contemporary documents describing Maori land tenure as ‘useless and valueless’.

Suppressing Maori “Communism”

“One Victorian gentleman, in his capacity as Native Reserves Commissioner for Canterbury, proclaimed thus: ‘Communism in land is admitted to be the great obstacle to the social and material advancement of the Maori people. It is very certain that under the present system of tenure the Natives will never be induced to give up their low Maori habits, and to adapt themselves to the requirements of a superior civilisation’. So our politicians started committing crimes in the name of suppressing ‘Communism’ from the earliest days of Pakeha settlement. What a happy coincidence that so many of the victorious capitalists personally profited handsomely from the dispossession of these feudal ‘Communists’. This book is excellent, both as history and as a bloody good read. It is a riveting story, with characters and places brought to life. It is the summation of Harry Evison’s life’s work, and is what he will be thankfully remembered for. It throws light on a very sad and shameful past, and explains just why southern Maori campaigned so very long and hard to redress this fundamental injustice. As an example of history serving the present and future, this book is as precious as the pounamu of its title”.

So, yes Harry, I was, and am, “interested in colonialism and racism” (and it’s not as if the subject of his books – the dispossession of southern Maori – is now only of interest to historians. As recently as February 2015 I attended a meeting of the Lyttelton/Mount Herbert Community Board and, whilst waiting to speak, listened to a plaintive appeal for justice from a representative of Port Levy Maori, discussing a multiple owners’ land problem going back to 1849!  Apparently these Maori “Communists” still have “to adapt themselves to the requirements of a superior civilisation”, eh). I count myself privileged to have been given two of Harry’s books: “Te Wai Pounamu” in the 90s and, in 2006, a signed copy of “The Ngai Tahu Deeds: A Window On New Zealand History”, which is as beautiful to look at as it is interesting to read. I was among those invited out to Tuahiwi Marae for the launch of “Te Wai Pounamu”, an event that was combined with a tangi, so the central figures were a live Pakeha author and a dead Pakeha lawyer, both of whom had played key roles in the Ngai Tahu Claim. It was a memorable occasion.

And Harry does crop up now and again in old Watchdogs, you just have to know where to look (the online pre-1999 issues are not responsive to our Website’s internal search engine), and you have to be able to recognise him without him being named, in one case, when Watchdog (51, December 1985) reported on the two memorial seminars we held to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Dr WB Sutch. “The only other incident was the sudden collapse of one participant with a vertiginous nausea attack, leading to him being taken to hospital in an ambulance. Somebody unkindly suggested that it was the only way to stop Wolfgang Rosenberg speaking”. The sick man was Harry – in one of those “it’s a small world” stories, he was attended to at Christchurch Hospital by his son, who was on duty as a house surgeon (the vertigo attack turned out to be caused by an allergy to something in tea. He never drank it again and never had that problem again).

Monthly Review

Harry was mentioned, by name this time, in my obituary (Watchdog 84, May 1997, http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-may-1997.html) of the Monthly Review – he was on the Committee in the 1960s and Editor for a couple of years in the 80s. “Harry Evison once explained to me his philosophy on illustrations: ‘If people want to see pictures, they can stick their heads out the window’…Steven Cowan was appointed the new (and final) Editor in 1987, and things changed markedly. In his very first editorial, he attacked the previous regime (i.e. Harry) and announced that there would be no place for the regular poetry under his editorship. Old subscribers and supporters started leaving; Owen Wilkes never took up his post as Wellington-based Co-Editor, in protest. The magazine adopted a much more Trotskyist tone (reflecting the leanings of the new Committee); it fired sectarian broadsides. One such was a cover story attacking none other than CAFCA (from the standard position of internationalism versus nationalism). What made this more interesting was that, at the time, Steven was our boarder. So I was being lambasted in print from within my own home!” Harry never forgave Steven and co for presiding over the demise of the Monthly Review, in 1996, having lasted since 1960. The bitterness never dissipated. At Wolf Rosenberg’s 2007 wake Harry referred to his successor as editor as a “shit”.

Those above couple of paragraphs, quoting Harry’s appearances in old Watchdogs, also include people who were key friends and colleagues of Harry’s (and key CAFCA members) for decades – namely Wolf Rosenberg and Owen Wilkes. He worked together with them, separately and collectively, on many things, with Monthly Review being the one key common denominator. The Evison family was good friends with the Rosenberg family (it was Wolf and Ann who drove me to Harry’s 1990s’ book launch at Tuahiwi Marae), and Owen was such a close friend of Harry and Hillary that he did jobs like trim their giant macrocarpa hedge at their former spectacular clifftop home at Whitewash Head (Owen was a valued home handyman to his friends – he painted my place). I can remember having a meal with Owen at Harry and Hillary’s home. Sadly, they’re all gone now (with the exception of Hillary). My obituary of Owen is in Watchdog 109, August 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/09/09.htm; Wolf’s is in 114, May 2007, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/14/04.htm; and Ann’s is in 116, December 2007, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/16/09.htm. Harry was particularly close to Wolf and had known him for decades, dating back to when they were both at Victoria University in the 1940s.

Not only are they all gone but so is the spectacular clifftop home at Whitewash Head, where Harry and Hillary lived for decades. Some years ago they swapped homes with their doctor son (now a Christchurch orthopaedic surgeon). It was deemed too dangerous to occupy post-quakes and, according to Hillary, her son was not even able to get his furniture out. The wonderful Sumner to Taylor’s Mistake clifftop walking track that passes in front of their former home is also indefinitely closed. I regarded Harry as a friend. Visiting that home was always a memorable experience. Through the years that I knew him (since the 80s) I shared not only political experiences but also became aware of personal things that affected him deeply – for example, he and Hillary were terribly upset by the 1999 New South Wales train crash that killed seven passengers, including their five year old grandson and the boy’s mother. Harry was angered by the subsequent Commission of Inquiry which found that it should have been preventable. I last saw Harry in 2011 but I used to ring him and we’d chat about all manner of things. His increasingly dire health finally put a stop to those calls – one of his many problems was that he went deaf and the last time I rang him he couldn’t hear me no matter how loudly I bellowed.

Over the years Harry regularly appeared in the mainstream media, as the subject of feature articles. Plus there was some material which he sent to me himself. The latter is worth quoting, because when I read it I can hear Harry’s distinctive voice telling the stories. I don’t know why but he sent me a single solitary page from his unpublished memoir, devoted to his 1941 job at a fruit packing factory. Why? Because he wanted to make a point about one of his workmates: “…the kingpin was the foreman, Henry Lang - a restless, unruffled young chap who shuffled about in gumboots organising and supervising everything, and talking in a foreign accent to the boss and the factory workers - who hardly knew what to make of him…He did well academically and later scaled the public service ladder, being Secretary of the Treasury from 1968 to 1976.

“He was by then a conservative administrator, and helped turn Treasury into a secretive ‘think-tank’, making or even dictating policy for the Government, instead of doing the Government’s bidding as it had done under previous governments. Thus he paved the way for the free market ‘reforms’ of the 1980s, sprung on the public by the Labour ‘New Right’ with Treasury’s assistance. Henry Lang was an Economics Professor at Victoria from 1976 to 1985, and thereafter held a lot of business directorships, including Tower Corporation, formed from the privatisation of the Government Life Insurance Office – which had been formed nearly a hundred years before, to provide people with a State-owned, reliable alternative to the private life insurance companies that were notoriously rapacious and prone to going bust. As Chairman of Tower, Henry Lang saw a lot of Government Life public servants out of their jobs, and cost me and Hillary and thousands of other policyholders a lot of money. The annual bonuses on our policies promptly sank from the 4% usually paid by Government Life to about 1%, or less, and have never recovered even to keep pace with inflation. Henry Lang and his fellow Directors pocketed huge fees for this; and for doing what had previously been done by a public service general manager on a modest salary”.

Peace Campaigner

In early 2012 I was scheduled to give a talk at the WEA about, among other things, the late 1940s’ campaign against peacetime conscription. Unsolicited, Harry kindly sent me a chapter of his unpublished memoir (“New Zealand As I Knew It”, Chapter 4, 1946-49, revised January 2012). It is vintage Harry – in it he has a go at National and Labour politicians, fellow historians and fellow campaigners alike (the latter being Ron Smith. My review of Ron’s autobiography “Working Class Son: My Fight Against Capitalism And War” is in Watchdog 77, December 1994, http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-december-1994.html; my obituary of him is in Watchdog 79, August 1995, http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-august-1995.html).

Harry describes a meeting attended by National MP Jack Marshall (who went on to spend many years as a senior Minister in the Holyoake government and briefly succeeded Kiwi Keith as Prime Minister). Harry had been invited as “Chairman of the Victoria University Socialist Club and well-known stump-orator for the anti-conscription campaign. We were all seated informally around someone’s comfortable lounge in Karori, Marshall and I being seated on the floor at centre, almost cheek by jowl. He began with an account of how he and the RSA and the National Party had successfully defended the country against our enemies in the 1939-1945 war, and now with the Communist Menace looming, they were ready to do the same again. Then he warmed to the subject of how all patriotic New Zealanders must resist Communism.

“When my turn came, I got stuck into ‘Gentleman Jack’, which some people there obviously thought was a rude thing to do. I argued that there was no evidence that anyone was preparing to attack New Zealand, and that the scare campaign being run by the Fraser (Labour) government and by National was being done only to please the USA. I challenged Marshall to explain, as a military man, how 18 year old conscripts could possibly defend the country if it was under attack, and I asked why Marshall and other conscription enthusiasts didn’t go back into the Army themselves if they thought the country was in danger. Jack Marshall seemed nonplussed. He seemed genuinely unaware that there could be an opinion contrary to his, in sane society. He didn’t even attempt to argue the issue. Marshall (to me): ‘You talk like a Communist’. Me: ‘I am a Communist’”.

The 1949 referendum on peacetime conscription was a foregone conclusion, with both Labour and National backing it and the news media not reporting the campaign against it. Harry describes a post-referendum party of the “Communist conspirators”. They had bought beer but no food (all men, obviously). They noticed that there was a social event taking place across the street at the National Party HQ. Several of the revellers (not including Harry) put on wet weather gear to look shabby and went across the street, where they conned National’s supper ladies that they were foreign seamen who needed some food for their hungry shipmates. “They won the hearts of the supper ladies and arrived back at our meeting laden with boxes of savouries and cream cakes. For good measure (one of them) had lifted a large portrait of the National Party’s esteemed Leader Sid Holland from its place of honour on the wall of the foyer, and brought it back as a trophy. We had a good supper, and toasted the National Party and its Leader, whose portrait was propped up on our table in front of us.

“When it was time for us to go home, the question arose as to what to do with Sid Holland’s portrait. To take it back to its rightful place across the street was out of the question, as the National Party’s security guards might be looking for the thieves. It could not be left in our meeting room without embarrassing the daytime occupants. So (the thief) undertook to wrap the portrait carefully in brown paper and leave it at a ‘left luggage’ locker at the Wellington Railway Station. After a few days this was done and the ‘left luggage’ docket was mailed to the Wellington National Party with a polite thank you note for the loan of the portrait”. Within months Holland was Prime Minister and National was the Government for 20 of the next 23 years.

Harry touched people’s lives in many ways. Maire Leadbeater wrote to his family: “Harry was a long time friend of my mother Elsie Locke*, who greatly respected his historical expertise and shared his perspective on a great many things. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and tramping, being just a couple of them. I am sure she was his ally in the struggle to save the spotted shag and would have supported his progressive ideas about teaching. I think Harry would also have had a lot to do with my Dad*, especially in the Monthly Review years. But my warmest memories are of my history teacher back in the 1960s – he must have had a pretty big impact. I am still involved in exploring the history of social movements and firmly committed to the need to understand our past, especially from the grassroots perspective. He was a kind and encouraging teacher, who always had time to spare for a consultation. The other really lovely memory is of his role in the drama productions at Linwood”. *My review of “Looking For Answers: A Life Of Elsie Locke”, by Maureen Birchfield, is in Watchdog 122, December 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/22/09.htm. My obituary of Elsie Locke is in Watchdog 97, August 2001, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/97/13.htm. And my obituary of Jack Locke is in Watchdog 84, May 1997, http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-may-1997.html.

Ngai Tahu Claim

Harry wasn’t an ivory tower historian, he used his skill to effect change; major change in the case of his role with the Ngai Tahu Claim. “The first time Harry Evison met Tā Tipene O’Regan, the former was a historian who had written an interesting but largely ignored thesis, and the latter was chairing a meeting of the Ngāi Tahu Development Board. ‘He asked me to write a booklet summarising the Ngāi Tahu Claim so I did’, says Harry. The booklet was called ‘Ngāi Tahu Land Rights And The Crown Pastoral Lease Lands In The South Island Of New Zealand’. Not the catchiest title ever, but important nonetheless, it was first published in 1986, followed by a second edition in the same year and a third edition the following year.

“Aimed at a general audience, the book was the first in a series called Ka Roimata Whenua and was published, as Tā Tipene says in the Foreword, ‘to redress in some degree the Northern ‘warp’ in the history of the Māori Land issue’. He went on: ‘Ngāi Tahu are blessed that Harry Evison has been willing to prepare this first volume. His interest in the subject dates back to his 1952 thesis on the Ngāi Tahu land issue. That he now has the time and energy to embrace the concerns of our people is a gift we are deeply grateful for. He represents an important strand in New Zealand’s history — the Pākehā writers and men of affairs who have indignantly protested against the domination of Māori culture and the injustice over land for more than a century… He writes about Māori pain from the perspective of his Pākehā roots and with the tools of Pākehā scholarship. It is right that he should, for this book is aimed at a Pākehā audience. That he is able and willing to do so reflects something important about this country - something of the hope about what we might yet become’.

“For his troubles, Harry Evison was paid $1,000. ‘Tipene got the Board to pass a resolution giving me $1,000 and insisted I take it’, he says. The money was well spent, much of it on a leather satchel which Harry has to this day. It has been through the mill, he says. What followed that meeting of course was Wai 27 and the hearing of the Ngāi Tahu Claim by the Waitangi Tribunal. And Harry Evison was a vital witness for Ngāi Tahu during those hearings. Going toe to toe with the Crown could be daunting, but Harry relished it. ‘Harry used to love a good argument’, says his wife Hillary. ‘But I had to be on my toes with the Tribunal,” says Harry. ‘If I didn’t know the answer, I would say I didn’t know. It was impossible to bullshit them’. Harry’s style was to uncover original documents and present them as incontrovertible evidence. Queen’s Counsel Paul Temm, who was senior counsel for Ngāi Tahu during the Claim hearings, called this ‘showing the body’, after a saying in legal circles based on convincing a jury in a murder trial…

“It was his upbringing in Christchurch and his family connections that would shape his later life, although, when Harry completed his thesis for a Master’s degree, he was simply looking for the truth. ‘It had always puzzled me that Ngāi Tahu were down and out. The orthodox idea was that Māori just couldn’t cope with civilisation, and that was based on the idea of a clash of cultures. Supposedly, when two cultures came in contact, the weaker would wither away. You don’t hear much about that now, but it was all the rage from the 1940s until the 1970s’. His mother’s sister Freda married Arthur Couch, from a prominent Rāpaki family, and Harry’s exposure to Rāpaki Māori had him questioning that prevailing theory.

Cheated Out Of Their Land

“His Aunt Freda was a big help, he says. ‘She took me round in her old car to meet some of the Tuahiwi elders. They told me things about the Claim that I hadn’t heard before, and confirmed that Ngāi Tahu were cheated of their land’. Harry called his thesis ‘The Canterbury Māori And The Land Question’. He says the prevalent opinion was characterised by the then head of Canterbury Museum, Roger Duff. According to Duff, Tuahiwi Māori, ‘in the face of civilised society, just sort of wilted and couldn’t cope’. In fact, as Harry’s thesis made clear, Ngāi Tahu had been prosperous and took to trade with Europeans with alacrity. ‘In the first place I asked myself why Ngāi Tahu at Rāpaki were so down and out, and yet at one stage they had the run of the country. When I started to look for answers, it became obvious that they had been cheated out of the land. They coped very well until their land and other mahinga kai was taken away from them. When Ngāi Tahu were put off the land, things started to go wrong’.

“But Harry’s thesis sank without trace, collecting dust on a shelf at the University of Otago Library while he and his new wife Hillary moved to Tikitiki on the east coast of the North Island, where Harry taught at the Māori secondary school….The couple returned to Christchurch in 1985, the same year the Lange government passed an amendment to the Treaty of Waitangi Act, which allowed historical claims to be lodged with the Waitangi Tribunal, and paved the way for the Ngāi Tahu Claim to be heard. Harry had retired, but his time had come. He continued to publish on the theme of Ngāi Tahu and the history of Te Waipounamu…

“Harry re-examined colonial history in‘The Ngāi Tahu Deeds: A Window On New Zealand History’, published in 2006, and looked in particular at the ten Ngāi Tahu Deeds by which the Crown acquired land in Te Waipounamu from 1844 to 1864. Harry’s aim in writing the book was to ‘restore the integrity of the Ngāi Tahu historical record’. His book ‘New Zealand Racism In The Making: The Life & Times Of Walter Mantell’, published in late 2010, took aim at Walter Mantell, the Crown agent who, from 1848, worked on securing land for the Crown. Mantell was seen as a friend to Ngāi Tahu but in Evison’s view, this was a sham; although it took some time to uncover Mantell’s disingenuous actions.

“’The only thing I would change (in his original booklet for the Ngāi Tahu Trust Board) is that I was too soft on Mantell’, says Harry. ‘He said he was sorry for what he had done and did his best to put it right. That is bullshit. In my last book I put Mantell on the mantelpiece and shot him down. He didn’t try to put anything right. He tried to cover his tracks. When I wrote that booklet, I hadn’t seen the Government papers which showed Mantell to be a thorough rogue. He died in 1895 and he hadn’t renounced his bullshit story about the Claim’. But it wasn’t about making Mantell the villain; it was, as always for Harry, about putting the story right” (Te Karaka, 27/6/14, “Historian Harry Evison And The Pursuit Of Truth”, http://ngaitahu.iwi.nz/our_stories/historian-harry-evison-pursuit-truth/).

Mike Knowles was one of the leading lawyers involved in the Ngai Tahu Claim. He e-mailed me: “(Harry) was my first pick as an expert witness to get the Claim started at the end of 1986. He loved a good pint of Guinness and we would adjourn to what was then ’Rumpole’s Bar’ in the Park Royal (later renamed the Crowne Plaza, and demolished post-quakes. MH) after a day’s work before the Waitangi Tribunal… Harry and I both lamented the corporate model that Ngai Tahu leadership opted for and this was often the chief topic of discussion at the Rumpole sessions, although we did manage to avoid crying into our beer over it”. So, let there be no illusions that Harry was any more enamoured of Maori capitalism, The Brown Table, than he was of the Pakeha variety (the details of the Ngai Tahu Settlement, which came into effect in 1998, can be found at http://ngaitahu.iwi.nz/ngai-tahu/the-settlement/settlement-offer/).

Fighting Racism

The Press wrote a feature (15/1/11, “Racial Prejudice’s Seeds”, Philip Matthews) about Harry’s last book, the Mantell one, which “comes with an author’s memoir, a personal history of racism in this country since 1924 – the year Evison was born in Christchurch. Within it, an early memory, circa 1928. The four year old Evison is standing at his front gate in the Christchurch suburb of Beckenham. He sees a dark skinned man riding a bike, followed by a group of school children who start a chant: ‘Nigger, nigger, pull the trigger’. He writes: ‘Eighty years on, I still see the dark skinned bicycle man’. He thanks his parents for teaching him to abhor racism; he dedicates the book to them…In the 1930s, Evison remembers, one of his mother’s sisters married ‘a bloke from Rapaki…There was no stigma attached to that in our family but some of our cousins from up north insulted (their) children for being dirty Maori’, he says. ‘But my parents never tolerated racial prejudice and encouraged us to have that attitude’. On current racism: “’New Zealand has been a backwater in this way’, Evison says. ‘It disgusts me that a lot of people think racial prejudice is just a joke now’.

Talking of the subject of his book, Walter Mantell, Harry said he “’enforced more ruthlessly and thoroughly than anyone else the racist doctrine of Victorian colonialism’…Mantell was a complex character who Evison likens to Shakespeare’s Iago….You might think that after more than 60 years, Evison has found his villain – one man as the answer to his questions about why Ngai Tahu ended up where they did. But the real villain is something larger and more amorphous. Evison’s argument is that racism was generally unknown in the pre-settler era. The whalers didn’t treat Maori as inferior; there was inter-marriage and cooperation. Racism came with colonisation; or, more specifically, colonist Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the New Zealand Company.

“Within Wakefield’s ‘waste lands’ theory was a notion that land was of little value to Maori and that they would even benefit from dispossession. Racism grew as desire for land grew. ‘They (the New Zealand Company) told the colonists coming here that Maori would be only too glad to give up their land because they would learn to become civilised and welcome the Europeans. And that they didn’t know how to use their land properly’. Two lies, of course – but convenient lies; as Evison has spent much of a long lifetime trying to show”.

“Evison held strong views on many issues and never tired of arguing them, from opposition to age-based promotion through school classes, to New Zealand’s adoption of the global free market from the late 1980s. Often he was painted as a bitter malcontent, mostly by people unaware of his energy and wry humour” (Press, Obituaries, 15/11/14, “Treaty Claim Boosted By ‘Little Brown Book’”, Mike Crean). That is so true – Harry was great company, with a good sense of humour and a wide range of interests. I feel privileged to have known him and to have counted him as a friend. My deepest condolences to Hillary, to whom he was married for more than 60 years; to their children and grandchildren; and to all New Zealanders who have lost a gem, a true original; a rarity who uncovered the truth about the past and used it to help make a better present and future.

Harry Evison

- Harry Evison

Harry Evison was born on 24 May 1924 at Beckenham, Christchurch, the third son of Sidney Evison, a London-born newspaper publisher, and Beatrice (née Foster), a Lyttelton-born school teacher. From his parents Evison got an abiding interest in music, history and writing, and learned racial tolerance. He started school at Beckenham, but at age ten moved to West Christchurch District High School where the headmaster, LF de Berry, believed in getting pupils to work at whatever level they were capable of. This idea was at odds with those of Clarence Beeby who, as Director of Education, introduced the system of “age classification” whereby pupils are classed according to age regardless of ability or achievement – a system with which Evison strongly disagreed. Evison regarded his two years at West Intermediate as the best schooling he ever had, and his teachers there, Grant Forbes and Douglas Blyth, as the most inspiring. Forbes for example taught his Form 1 boys (Year 7) three-part singing, watercolour painting, and sonnets by Gerard Manley Hopkins, then a little-known avant-garde poet.

In 1937 Evison’s family moved to Wellington. In 1939, when World War Two began, Evison enlisted as a deck cadet on the liner Niagara, but it was sunk in 1940 before he was due to embark. He then enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF). He trained in radar, and was with 10 Servicing Unit, north of New Guinea, when the war ended with the Japanese surrender in August 1945. A week later, an air crew Evison had flown with were killed on a test flight when their plane (a Ventura) crashed into Seeadler Harbour. Evison, like many others, was unsettled by such tragedies. In October 1945 at Jacquinot Bay, New Britain, Evison helped to organise the first successful RNZAF airmen’s strike. This was not a “beer strike” as stated by Bryan Cox in his “Pacific Scrapbook”(1997). It was a strike for fresh vegetables, in protest against the diet of Spam and dehydrated vegetables that airmen at Jacquinot were being fed two months after the war’s end.

Lifelong Marxist Historian

In 1946 Evison enrolled at Wellington Teachers College, where he was active in drama and student publications. Influenced by the war and by his reading of history, Evison was now a Marxist, a point of view he maintained for the rest of his life. While at Teachers College Evison studied part-time at Victoria University College and was active in student politics. He was elected Secretary of the Socialist Club, Chief Guide of the Tramping Club, and Secretary of the Students’ Association. In 1949 he was prominent in Wellington as an opponent of the Fraser Labour government’s compulsory military training scheme. For this he was blacklisted by the secret police, as he found out later.

Evison disagreed with the Communist Party theory (derived from Engels) that ranked human societies in terms of their technological development, with hunter-gatherer societies lowest in the scale as “savages”. Evison regarded social cooperation as a better yardstick of human progress than technical achievement. He also disagreed with the idea of “intellectuals” as a distinct “class”. So-called “intellectuals”, he said, should try using a pick and shovel alongside workmen skilled at the job, and they would find that manual work also needs intelligence. In 1950, while completing his MA papers at Canterbury University College (CUC), Evison was elected Chairman of the CUC Socialist Club. Among other officers of the Club that year, were lecturers Winston Rhodes, Harry Scott, Wolfgang Rosenberg, and PJ Alley (Rewi’s brother); clergymen HS Hoddinott and Alan Brash (Don Brash’s father); librarian CS Collins, ornithologist Ron Scarlett, trade unionist AB Grant, and Colin Clark (later secretary of the Public Service Association).

In 1952, while teaching at Cromwell, Evison completed his MA from Otago University with his thesis on Canterbury Ngai Tahu, the first Marxist study of the effects of colonialism on New Zealand Maori. The prevailing theory then was “Culture Clash”, which sees history in terms of “superior” cultures replacing “inferior” ones. This was promoted by Professor Ivan Sutherland of CUC in his book “The Maori Situation”(1935), and by Sutherland’s student, Roger Duff, in his 1943 MA thesis on Canterbury Maori. They argued that Maori had collapsed psychologically during European colonisation because they could not cope with civilisation. Evison’s thesis showed that the Maori collapse was economic, not psychological: Canterbury Maori coped well with early European contact: and “collapsed” only when the colonial authorities deprived them of their economic resources. Evison said that for 35 years no one took any notice of his thesis.

Advocate Of School-Based Teacher Training

Evison taught in country schools from 1951 to 1959, chiefly at Cromwell and Reefton. These he regarded as his best teaching years. There were no unemployed, no rich or poor, and all school pupils got the same opportunities. During this time he met his wife Hillary, and their three children were born. In 1960 Evison transferred to Christchurch as Head of History at Linwood High School, where he also directed stage productions. In 1964 he joined the secondary department of Christchurch Teachers College as Senior Lecturer in History and Social Studies. He ran refresher courses for history teachers, and initiated the first college courses in drama and mountain recreation. As Canterbury President of the Post-Primary Teachers Association he campaigned for better funding for district high schools.

In the 1960s Evison served on the committee of the NZ Monthly Review, and on the Canterbury Mountain Safety Committee. For six years from 1967 to 1972 he was honorary warden of the Alpine Club’s Aspiring Hut in the West Matukituki, where he spent summer vacations with his family. He said he made more new friends in six weeks at Aspiring Hut than during the rest of the year in town. For many years Evison and his family lived at Sumner above the Whitewash Head cliff. As an honorary wildlife ranger he campaigned for better protection for the spectacular spotted shag colony there. He wrote environmental submissions on the subject to the City Council, but with little success. He was dismayed when later on the colony virtually collapsed.

As Principal Lecturer for Teaching Practice at Christchurch Teachers College, Evison advocated school-based training for graduate trainees as an alternative to the college-based system. He believed that ideas about teaching could best be gained in the classroom, with practical teaching experience preceding college lectures rather than the other way round. His scheme provided for exchanges of staff between teachers’ colleges and schools. To vindicate this idea he took leave from the College in 1973 and taught for a year as Head of English at Queens High School in Dunedin, the first college lecturer to make such a move. His 4scheme was supported by secondary schools and by trainees who volunteered for it. But the Education Department failed to authorise a trial of school-based training, and Evison resigned from the College.

In Dunedin in 1973 Evison was elected to the Dunedin City Council Committee for Recreation and Sport, under the scheme set up by the Kirk government. This led to his appointment in 1975 as Activities Officer at the University of Otago. There he persuaded the Students Association (OUSA) to spend its’ building fund on a new, purpose-built multi-storeyed building with proper facilities for student clubs and societies, to function also as a community centre. Evison wrote the architectural brief for the building, and in 1980 it opened as the OUSA Clubs and Societies Centre with himself as Manager. This was the era of “user pays”, but Evison instead successfully ran the Centre on the principle “user cleans up”. When he retired in 1983, the OUSA made him a life member and named the Centre’s main lounge after him. Evison regarded the Centre’s success as his most satisfying achievement in education.

Between 1975 and 1984, Evison lectured in Dunedin for the Diploma in Recreation and Sport and wrote a teachers’ correspondence course in outdoor recreation for the Education Department. He also represented Otago University on the Otago Mountain Safety Committee. In Dunedin he was President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and of the United Nations Association, and helped establish an Otago Council for Civil Liberties. In 1977, with Hone Tuwhare, Evison organised a campaign against the Muldoon government’s SIS Amendment Bill, culminating in a protest march and rally in the Octagon of more than 2,000 people, shown on national TV. In 1981 Evison helped Larry Ross to launch the Nuclear Free New Zealand campaign, and afterwards joined its Committee. In 1977 with Professors Alan Mark and John Child he organised a campaign to establish a Scenic Reserve at Trotters Gorge in North Otago. His “Trotters Gorge Field Guide”was published in 1978, and the Trotters Gorge Scenic Reserve was gazetted in 1979. He enjoyed tramping in the Otago ranges, and in 1982 with his wife Hillary he submitted a Protected Natural Area proposal for the Rock and Pillar summit ridge.

Regretted Ngai Tahu’s Corporate Structure

In 1983 Evison left Otago University to concentrate on writing, and he edited the New Zealand Monthly Review for two years. In 1986, to support a Ngai Tahu claim to the high country Crown lease lands, he wrote a 72-page booklet, “Ngai Tahu Land Rights And The Crown Pastoral Leases In The South Island Of New Zealand”. High country farmers took this seriously, said Evison. At a Christchurch public meeting on the claim, the Canterbury high country farmers’ Chairman, the late Michael Murchison, said to Evison: “Mao wrote the ‘Little Red Book’, and now you’ve written the ‘Little Brown Book’”.

From 1987 to 1990 Evison assisted Ngai Tahu with their historic Waitangi Tribunal Claim. His evidence to the Tribunal reiterated his 1952 thesis argument that Ngai Tahu’s impoverishment and dispersal had been caused by the Crown’s appropriation of their land. Evison thought the high country farmers’ reaction to his “Little Brown Book” influenced the National government to settle the Ngai Tahu claim favourably, while leaving the high country leases untouched. Evison welcomed Ngai Tahu’s huge Claim settlement, but regretted the corporate business structure that was set up to administer it. Evison strongly supported Dr WB Sutch’s views on economic independence for New Zealand. He was disgusted when the Lange government signed the country into the so-called global “free market” system, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, erosion of public services, and relentless plundering of natural resources for private profit. Evison regarded “free market” politicians as traitors to New Zealand for destroying the social services that had been laboriously built up by preceding generations.

In 1989 Evison received the Queen’s Service Medal (QSM) for public services. In 1994 he was awarded the New Zealand Book Award for Non-Fiction for his book “Te Wai Pounamu The Greenstone Island”, and in 1996 he received the honorary degree Doctor of Letters from the University of Canterbury. In later years Evison suffered from two debilitating kinds of cancer: he read the proofs of his 2006 book “The Ngai Tahu Deeds”while in a hospital emergency ward. In 2010 he published his book “New Zealand Racism In The Making: The Life & Times of Walter Mantell”. Harry Evison is survived by his wife Hillary and their three adult children.

Helen Yensen

- Maire Leadbeater

Helen Yensen was a CAFCA member from 2011 until ill health and old age forced her to resign in 2014. In that brief period, at the end of her life, she was a generous donor to both CAFCA and the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income. I knew nothing about her life and am indebted to Maire Leadbeater, who informed me of her death and who accepted my invitation to write Helen’s obituary. MH.

Helen (full name Helena) Yensen died on January 22, 2015, aged 84, at the Princess Alexandra Retirement Village in Napier. She had been suffering from heart and increasingly painful vascular problems that could not be remedied. A long-time advocate of assisted dying, she was denied this option but still managed to choose her own time by opting to stop eating and drinking. Poignantly friends report that she spent much of her last week bidding farewell to those close to her. Her obituary notice in the New Zealand Herald records: “Her wish to die has come to pass, and her body has been cremated without ceremony in accordance with her instructions. In 2013 Helen helped to organise Maryan Street’s speaking tour in Hawke’s Bay promoting her ‘End of Life Choices’ Private Member’s Bill. Helen’s friends respected her wish to die and for a speedy end to her suffering. She had been a life-long advocate for justice, and worked tirelessly to expose injustice and cruelty. She deserved to have end-of-life choices and to die a peaceful death. Arohanui. Dag, lieve Helena” (the Dutch phrase translates as “goodbye, dear Helena”).

Helen’s last four years were spent in Napier. She took to Hawke’s Bay life with enthusiasm and was soon regaling her Auckland friends with accounts of the cultural, community and political attractions of her new home. She will be greatly missed in Napier for her contributions to many organisations including Don’t Frack the Bay, the Green Party, Grey Power, the Maraenui community in Napier and its Maori bilingual school, and the Books in Schools programme. Helen was a dear friend and mentor to me over the past 30 years. We met when the Auckland peace movement was in a period of exponential growth in the early 1980s. Helen was at the heart of all the major campaigns and supported a number of groups, including the Auckland Peace Forum and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.  She chose to use her energies and time in line with her skills – facilitating meetings and supporting others to develop good group process, writing submissions and letters, record keeping as well as the innumerable demonstrations, stalls, and petitions of the time.

East Timor Campaigner

In 1981 Helen volunteered to help Greenpeace’s then Coordinator, the late Elaine Shaw – how could she be most effective? Elaine handed her a file of material about East Timor and told her East Timor work had lapsed for want of an effective coordinator. Helen was soon hooked and for the next two decades she was a key driver of East Timor solidarity work – maintaining the links with other national and international groups, and with Timorese leaders in exile – Jose Ramos Horta was a guest in her home more than once.  Helen kept up a stream of lobbying correspondence with Government and fronted up to the parliamentarians when petitions were heard. Often this was a thankless and somewhat disillusioning task – nuclear free leader David Lange was obdurate on East Timor and many MPs were little better. In the 1990s East Timor work went up a notch and there were more hands to the plough, but Helen’s wise guidance, organising skills and extensive snail mail correspondence with supporters was vital to the group’s effectiveness. In 1999, at the time of the cataclysmic post-referendum violence in East Timor, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Conference was held in Auckland. Jose Ramos Horta visited to plead with world leaders to take action and Helen worked hard to ensure he met with key figures, including US President Bill Clinton (for the history of NZ’s decades of shabby policy towards the long suffering Timorese people, see Maire Leadbeater’s “Negligent Neighbour”, reviewed by Jeremy Agar in Peace Researcher 34, July 2007, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr34-141b.html. Ed.).

Pakeha Treaty Activist

I believe that Helen’s own personal background, working with the Resistance in the occupied Netherlands, was a help to her understanding of the Timorese struggle – she knew at first hand the hard challenges of clandestine work. Helen was a passionate advocate for Maori rights and Treaty justice and remained involved with Pakeha Treaty Action until her death.  She co-edited a book with Kevin Hague and Tim McCreanor, “Honouring The Treaty: An Introduction For Pakeha To The Treaty of Waitangi” (Penguin Books, Auckland, 1989).

Tim McCreanor, these days Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at Massey University’s Shore and Whariki Research Centre, agreed to let me share his personal tribute: “I met Helen while studying psychology at Auckland in the mid-1980s. Her quiet, radical analyses of the shift to neo-liberalism of that decade helped me enormously to develop a critical understanding of the impact of colonisation on social relations in this country which has animated my own work ever since. With Helen's encouragement and leadership, Kevin Hague and I collaborated with her and other authors including Mitzi (Nairn) to produce ‘Honouring The Treaty - An Introduction For Pakeha’, which I think was a very public expression of her understanding and commitment to Treaty-based futures for Aotearoa. I remember her keen intelligence and energy in working to make what were then 'hard to hear' ideas intelligible to a broad Pakeha readership and a certain good-natured impatience with my feckless scholarship and inability to write in an appropriately accessible style. With characteristic self-deprecation she would say: ‘This passage is way too intellectual. You have to write it so even I can understand it!’ 

“Certainly the ideas converged with many other strands of thought in the Treaty movement of that time and were a key resource for the bicultural training courses for clinical psychology students that Helen led and contributed to at Auckland, Waikato and Massey Universities, over a number of years. A key feature of these efforts was the goal of building mutual support among students which she characterised as a need to find allies in this work because it was necessarily risky and lonely in those Rogernomics/Richardson years. Her empathetic and self-effacing style won over many and affected all the students one way or another but when they expressed admiration or even amazement that she had, as an adult migrant, such a clear understanding of the issues she would laugh and say: ‘Yes but it is so much easier for me! Compared to you I had so much less that I had to unlearn!’

“We kept in touch intermittently and I was among many who benefitted from her long and rich life experience, sometimes in semi-formal ‘supervision’ where I could air specific issues, but also in laid-back ‘catch up’ sessions where she would share her latest experiences in her work with Maori schools, community groups and others and listen to the challenges and difficulties that I was encountering in the research field. When she decided to downsize her home she was insistent that I take many of the psychology and race relations books that she owned and these have been added to the Whariki Research Group Library where they are still in daily use… Helen, you changed my life greatly for the better, gave me inspiration and courage at moments when I felt struggles for social justice were in vain. Your warm, spiky, energetic, determination will not be forgotten”.

Tim’s contribution was read to a group of us who gathered in Auckland at Joan Macdonald’s house to remember Helen over morning tea. Helen did not want a memorial service – “no right of reply” she is reported to have said! Kuia Pauline Tangiora (Mahia/Rongomaiwahine), Helen’s old friend, joined us – she had been with Helen in her last days. There were plenty of tales of her activist involvement spanning the 1981 anti-tour movement – including an arrest - Child Poverty Action, a successful campaign to resist the construction of a school at Alexandra Park, Palestine and Western Sahara, and Women’s Refuge.

Many referred to Helen’s support and mentoring of others – this ranged over all kinds of personal and practical help from helping children with their maths through to helping with doctoral theses as well as looking after new immigrants. She also volunteered as a Lifeline counsellor. Life was not all about politics. Helen was a great supporter of the visual arts and an art collector as visitors to her Epsom home will recall. Artist Eric Lee-Johnson and his wife Elizabeth were good friends. Helen used to make regular visits back to The Netherlands to catch up with old friends and family. Her brother Henk, to whom she was close, was also a well-regarded artist. However, by the end of her life, her remaining relative was Henk’s wife Co.

Earlier Life

I am indebted to old friend Ian Summers, his son Graeme and Graeme’s wife Cathy Summers, for helping me with this little background. Helen’s childhood was spent in The Netherlands, and the Second World War had a major impact. All the family were involved with underground Resistance work. Helen, though only a child, played a part, passing messages as a “runner”. After the war Helen gained a Fulbright Scholarship and studied in the United States where she lived with a Quaker family. Still only in her late teens, Helen was accepted as an immigrant in Perth, Australia, where she worked for a time at the Dutch Consulate. She met her husband Roy, an academic and behavioural psychologist. They moved to Sydney and subsequently lived in the UK while Roy studied for his PhD.

Returning to Sydney the couple sought a change and decided to try life in the Manawatu where Roy taught at Massey University and Helen taught high school maths in Feilding. Here they met up with the Summers family who became life-long friends. Graeme and Ian remember this as a happy time – Ian and his wife shared an interest in geology with Roy and there were lots of adventures seeking out fossils and shared campervan trips. The Yensens took out New Zealand citizenship and the Summers signed the necessary papers for them. Then there was a sabbatical year in Sweden, during which the Summers cared for the Yensen’s large Feilding property. Sadly, on returning to New Zealand, Roy suffered a serious accident which exacerbated old war injuries. 

Roy and Helen moved to Whangarei and Helen took a senior position at Tikipunga High School. She was an excellent teacher, able to get alongside “difficult” kids and with a special facility for understanding the different ways each person learns. After Roy’s death, Helen moved to Auckland where she was happy to link up again with Graeme, his wife Cathy and subsequently their two boys, Andrew and Michael. I think she regarded the boys as grandsons and they went on many outings together. Cathy said she sometimes referred to her as a “daughter-in-law” but Graeme says the best word to describe his relationship with Helen was “mentor” - as Helen was to so many of her friends. I last met with Helen in December 2014 in her retirement village apartment. I was using her as a sounding board about my latest research project and benefiting from Helen’s vast cultural and historical knowledge. I feel her loss and I pay tribute to Pauline Doyle, Pauline Tangiora and those who supported Helen on her final journey.

John Johnson

- Murray Horton

John Johnson, who died in Christchurch in December 2014, aged 92, was a CAFCA member from 1998 until 2006. During that period he was also a regular generous donor to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income (his donations totalled $700). As with too many of our members, I never met him (even though we both lived in Christchurch) and I knew nothing about his life or even what he looked like until I read his Press obituary (7/2/15, “Pacifist Carried Medical Supplies To Remote Parts Of War-Torn China”, Mike Crean).

That obituary highlighted the most adventurous part of John’s long and very active life. “John Johnson was excused war service but saw plenty of war anyway. The Sumner man appealed his conscription to the Army in World War 2, as a conscientious objector. He was a Quaker and his appeal was approved on religious grounds. However, before the war ended, he was in China serving with the Friends Ambulance Unit. There he witnessed the final stages of China’s struggle against the Japanese occupation and then he became embroiled in the Chinese civil war between Communist and Nationalist factions.

“Johnson’s two years in China involved driving old Army surplus trucks long distances on rough roads carrying medical supplies to remote regions where many people had not seen Europeans before. Son David says many of the trucks had been converted to burn charcoal as fuel, since petrol was in short supply. Johnson’s skills as an engineer and fitter were in demand as trucks regularly broke down and parts had to be ‘cannibalised’ for repairs….Johnson sailed from Lyttelton and travelled through Australia and India to reach China in June 1945. His delivery missions took him across southern China and into the Japanese-occupied northern regions. David says he enjoyed the ‘opportunity to use all his wits to get by and to meet and interact with the Chinese locals’. Other highlights were meeting Rewi Alley, who was a friend of his grandfather, and the Dalai Lama…He remained interested in world and local affairs and wrote many letters to the Press - after completing the puzzles. David says his father was ‘a true gentleman, honest, kind and generous’”.

Greg Ansley

- Murray Horton

Greg Ansley, who died in September 2014 at the tragically young age of 65, had been the Australia correspondent for the New Zealand Herald for more than 20 years and was writing right up until his untimely death (it was a liver infection but not cirrhosis, because he didn’t drink). That’s not why he is being remembered in Watchdog. Before he worked for the Herald, back in the mid to late 1980s, he worked for the Christchurch Star when it was a fully functioning afternoon daily paper. I wrote an obituary for the Star in Watchdog 69, April 1992 (“Star Goes Into Black Hole”, http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-april-1992.html). In it I said: “And reaching further into the past, we should mention that Greg Ansley used to be the best daily columnist in NZ when he had the page 2 slot in the Star, and he consistently ran CAFCA/ABC material fairly, comprehensively and intelligently” (writing this has reminded me that the Star used to be a good paper, with good journos, in those long gone days. Have a read of my 1992 Star obituary cited above to get their names. And see my obituary of the legendary Don Grady, the last of the old school Star reporters – he really did wear a hat at all times – in Peace Researcher 41, July 2011, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/41/pr41-013.htm).

I’d had no contact with Greg since he left the Star, but had a very good and close working relationship with him when he was on it. So close that, when he left, CAFCA and the Anti-Bases Campaign hosted (at my place) a farewell for him to thank him for services rendered. He remains the only journalist for whom we’ve ever done that. Greg ran a lot of our stuff in his column and he also went beyond the call of duty. In those days I used to be a regular visitor to Christchurch media newsrooms (no social media, Twitter, mobiles, texts, e-mail or even faxes), so I got to know particular journalists well. On one such visit Greg bemusedly gave me the May 1988 issue of Plain Talk, the journal of the now long forgotten Plains Club, which was a stridently pro-American, pro-nuclear, pro-ANZUS Christchurch-based lobby group in the 80s. This issue was titled “Rent-A-Demo: New Zealand’s Longest Playing Soap Opera” and was aimed at “exposing” the peace movement (Greg had received it from the Plains Club).

It listed the “Leading Characters” as “Horton, Murray” and “Wilkes, Owen”. The “Supporting Cast” included: “Hager, Nicky; Ledbetter (sic), Maire; Leonard, Bob; Locke, Elsie; Rosenberg, Bill; and Ross, Larry”. All names very familiar to Watchdog readers, indeed some of them have been the subject of Watchdog obituaries.It filled 12 of its 16 pages about us. I’ve kept it because it is fascinating to read your own life story being exhaustively chronicled from a Rightwing perspective by my ideological enemies who tried to tie it all together into a seamless conspiracy (spoiler alert – it’s all a Communist plot!). Somebody not at all kindly disposed to me has gone to all the trouble (no Internet, Google or Wikipedia in those days) of documenting all sorts of things from my ancient past that I’ve long forgotten, so the least I can do is keep it and give it an airing every now and again. I last used it in my obituary of Larry Ross in Watchdog 130 (August 2012, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/30/17.html). So thank you, Greg, I’ve got a lot of use out of that since 1988.

I didn’t know him at all personally but I do know that he had a long and distinguished career as a journalist, starting in Waipukurau (Hawkes Bay), and finishing up in Aussie for the Herald via papers in Canada and the UK and, of course, in his hometown of Christchurch. His brother Bruce (who had also worked on the Star but left before Greg joined) wrote to me that “after he died (Greg’s family) and I went down to his house on the beach (he surfed right up to the last and was still winning NSW titles) and I found a carton in his shed literally stuffed with journalism prizes, from Walkleys to Qantas”. I concur with Bruce’s assessment of his younger brother: “Given the state of print journalism, but mainly because of his talent and commitment, I don’t think we’ll see his like again”.

Gough Whitlam

- Murray Horton

Gough Whitlam, who died in October 2014, aged 98, was the most dynamic Australian Prime Minister in my life time and maybe of any life time. He was in power for a mere three years (1972-75) but he hit Australia like one of the tropical cyclones that periodically batter that country. His political philosophy was described as “crash through or crash”. He achieved both. I don’t intend to list his achievements in office; this is not an obituary; and, in any case, that is best left to Australians. Suffice to say that his single term coincided exactly with that of the Kirk/Rowling Labour government here; Labour (and Labor) had been out of office for 12 and 23 years respectively; both came into power with a charismatic Leader and the same “It’s Time For A Change” theme. In Whitlam’s case it really was – what his Government achieved in the way of fundamental, enduring and positive change was profound and the effects can be seen in many aspects of today’s Australia. His Government achieved considerably more in three years than what the Clark Labour government here achieved in nine (let alone the Kirk/Rowling’s three). It could be argued that the Lange/Palmer/Moore Labour government achieved equally fundamental and enduring change during its six years in power but that was almost wholly negative, namely Rogernomics.

Whitlam was a man who was greatly admired on both sides of the Tasman as a true reformer, within the context of parliamentary democracy. He was proud to describe himself as “bourgeois”. But he was no international working class hero. He had blood on his hands too – although he was rightly praised for ending conscription, getting Australia out of the Vietnam War and opening relations with China (among many other things), he gave Indonesian dictator Suharto the go ahead for the 1975 invasion of East Timor and the decades of genocidal occupation that followed. There has always been a bipartisan consensus in Australia that is obsessed with “instability” in its’ huge Asian neighbour.

The Whitlam years were significant to both CAFCA and to me personally. In 2015 we are celebrating our 40th anniversary. The event that inspired the creation of what started off as CAFCINZ, was the 1974 Long March (actually a bus ride) across Australia to the former US military base at North West Cape, in Western Australia. I was among the New Zealanders, including several other CAFCINZ founders, who took part. That trip happened during a snap election which marked the conservative Opposition’s first attempt to get rid of Whitlam. I have a surreal memory of us Long Marchers attending a Country Party (i.e. part of the Opposition Coalition) election meeting in the middle of nowhere. I went back to Aussie and lived in Sydney from 1975-76. I was a political activist there during the massive street protests that followed the November 1975 bloodless coup that overthrew Whitlam. The Stock Exchange was duly stormed the day of the sacking, with a cop being slung through the doors for good measure (I wasn’t there because me and my Maoist mates literally missed the bus, and were left running around central Sydney with our banners and flags, frantically looking for the demo). I have fond memories of being among a crowd of thousands that successfully fought our way past thuggish cops (I stomped flat a cop’s hat that happened to come within stomping distance) up Sydney’s main street to reach a rally addressed by Whitlam. And even fonder memories of being among the crowd that invaded the Sydney head office of Rupert Murdoch’s gutter papers and shut it down for a day. I had an inner smile thinking about those things when I was hosting retired Australian cops in our home after the 2010/11 Christchurch quakes (they comprised a significant number of the Earthquake Commission’s assessors in those early days).

He Pissed Off the Covert State

But the point of this is not to reminisce about the good old days of my distant youth on my Australian OE. No, the point is to remind ourselves what led to Whitlam’s overthrow and what the lessons of that were, and are, for New Zealand. In one sentence – he pissed off the covert State, both nationally and internationally. “Whitlam knew the risk he was taking. The day after his election, he ordered that his staff should not be ‘vetted or harassed’ by ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) - then, as now, tied to Anglo-American intelligence. When his ministers publicly condemned the US bombing of Vietnam as ‘corrupt and barbaric’, a US Central Intelligence Agency station officer in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) said: ‘We were told the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators’”  (John Pilger,  23/10/14, “The Forgotten Coup – How America And Britain Crushed The Government Of Their ‘Ally’ Australia”, http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-forgotten-coup-how-america-and-britain-crushed-the-government-of-their-ally-australia).

Police Raid On ASIO

The Whitlam government continued to piss off ASIO. Watchdog 55 (March 1987, http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-march-1987_05.html) included an obituary for Whitlam’s Attorney-General, Lionel Murphy. “(He) deserves a mention in Watchdog for one thing, which was quite unprecedented in Australian history (and New Zealand). In March 1973, as Attorney-General, he personally led a raid on the head office of ASIO. The Prime Minister of (the then) Yugoslavia was about to make a State visit; fascist Croat terrorists, the Ustasha, had been protected under the previous 23 years of Liberal/Country coalition rule.

“The conservatives and ASIO had aided and abetted their bombings and other acts of terrorism, both in Australia and Yugoslavia. Murphy believed, with very good reason, that the security agencies he nominally controlled hadn’t briefed him properly on the threat the Croat fascists posed to the Yugoslav PM’s visit. So he decided to inspect ASIO’s files for himself. He didn’t intend it to be a raid, just an unannounced official visit. But the Commonwealth (now Federal) Police got wind of it and because of its dislike of ASIO, sealed the HQ off for his arrival and ensured the media was in attendance. So it became a fullblown police raid of an intelligence agency. Anyone who has seen the excellent Australian documentary ‘Home On The Range’ (online at http://www.smh.com.au/tv/Politics/Home-On-The-Range-5000641.html) will recall the chilling phone interview with James Jesus Angleton, former head of CIA covert operations. Angleton said that Murphy’s action had damaged the ‘delicate flower of intelligence’ and was a substantial factor in the CIA’s anxiety to overthrow the Whitlam government”. Needless to say, there haven’t been any more police raids on ASIO; and no NZ government has ever had the guts to do anything like that to the NZ Security Intelligence Service.

Pine Gap

“Whitlam demanded to know if and why the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, a giant vacuum cleaner which, as Edward Snowden revealed recently, allows the US to spy on everyone. ‘Try to screw us or bounce us’, the Prime Minister warned the US Ambassador, ‘[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention’.  Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later told me: ‘This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House... a kind of Chile [coup] was set in motion’. Pine Gap's top secret messages were decoded by a CIA contractor, TRW. One of the decoders was Christopher Boyce, a young man troubled by the ‘deception and betrayal of an ally’. Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite and referred to the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as ‘our man Kerr’.

“Kerr was not only the Queen's man; he had long-standing ties to Anglo-American intelligence. He was an enthusiastic member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan Kwitny of the Wall Street Journal in his book, 'The Crimes of Patriots', as ‘an elite, invitation-only group... exposed in Congress as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA’. The CIA ‘paid for Kerr's travel, built his prestige... Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money’. When Whitlam was re-elected for a second term, in 1974, the White House sent Marshall Green to Canberra as Ambassador. Green was an imperious, sinister figure who worked in the shadows of America's ‘deep state’. Known as the ‘coupmaster’, he had played a central role in the 1965 coup against President Sukarno in Indonesia - which cost up to a million lives. One of his first speeches in Australia was to the Australian Institute of Directors - described by an alarmed member of the audience as ‘an incitement to the country's business leaders to rise against the Government’.

“The Americans and British worked together. In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain's MI6 was operating against his Government. ‘The Brits were actually decoding secret messages coming into my Foreign Affairs office’, he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me: ‘We knew MI6 was bugging Cabinet meetings for the Americans’. In the 1980s, senior CIA officers revealed that the ‘Whitlam problem’ had been discussed ‘with urgency’ by the CIA's Director, William Colby, and the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield. A Deputy Director of the CIA said: ‘Kerr did what he was told to do’.

“On 10 November, 1975, Whitlam was shown a top secret telex message sourced to Theodore Shackley, the notorious head of the CIA's East Asia Division, who had helped run the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile two years earlier. Shackley's message was read to Whitlam. It said that the Prime Minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country. The day before, Kerr had visited the headquarters of the Defence Signals Directorate, Australia's National Security Agency (and GCSB) where he was briefed on the ‘security crisis’. On 11 November - the day Whitlam was to inform Parliament about the secret CIA presence in Australia - he was summoned by Kerr. Invoking archaic vice-regal ‘reserve powers’, Kerr sacked the democratically elected Prime Minister. The ‘Whitlam problem’ was solved: and Australian politics never recovered, nor the nation its true independence” (Pilger, ibid.).

Whitlam was, quite literally, the agent of his own undoing – he had appointed Kerr as Governor-General. But Kerr was only the fall guy, the last player in a team of hit men tasked with getting rid of Whitlam. The bloodless coup started with an international con man, who suckered one of Whitlam’s ministers into signing up for loans from unofficial sources to assist the minister’s stated dream of “buying back the farm” i.e. regaining Australian ownership of its natural resources. This scam was a political set up which led to a political scandal which, in turn, enabled the Tories to tip the balance of power their way in the Senate and thus to block Supply – the money needed to run Government. They were literally trying to starve the Government out of office. That kicked off the crisis, during which Whitlam went seriously off message as far as the covert State was concerned and started to name names of US spies in Australia (he revealed that the very senior CIA official who set up Pine Gap in the 60s was a personal friend of the Leader of the Country Party, the man who became Deputy PM in the Government which succeeded Whitlam’s).

It is worth noting that the covert State didn’t just want Whitlam gone as PM, they also wanted him gone as Leader of the Opposition to remove any chance of him coming back into power. In 1976, a few months after the bloodless coup and Labor’s landslide election defeat (Australians had voted for stability, which was the intended outcome of the destabilisers), Whitlam was under attack again, with the Murdoch papers’ “revelation” that he had personally received large sums of money for his election campaign from Iraqi intelligence agents (the first time I had ever heard of Saddam Hussein). It was another set up and a complete media beat up by Rupert Murdoch (who was personally writing the articles). Whitlam survived but Labor got the message – its subsequent Prime Ministers (Hawke, Keating, Rudd and Gillard) have been the most faithful of servants to the American Empire.

Lessons For NZ From His Overthrow

There were, and are, lessons in Whitlam’s overthrow for New Zealand. The US covert State tried to repeat the same modus operandi a decade later to get rid of the nuclear free Lange government. As I wrote in my obituary of David Lange (Watchdog 110, December 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/10/09.htm): “The US tried to subvert and overthrow Lange using all the old tricks in the handbook of its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). There was the textbook ‘Maori Loans Affair’, which targeted Koro Wetere, the Minister of Maori Affairs, and which TVNZ, in one of its finest hours, tracked back to the CIA office in Hawaii. It was a deadringer re-run of the ‘Loans Affair’ scam which played such a major role in overthrowing the Australian Labor government headed by Gough Whitlam in 1975”. It didn’t work in NZ but then, why would the US want to overthrow the Government that, via Rogernomics, threw this country open to the depredations of American transnational corporations and carpet bombed the economy and society to make it easy pickings for Big Business?

No NZ Labour government has ever challenged the American alliance, beyond the largely symbolic nuclear free policy (highly commendable though that is). And no NZ Labour government has ever tackled the covert intelligence alliance with the US, or the Americans’ client intelligence agencies in this country – it was the very same nuclear free Lange government that authorised the creation of the Waihopai spy base which constitutes New Zealand’s single most important contribution to that whole military/intelligence relationship with the US. 

Throughout my 2014 CAFCA/ABC national speaking tour (my speech is in Watchdog 136, September 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/36/01.html) I was asked: “Wouldn’t there be negative consequences if New Zealand adopted the policies that you are advocating?” Of course there would, and I always cited what happened to the Whitlam government in our nearest neighbour. He was a lesson by negative example for progressives in this country – when the shit hit the fan and his Government was sacked by the Governor-General, he didn’t fight back. He made his famous speech on the day of the dismissal, calling on Australians to “maintain the rage”. But, by that, he only meant the snap election campaign, and that ended in a totally predictable whitewash of Labor.

Be Prepared To Fight For Change

The same scenario had played out two years earlier in Chile where socialist president Salvador Allende refused to arm the people against the forthcoming coup and massacre (Allende paid for that with his life in the 1973 coup – how come the Americans never tell us about that particular September 11th atrocity?. Ten of thousands of Chileans were murdered, disappeared, imprisoned, tortured and exiled during the brutal 17 year long Pinochet military dictatorship that followed). The covert State didn’t need to get any blood on its hands to get rid of Whitlam and get Australia back into line - because Whitlam wasn’t prepared to fight, to take it beyond the confines of parliamentary game playing. That is the biggest lesson for New Zealand – if you really want to make fundamental change, you have to realise the consequences of what you’re doing, know who you’re up against, take the people with you, and be prepared to fight for it.

Malcolm Fraser

- Murray Horton

By coincidence, Malcolm Fraser, the beneficiary of Whitlam’s overthrow, died only a few months after him. Fraser died in March 2015, aged 84. He was Liberal Prime Minister from 1975-83, and there was no more loyal servant of the US empire, both overt and covert. Fraser was the classic arrogant, born to rule Tory bastard, of a type which the Aussies label a “silvertail” from the “squattocracy”. He was the polar opposite sort of Tory bastard to Piggy Muldoon, who was in power in NZ at the same time. It was common knowledge that they loathed each other – they were literally the long and the short of Tory bastards.

But something quite unexpected happened with Fraser after his heavy electoral defeat in 1983 (which brought to power Labor’s Bob Hawke, an even more loyal servant of the US Empire). He quit politics and became a thorn in the side of his former colleagues (in later years he and Whitlam even worked together on common projects). Best to leave it to an Australian to describe it: “In retirement Fraser became increasingly critical of first, John Howard and then Tony Abbott, as conservative Prime Ministers. He took issue with them - and Labor governments too - over the draconian measures used to prevent asylum seekers from entering Australia.

“He also began to question what he saw as counter-productive actions taken by US imperialism and supported by Australia. These included the so-called ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq. He was particularly scathing of the Bush Administration and called for the withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq.  For this he was attacked as a ‘frothing at the mouth Leftie’ by many in the Liberal Party. So complete was his estrangement from the Party he had led that Fraser resigned from it in December 2009. He tackled with renewed vigour the criticism of blind obedience to the dictates of the US imperialists and became a strong and activist advocate of an independent stance in foreign policy. He opposed Labor’s decision to permit the export of uranium to US ally India, a country which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and he also opposed Labor’s decision to open a US Marine base outside Darwin.

“In 2014 he published ‘Dangerous Allies’, a history of Australia’s strategic dependence on Britain and the United States. His argument was that this was necessary and desirable up to the point at which the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed. After that, he wrote ‘…our continued strategic dependence on America led us to make policy choices that ostracised us from the region, cast us as a deputy sheriff to Washington and a willing participant in US strategic aims, both in the region and around the world. We must turn to an option of strategic independence to avoid complicity in America’s future military operations and to secure a future that best serves Australia’s interests’. 

“To that end, he called for the closure of the US base at Pine Gap – known to be directing US drone attacks in Pakistan and the Middle East – and for the closure of the US Marine base at Darwin. He also called for an end to the integration of Australian frigates and naval personnel into the US strike force fleet in the Pacific. Fraser called for an Australian republic and continued his advocacy for human rights, especially in relation to asylum seekers and refugees.  In the 2013 election he endorsed Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young for her championing of the rights of asylum seekers.

“Whilst we can never forgive nor forget Fraser’s despicable role in the semi-fascist coup of November 1975, his role in the conscription and Vietnam War era, and his attacks on working people and unions as Prime Minister, we can and should acknowledge and celebrate his important later stand against what he said had now become a dangerous ally, the United States” (Vanguard, Communist Party of Australia Marxist Leninist, 22/3/15, “Malcolm Fraser – The Complexity Of Human Beings”, Nick G, http://www.cpaml.org/posting1.php?id=159).