Max was a CAFCA member from 1993 until 2013. And a very generous one too, donating thousands to us ($5,000 was the single biggest sum while he was alive). Plus, he donated more than $1,000 to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income, over the course of a decade.  And he paid subs for other people to become CAFCA members.

I only ever met Max once – I was in Wellington at Easter 2005 for an Anti-Bases Campaign activity and was staying with a friend in Thorndon, when I remembered that CAFCA had a member in that very same little street up a typically steep hill. So, I just rocked up without notice and knocked on the door of Max and his partner Aileen Finucane. They made me very welcome. Max was an old man then.

Until I received a lawyer’s letter in 2018, I had no idea that Max had died in 2016. And I certainly did not know that he had included CAFCA in his will. All up, his bequest came to more than $14,000. Not only was Max very generous to CAFCA while he was a member, he was even more generous in death. I knew nothing about his life until I read some material after his death. I asked his executor, friend and neighbour, Chris Cochran, to write Max’s obituary. Instead, Chris suggested we re-publish the below. Who better than Max to tell his own life story? And what a story it is.

- By Max Wilkinson, as told to Mark Derby

Labour History Project Bulletin 58, August 2013. Reproduced with permission.

My father, George “Red” Wilkinson, was a real working class intellectual. He painted landscapes and wrote poetry, short stories and journalism. He was always writing. He wrote a short story about the formation of the Communist Party but I don’t know what happened to that. He was born in England at the end of the 19th century.

His father encouraged him to leave the country to avoid conscription for World War One, so at the age of 17 he went to the US. He worked on the railways in New York as a ganger, and became a member of the IWW (the Industrial Workers of the World). His great friend at the time was Max Granich - I’m named after him. Max had a brother, a well-known writer who went by the name of Mike Gold.

Note: Max (Manny) Granich (1896-1987) joined the IWW in 1917. He joined the US Communist Party in the late 1920s and he and his wife Grace travelled to China after its revolution. Upon their return, Max worked as managing editor of the magazine China Today. The Granichs later distanced themselves from the CP and in 1946 founded a Leftwing summer camp for children. In the 1970s Max Granich was active in the Chinese-American Friendship Association and led tours of China.

Max’s brother Itzok Granich (1893-1967) was a radical journalist, playwright and poet. In 1916 he became a member of the IWW and spent some time living in anarchist communes in the Boston area. He joined the Communist Party in 1922 and edited its magazines Liberator and New Masses. Under the pen-name Mike Gold, he chronicled the Great Depression and the plight of immigrant workers. He is best known for the fictionalised autobiography “Jews Without Money” (1930).

Father Was A Founder Of NZ Communist Party

In about 1920 my father worked his passage on a ship to New Zealand and when he got here, he jumped ship, as many did. He was one of the founders of the New Zealand Communist Party and in 1921, just a few months after the Party was formed, he and two other members were convicted of selling “seditious literature” at the Communist Hall in Wellington’s Manners Street.

The prosecutor described my father, who was working on the wharves at the time, as “one of the most energetic of the Communists. He never missed a meeting. On days when stopwork meetings were held on the wharf, defendant made himself very busy and sold a lot of revolutionary literature” (Evening Post, 19/8/21).

My father was given two months in jail, and another wharfie named Bill Blair was fined £25, or two months’ jail if he didn’t pay the fine, which of course, he couldn’t do. The third defendant was a young woman university graduate, Hedwig Weitzel, who was fined £10 for selling an Australian paper, The Communist, to a policeman posing as a CP member.

My father later wrote that the judge: “hesitated to imprison her, in the face of the big crowd at the back of the Court. And in the street outside she received an ovation when she appeared. Someone took up a hat and passed it around the crowd. Watersiders and seamen, schoolteachers and students put their hands deeply into their pockets, spontaneously, willingly”.

“The fine was paid into Court, without difficulty, in shillings and half-crowns. All seemed to realise that the blow at her was a blow at themselves, at the right of free speech and the right to read those publications that will help the working class to freedom” (“Two Peeps At The Past”, Working Woman, March 1936). The following year Red gave regular public talks at the Communist Hall on subjects like “Direct Action”. He was chairing a meeting at the hall when Alex Galbraith spoke on “The Downfall Of Capitalism”, which resulted in another criminal charge for inciting violence.

A Childhood Of Poverty

I was born a few years later. At that time, we lived in Nigges Ave, that tiny little cul de sac off Vivian Street, straight opposite Trades Hall. Our neighbour was FP Walsh (who went on to become a national union leader.  Ed.). I never got to know my father well because he contracted TB when I was four, and he spent the next ten years, until he died, in the chest hospital at the end of Coromandel Street in Newtown. There was no cure for TB in those days. I was always kept in a separate room on the occasions when Dad was allowed to come and visit us.

My mother worked as a cook. She had a job in a delicatessen but once the Depression came, she was fired and then we had to survive on charity. The Unemployment Assistance Board was run through the Hospital at that time. They paid our rent and gave us a five-shilling grocery voucher each week. My mother never had any money. She would give this voucher to the grocer and he would issue her supplies. Half a pound of butter. Two ounces of tea. Two loaves of bread - things like that.

We lived in Johnsonville and she used to walk down the dark, winding road to get to visit Dad in hospital, hoping to pick up a lift on the way. Life was so cruel in those days. She died in 1937 and when people asked me what my mother died of, I always say “she died of poverty”. My dad died two years later. I left school the next year, aged 15.

My biggest influences were novels I'd read, like “The Iron Heel” by Jack London, and books by Upton Sinclair. Tremendous stuff, I thought. I worked on a dairy farm for a couple of years, then hung out avoiding the war. It wasn’t my war at first. Then, when Moscow was threatened, it suddenly became very much my war. I volunteered and spent three years with the Air Force.

Years In China

By 1948 I was back working on one of the Riddiford family farms, Lagoon Hill, outside Martinborough. A Communist Party member, Adam Laird, got in touch to say that CORSO (Council of Organisations for Relief Services Overseas) was advertising for someone to go and look after New Zealand sheep in China. Some New Zealand farmers had donated a flock of Corriedale sheep to Rewi Alley’s training school at Shandan.

They’d been airfreighted over there, but Shandan was on the edge of the Gobi Desert, a very harsh environment, and a lot of the poor bastards died. They didn’t manage to produce any lambs. So, CORSO sent out an SOS for someone to go over and look after them. Rewi Alley had known my father, so I was the one he wanted.

At first, I was stuck in Shanghai for some months. Then I spent two weeks travelling in a little boat up the Yangtze River, and another 28 days by truck. When I first saw Shandan, I thought it was an absolute crude little country town. It was one of the oases on the Silk Road - a walled village. Rewi had chosen it for his school because it was well out of the way of the Kuomintang (Chiang Kai-shek’s Government that was fighting the Communists in the civil war. Ed.).

Anyway, I managed to increase the flock, and then Liberation came (in 1949). CORSO carried me for a while, but then a new Government policy came in and the sheep were shipped to an artificial insemination centre out in a Tibetan autonomous zone. I chose to go and work on a dairy farm in Lanchow, the provincial capital, and I spent two years there. In 1955 I came home - I wanted to be part of the revolution. How fucking naive could one be? I joined the Communist Party and they gave me the alias “China”. Looking back, it was ridiculous - the self-importance, the pointless paranoia.

Peace Activist, Socialist

I met Aileen Finucane and we lived together for 50 years (until her death). She had been raised a good Irish Catholic but when the 1930s’ Spanish Civil War broke out, she couldn’t stomach the Catholic influence over there and she became an atheist overnight. She was very active in the anti-conscription campaign around 1948.

In 1956 Aileen was an instigator of the Peace Council, whose main object was to prevent the (atomic) Bomb being used in Korea. We had a copy of a very good film, “Children Of Hiroshima”, and we used to take that all around the district and give screenings in places like churches. Aileen was very good at working with people, and she knew that we had to get the churches involved. There were some very progressive ministers like Alan Brash (father of Don Brash).

I had no thought but to be a worker, so I drove a truck for a couple of years. Then Aileen persuaded me to take a pressure-cooker teacher training course. I spent about ten years teaching, mainly at Hataitai School. I enjoyed it, but I made the mistake of a transferring to Te Aro School, since it had an extremely good headmaster. He left after a term, and his replacement made life sheer hell for everyone. I left before I had a breakdown.

I’d left the Communist Party by then. (Party leader) Ray Nunes and I had a big fight about the Suez adventure (1956), because he wanted to make a big noise about condemning that, but not to mention what the Soviet Union was doing in Hungary at the same time. I wasn’t having any of that. I couldn’t take it any longer. Most of the Wellington branch left around that time and some of us formed the Socialist Forum, which met week after week for years in this house. It was a very sociable forum. Each family took turns to supply the meal.

A few years after I stopped teaching, I got a job at Trade and Industry as a price inspector, and I stayed there until I retired. Jack Lewin was in charge at that time. I belonged to the Public Service Association, of course, but it was an odd union. In ten years, I never saw an organiser come around to our branch, and the delegate elections were a farce. It was common knowledge that you had to belong to either Catholic Action or the Masons to get elected. My generation was lucky, in economic terms. Aileen and I were both frugal. We saved like mad for when we retired - we lived a fairly quiet life. So, I’ve ended up with enough for my own needs.

MAX WILKINSON

- Chris Cochran

In 2013, when Mark Derby transcribed the story of Max’s life, he was living in his home at 41 Glenbervie Terrace, Thorndon, in the heart of the heritage area he and Aileen had helped campaign for in the 1970s. He had built the house himself in 1958, carrying all the materials up from Tinakori Road.

Here Max brewed a legendary beer, grew vegetables, read voraciously, made curried eggs for the street gatherings, and was the “St Francis” of the Terrace for his empathy with all animals and birds. He remained well informed (and strongly opinionated) about world politics and was always ready for a political discussion with home brew and his own pickled onions. He cooked for himself and friends until a few weeks before he died, on 28 October 2016.

Max had grown up in poverty, and had lived a frugal life, yet was generous in later life when he was able to be. He had endowed educational scholarships for his old college, Wellington High, been generous to various charities, and had gifted important relics of his time in China to the Canterbury Museum and Victoria University (although, inexplicably, had burnt his correspondence with Rewi Alley).

His estate (after bequests to five friends) was divided between the Wellington Free Ambulance, the Malaghan Institute, UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund), Forest and Bird, Riding for the Disabled, Asthma Foundation, Wellington Women’s Refuge, Wellington Hospitals Foundation, Economic and Social Research Foundation and CAFCA.

Throughout his life, Max worked consistently for the rights of workers, against war, against arrogant Government here and around the world, against apartheid, against the destructive force of religion, against excessive wealth and the greed of big business, and against foreign control. He had a strong and unwavering commitment to social justice. His was a remarkable and generous life, attested to by many friends who held him dear.

AILEEN FINUCANE

- Helen Smyth

Max and Aileen were together for 50 years, from 1958 until her death in 2008. So, it is only fitting that we should remember them both together and reprint this tribute to her from Watchdog 118, August 2008. Ed.

Photographs of (Annie) Aileen Finucane tend to emphasise the place rather than the person, and in so doing offer an insight into her personality. Aileen died peacefully at home on 3 April, 2008, just a few weeks short of her 90th birthday. An only child of Catholic parents, she lived in Wellington all her life, attending St Mary’s College.

It was during the Spanish Civil War from 1936, when she was a teenager, that Aileen began to question her Catholic roots. World War 2 and the Vatican attitude cemented her doubt. She became instead increasingly sceptical and politicised. She admired the work and writings of John A Lee and they became friends and correspondents until his death in 1982.

Aileen’s community and political involvements were many, including early days of Playcentre, the original group having been established in Wellington in 1942. She was also a leading member of the Peace Council in Wellington and the main force behind early anti-nuclear work before the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was born in 1959. “She spent every weekend canvassing, petitioning and organising meetings”, says long-time partner Max Wilkinson.

Max and Aileen became friends when Max returned to New Zealand in 1955, having lived in China for seven years. The 1952 Japanese film “Children of Hiroshima” was a powerful tool of the time. “Every week we took it about to community groups, churches, etc”, Max says. “Aileen spent an awful lot of time getting a wide range of groups on board”.

Another pursuit was saving the Wellington suburb of Thorndon from developers and the Ministry of Works, leading to the formation of the local residents’ association. Also in Thorndon, Aileen was active in saving Rita Angus’ cottage, now a residence for local and international writers. A natural environmentalist, walking on beaches was her favourite pastime. Aileen loved travelling within New Zealand, and never left the country after plans to travel in later years were thwarted by ill health. She was able to stay at home in her final months thanks to Max’s vigilant and loving care; a most dignified exit for a kind, quiet, intelligent woman.

PENNY BRIGHT

- Oliver Hoffmann

Penny Bright was only very fleetingly an actual CAFCA member. But we had known Penny since the 90s, when we worked with the splendid Water Pressure Group. And our paths had crossed many times in the intervening two decades. Indeed, the last time I saw her was at the last ever Roger Award event which was held in Auckland in April 2017. She was wearing what Jane Kelsey quite correctly describes, below, as one of her “terrible masks”.

And it wasn’t until reading Oliver’s obituary of her that I realised that our paths must have crossed decades earlier – I had no idea that she was part of the 1974 Long March to the US Navy communications base at North West Cape, Western Australia. I was one of the Kiwis on that and it played a pivotal role in the chain of events that led to the creation of what is now CAFCA. It’s a small world. Murray Horton.

Perpetual Activist

As a perpetual activist Penny Bright spent her life on the streets – and in prison cells. She fought the fight that many of us would like to have fought, the fight for transparency and truth, the fight against corruption. In her major campaign for the Mayoralty of Auckland in 2013 she called for the opening of the books. She made demands to open the back doors of corporate control of the city’s finances.

She epitomised humanity. She represented what we should all be living for: the true values of society. Fitting, then, that placards and banners took the place of flowers decorating the walls of St Matthews Church in the heart of Auckland where hundreds of whānau, friends, and activists gathered to celebrate Penny’s life and say goodbye to a real warrior lady, “Her Warship” as Penny would sign off her later emails. 

Her friend Verity George acted as MC and welcomed the congregation to “our revolutionary pop-up headquarters" after a moving opening by a local kaumatua: “free now to be, to dream, your message heard, your truth told”. As the simple wooden casket was carried up the aisle a sombre waiata gave way to the opening whistle of Monty Python's Always Look on the Bright Side of Life (groan).

Penny Bright died on 4 October 2018 a month after her 64th birthday. She had been a diabetes sufferer since being sacked on a pretence from a job she held around 1990; then, in 2018, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in April – but neither the diabetes nor the cancer was the true cause of her death.

Numerous epithets are all accurate descriptions of the person that Penny Bright was – and for many of us remains: selfless, headstrong, determined, tenacious, hard-working, bossy and yet caring. In Verity’s words, Penny was a “champion of good over evil, of right over wrong”. Penny never went anywhere without a sign – like “open the books”, “save the trees”, “we shall not be moved”.

Penny grew up on a lifestyle block near Carterton with two younger sisters and a younger brother. They were "free range kids", said her brother Whiz, the youngest. With both parents employed Penny’s childhood was spent helping in the household, growing vegetables, and raising animals. Her first pocket money enabled her to buy a pony with the associated riding gear.

Her first campaign was during her final year at Kuranui College (Greytown) when she started a branch of HART, the Halt All Racist Tours movement, which opposed sporting contact with apartheid South Africa. She recruited Whiz into handing out leaflets for the anti-1981 Springbok tour group on his way home from primary school. Her school interests otherwise included basketball, debating, and the opera.

After leaving school, Penny spent a year hitch-hiking around New Zealand and staying at youth hostels. Her first job was on the line at a Masterton home appliance factory. She joined the union. Various union roles followed. Then she went off to see the world – but did not get past Australia. That was in the days when you could just walk into a job off the street, which she did. In Perth she got involved in the first famous campaign against foreign military bases in Australia and was part of the “Long March” across Australia against the US base at North West Cape.

NZ’s First Female Welding Inspector

She returned to New Zealand to become more politically involved and ended up working for six years in a home appliance factory in Masterton and becoming a union activist on the factory floor. When that job ended in 1981, she moved to Auckland where she worked for an electronics factory but soon lost that job – because of her union activities. At that time, she was one of a team of 12 people who organised the anti-Springbok tour protests as part of the Halt All Racist Tours movement.

Penny then completed a practical welding course at the Auckland Institute of Technology, the move into a male-dominated area being typical for her vision of women being able to do everything. After passing her certificate and working in the sheetmetal industry she became New Zealand's first female welding inspector. As a welding tutor for nine years at Manukau Institute of Technology (MIT) she helped many students gain their qualifications. That was also the time when I first made contact with her because, again as a union representative, she would regularly send out emails in the early years of the Internet to keep MIT staff informed of union activities.

In 1999 Penny and one other were made “redundant”. At least that was the official version. The unofficial version is far more mundane. She had informed her head of department about her attendance at an upcoming union conference but he was adamant that she had not informed him. When she stuck up for herself, he said, “you’re sacked”.

Her colleague Daryl who was present at the time and witnessed the exchange confirmed that yes, Penny had told their boss about the conference, whereupon the head of department turned on Daryl and said, “you’re sacked as well”. That was the first real occasion when I met Penny in action: at the picket on East Tamaki Drive where a number of us gathered to protest the “redundancies”. If you think we have universal freedom of speech then you may wish to think again.

By that time, she had been able to pay off the mortgage on the house she had purchased in Kingsland, a central Auckland suburb, so decided to work full-time on a self-funded basis on the political issues with which she was involved, taking in occasional flatmates from time to time. As always, transparency became Penny’s chief cause and in 2007 she stopped paying rates, demanding the Auckland City Council publish extensive details of all contracts it let.

She would tell everyone that millions upon millions of dollars were being paid out from our rates on contracts given out to private businesses. Penny and fellow activist Lisa Prager became regulars in the public forum section preceding Council meetings, regaling Councillors with their – often unpublishable – thoughts on perceived relationships between Council staff and business interests.

She was always a colourful presence at Council meetings with an array of headgear from the classic beret to wide brimmed hats, often towing her small briefcase on wheels as favoured by lawyers. Her greatest electoral triumph was finishing fourth in the 2013 Mayoral election with nearly 12,000 votes. With her usual war cry of “open the books” she participated in a meeting of candidates at Auckland Univer­sity which I attended, but had to persevere to even be included in the line-up.

The candidate who ended up third had refused to attend but I believe that was unrelated. On another occasion she livened up the debates at candidate meetings in the 2014 general election where she stood against then Prime Minister, John Key, in Helensville. She regularly phoned in to Auckland media newsrooms and talkback radio.

At War With Auckland Council

With regards to Auckland City Council - while Mayor John Banks had her arrested in Council chambers, Super City Mayor Len Brown regularly allocated uninterrupted speaking time to Penny at the start of meetings. Her views on the closeness of relationships between Council executives and the business world, were listened to politely, even if not heard. She took an unsuccessful defamation case against Auckland Council's Chief Executive Stephen Town, having taken umbrage at a comment in a media statement (along the lines of Ms Bright saying things that are “wildly inaccurate”).

Penny was arrested 22 times at the Auckland Council's request. She claimed she'd faced 19 charges and won all but one for trespass. "I have a criminal conviction for trespassing in the Town Hall, a supposedly public place,'' she boasted. Frequent brushes with the law didn't do anything other than polish her drive to overthrow her foes – the “elected representatives and the unelected bureaucrats who actually run the Council”.

Above all, and in whichever campaign she was involved in, Penny was known and praised for taking care of all the minutiae. Whether it was drawing banners or stuffing envelopes, getting on to a phone tree or answering questions from reporters, or simply providing moral support to those most adversely affected by the injustices of the day, Penny was there lending a hand or an ear.

Penny campaigned politically on a 15-point programme including, as to be expected: making bribes (“facilitation payments”) illegal; creating an independent anti-corruption body tasked with educating the public and preventing corruption; legislating for Members of Parliament to have a legally enforceable “code of conduct” (after all, they make rules for everyone else).

Making it an offence for local government elected representatives to breach their “code of conduct”; making it a lawful, mandatory requirement for local government representatives and staff to complete a “register of interests” available for public scrutiny. She also believed there should be a strategy in place regarding national population growth, migration, and regional employment.

Those who benefit from Auckland’s One Plan, Penny said, are “property developers, foreign investors, bankers, land bankers, speculators and money-launderers” – this is a 'supercity' for the 1%”. Further: “The Auckland region is being run 'like a business’ – by business – for business, the mechanism for this effective corporate takeover being the 'Council Controlled Organisation' model”.

“It's time to stop the commercialisation and privatisation of Council services and regulatory functions and return to the genuine 'public service' model. It's time for we the people to take back control of our region, our assets and our resources. The aim of the $upercity is to replace thousands of private 'piggy in the middle' snouts with fewer but bigger multinational snouts into a bigger public trough”.

As friends from the Auckland Tramping Club reported, she did take time out as when she went tramping with club members in the 90's; the club has 1993 records of her hiring club crampons and an ice axe. One club member recalls tramping with her in St Arnaud range around 1997. Another reports: “I feel guilty that I never did a thing to support her even though I agreed with what she was saying and asking for; I never offered financial support, just thought about it”. Another couple remember her as a feisty lady and great company; also climbing Te Iringa Ridge on Ruapehu with her, and the energy draining from her as her diabetic condition kicked in; she had to stop twice to refuel on dried fruit and nuts.

Water & Housing Campaigns

Along with about a dozen other foundation members of the Water Pressure Group from 1998 she campaigned against the commercialisation of water as operated by Metrowater, the company set up by Auckland City Council to run the city's water network and contributed to Metrowater having to reveal the "dividends" it would pay into the Council coffers and to soften plans such as legal action against those who could not or did not pay water bills.

The Group acted as a collective and completely democratically without any top down structure. It publicised ways how, and often helped, to reconnect water meters which had been turned off by Metrowater, when citizens joined the boycott to paying water bills. From the days of the Water Pressure Group on until her 2018 death Penny was in continual clinch with Council, recently calling Phil Goff a monarch rather than a Mayor.

She spoke proudly of being arrested dozens of times and was famously removed from Council meetings by then mayors John Banks and Dick Hubbard. Calling herself a "judicially recognised public watchdog", Penny devoted most of the past 20 years to tackling the city's political Establishment. In holding back her rates payments, she demanded that Council routinely publish the details of all external contracts it lets, but Council refused to do so, thus lending credibility for the cry to “open the books”.

One of Penny’s more recent campaigns was on behalf of the underprivileged State house tenants in the eastern Auckland suburb of Glen Innes. They had been fighting a long battle against the housing intensification project that was forcing them to move out of their homes. As a result, longstanding bonds within both whānau and community were being destroyed. Bureaucracy and a cold-hearted attitude within Housing New Zealand did nothing to endear that institution in the minds of those affected.

Penny was tireless in her efforts to stand by the side of those being forced to vacate their homes. Just one more of the many campaigns where I witnessed Penny in action was during the Hikoi For Homes on 21 November 2015 which proceeded from Glenn Innes to Okahu Bay (Orakei). Actions also took place in Wellington and Christchurch, all running under the slogan of “everyone deserves a home”.

Arguably the most moving and uplifting portion of Penny’s life celebration was the thank you from appreciative members of the Tamaki Housing Group who were truly grateful for Penny’s advocacy on their behalf. For instance, Marion said: “Penny – a friend, comrade, and defender of all things ... when I think of tomorrow without Penny I struggle”. Nicki recalls how Penny told her that no one likes a strong woman, “you’re always alone when you’re a strong woman ... well I’ll never be a strong woman”.

And how banners disappeared, “either taken by the Police or kept as souvenirs ... that type of woman very unusual, I don’t think I’ll meet a woman again who made me insane, made me laugh, made me cry all in one go ... you couldn’t stay mad at her for long because she’s Penny Bright and that’s it”. Lisa: “not just an activist but an activist extraordinaire, she does everything, my respect for her is enormous ... no disrespect to all of you out there but you are not in Penny Bright’s league”.

As for actions against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) with only its name having changed under the new Government, Penny was always there – usually with a pile of banners and often addressing the crowds. Her favourite slogan says it all: “We’re being consulted now – after the Treaty has been signed? Excuse me”. Fellow TPPA campaigner Barry Coates says: “She hated corruption and abuse of power. No wonder successive mayors of Auckland and Council managers regarded her as their worst nightmare. But she was also a kind and considerate person to her friends and those who were being unjustly treated”.

Tributes

Veteran TPPA activist Jane Kelsey, Law Professor at Auckland University, shared how she appreciated all the campaigns that she had worked on together with Penny in a relationship that endured for almost 40 years, starting from the reoccupation of Bastion Point in 1981, the Rogernomics stuff, the campaign against the proposed (and defeated) Multilateral Agreement on Investment in the 90s, on defending public education, and most recently the campaign to stop the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement.

“Yes, there was Penny the spectacle …  with her masks ... but she also worked tirelessly on the ‘boring’ tasks. We often did quite different things in the same campaigns but I hope I told her often enough how hugely I respected what she did and how absolutely and valuable it was and how irreplaceable you will be, comrade, there won’t ever be another Penny Bright, you will live in that fiery image that we have of you behind those terrible masks”.

Likewise, John Minto on Penny: “Over the years I’ve always admired her tenacity in the campaigns she immersed herself in. She was always busy without the hours in each day to do things that she wanted to do. She often joked to me that it was no point in resting because you get plenty of rest when you die, so it’s time for a well-deserved rest”. And Mike Treen: “inexhaustible energy, to do the little things, to make sure the leaflets were in every neighbourhood letterbox ...”

“Whether it was talkback radio or whatever, she made sure the message was getting out there ... on the side of the people, on the side of the oppressed, on the side of those discriminated against, of those without power. Hard to do that job and to keep doing it, year in, year out because the system tries to grind you down. Also, though Penny could drive you mad at many times ... at the end of the day it was the cause that was the most important thing and you came together again”.

As recently as December 2017 together with another veteran activist, Lisa Prager, Penny formed the initiative Occupy Garnet Road in the central Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn to highlight systemic incompetencies in Auckland Transport’s handling of suburban road development. The Garnet Road Traffic Island Occupation opposed not only the realignment of the roadway but also the removal of trees, the routing of cycleways, and the reduction in the number of carparks outside shops.

They took up the cudgel and proclaimed that Auckland Transport does not support, expect, or demand that its staff gets things right. It’s not just that it has some incompetent people, it’s that the culture of the organisation from the top down supports incompetence. That doesn’t mean everything it does is wrong: patently, it knows how to design and build all sorts of transport infrastructure.

Some of it, including some of the cycling work, is very good. Being systemically incompetent means that when mistakes happen the organisation cannot recognise those mistakes while they are being made or when it does recognise them it does not fix them and does not know how to. It means that once the organisation gets itself on a track to calamity it cannot get itself off.

In sharing her memories, Lisa Prager talked about the spark at their first meeting: “It was at a Council meeting where Penny was present with a well-organised Water Pressure Group team and me, the lone ranger. That was a spark that we shared forever – the spark to fight for truth and for justice and to make our political elected members accountable and we’re still fighting today”.

Lisa treasures other memories, like “after spending Sunday at Avondale markets on some cause or other, I couldn’t keep up, Penny came to Garnet Station for the evening sunset and for a gloat  ...and about where it will all end – it will never end because Penny will always be in our hearts as an example, as a reminder, of the strength and courage we must all have to challenge that which is not right and to know that we have the strength to do what is right and bring good into this world”.

“I say my farewells but she will always be there in the back, telling me what to do and how to do it and to a degree I will ignore her but when she hits the nail on the head and she turns up proof that’s inexplicably true, when she shows me the documents that I can no longer ignore, then I won’t have any fear in standing up to those who will have us crawl away and be silent”.

For Transparency, Against Corruption

Then there was Vince Siemer who called Penny “the most altruistic and honest person I ever met”. It is always a thankless job fighting corruption. Once when she, as well as former Police officer Grace Haden, applied to join the pro-transparency and anti-corruption group, Transparency International New Zealand, their applications were rejected. Their Website claimed that if an application were rejected a reason would be provided – yet in their case no reason was given. A week later that Website claim had been taken down.

“Yet Penny was unfazed, she had an amazing ability to bounce back from virtually anything and I admired that in her, deeply. I look around, I don’t see five people who together could fill her shoes and that saddens me almost as much as our collective loss. I will remember her in the manner I implore you to and that is to pick up the mantle of activism that is Penny’s legacy and to advance it for the benefit of all New Zealanders in a way that would make her proud”.

Another veteran, peace activist Laurie Ross, says Penny was “one of the most effective consistent anti-war campaigners in New Zealand that I know”. Their paths crossed often over the years at public rallies, meetings and events on human rights, social justice, peace, and the environment. “We worked intensively together with Lisa Er organising the ‘Say NO to War – March for Peace’ event on 19 November 2016 at Aotea Square”.

“It was a major public focus in the week of protest against the New Zealand Defence Industry Conference and War Weapons Expo held at the Auckland Viaduct. We objected to $20 billion of taxpayers’ money being spent on warfare equipment and weapons from the big corporations who also produce nuclear weapons. These weapon producers come to New Zealand to sell war weapons, culture and militarism. They offer small local companies contracts to make components, thus reinforcing the warfare economic system called the ‘military/industrial complex’”.

“They all profit from the perpetuation of warfare which results in millions of children being killed or maimed. It is time to stop this barbaric behaviour. Penny had the courage and skills to work for free (unpaid) to help society be brave enough to say NO to investment in warfare ideology and weaponry as an essential part of establishing the platform for peace-making”.

Partner Julian for the last 13 years noted that Penny would work day in and out, 18 hours a day, seven days a week. She gave up her career, income, energy and time to follow her path and to help people. "She would do the research necessary to make sure everything she said she could back up." They supported each other fully. A final lesson from the last few months is the recognition of the need for something between hospital and hospice to help with holistic care and to understand the dying process”.

“The idea that came out of that was the establishment of a Bright Centre, a respite clinic, to give life to people and to help them live life more abundantly. In fact, the first steps towards developing a business plan have already been taken. “Let’s see if we can do more than we’ve done to date, let’s see if we can make this last legacy for Penny Bright something special for others. Let’s shine a bright light in other peoples’ lives”.

John Eisen: “As Julian indicated, Penny did not die of cancer. Penny’s team had achieved more than a stasis but the beginnings of a reversal of her cancer, something that Auckland Hospital did not do and something that the hospice would not do”. John went on to say how tenaciously Penny fought corruption in New Zealand and then pointed out that one of the most serious areas of corruption is in the medical system itself. He quoted the known statistic according to the Ministry of Health that the medical system “is the second leading cause of death in this country”.

A Battler To The End

This admission was even on the Ministry’s Website – and was only taken down after that statistic was publicised. How corrupt is that? With Penny fighting this newest symptom of corruption, John claimed it was the corruption that killed her. The purpose of the new legacy is to provide people afflicted by cancer with the help that they really need.

In closing the life celebration, long-time partner, Julian took a miniature axe from its place with Penny in the casket and stuck it into the lid, expressing the hope that someone would take it and continue Penny’s fights: “good luck to you” (the axe was removed by the end of the ceremony). Earlier it had been pointed out that it would take five people to fill Penny’s shoes, so maybe that is a forlorn hope.

Getting on in years myself, I can’t stop tears coming to my eyes when I read some of the comments that have been posted online. Not this one from a former teacher so much: “I remember her raising the hemline on her school uniform. The headmistress instructed her to lower it again, so she cut the hem off! She was a real character already back then”.

But these ones: “Penny, you were a treasure, standing up for the little people, the victims of an

unfair system”; “we need a lot more like her to force the powers-that-be to listen to the people and to help change an unfair system”; “I didn't always agree with your views but you're the most selfless, dedicated, hardworking and honest person I ever met”; and “our society needs people who are not the same as everyone else – to provide colour and interest and hopefully to make people think”.

POEM FOR PENNY

- Laurie Ross, 12/10/18

Wistful wisteria draping
Over the protection barrier
As one speeds along life's highway
West past Kingsland
Remembering Penny Bright
Who lived here and took a stand
Shining her light
In dark places
Of Auckland Council corruption
And other issues
Requiring disruption
And so, we continue the play
Hardcore activists
Fighting 'til our dying day