Read an Excerpt
Changing Times
New Zealand Since 1945
By Jenny Carlyon, Diana Morrow Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2013 Jenny Carlyon and Diana Morrow
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-039-3
CHAPTER 1
On an Even Keel?
PEACE, PROSPERITY, CONSENSUS
If the old world ends now with this war, as well it may, I have had visions and dreamed dreams of another New Zealand that might grow into the future on the foundations of the old. This country would have more people to share it. They would be hard-working peasants from Europe that know good land, craftsmen that love making things with their own hands, and all men who want the freedom that comes from an ordered, just community. There would be more children in the sands and sunshine, more small farms, gardens and cottages. Girls would wear bright dresses, men would talk quietly together. Few would be rich, none would be poor. They would fill the land and make it a nation. — John Mulgan, 1945
You get up at a regular hour, go to work, you marry and have a family, a house and a garden, and you live on an even keel till you draw a pension and they bury you decently. The New Zealand way of life is ordained but who ordains it? — Bill Pearson, 1952
On 8 May 1945, New Zealanders greeted the news of the Allies' victory in Europe with jubilation. People danced in the streets, embraced passing strangers and gathered happily in pubs to toast the historic occasion. Newspapers praised the Mother Country's fortitude and stressed the urgency of ensuring that 'never again will the world be plunged into the maelstrom of total war'.
Celebrations continued for days. In Wellington, on 9 May, residents woke to screaming sirens and pealing bells, and poured into the city for the official ceremonies, promenading with patriotic streamers and rosettes. No buses or trams ran during the national thanksgiving service at noon, or the citizen's service in the afternoon. Later, 'laughing, cheering crowds took complete charge of the streets. Bands played in relays. People danced to their music and generally behaved with good humoured but unrestrained exuberance' as 'a spirit of increasing abandon' took hold, culminating in 'scenes of revelry unprecedented in the history of the city'. In New Plymouth:
pent-up feelings after 5½ years of war were let loose when it was decided to 'lift the lid' and let the people give spontaneous expression to their feelings of thankfulness ... And when the sirens gave the symbol, bells and whistles took up the great chorus of rejoicing, and every noise-making device, designed and improvised, was brought into play and pandemonium, which reigned for some minutes, broke out again spasmodically at intervals afterwards.
These revelries, which occurred on a smaller but no less enthusiastic scale in rural towns and communities throughout the country, marked the end of the European conflict. The war in the Pacific continued for another three months. Only after the Japanese surrender on 15 August could Prime Minister Peter Fraser finally announce that 'six long anxious, worrying, dangerous, tragic years' were over.
The logistics of getting thousands of troops home meant that many loved ones did not return before late 1945 or 1946. Homecomings brought joy but frequently also sadness. Some families welcomed sons and brothers down the gangplank; others remained at home, attempting to come to terms with grief. A total of 11,928 New Zealanders lost their lives in the conflict. For Flo Small, whose American husband died in the war:
It didn't worry me that the war was over — war meant nothing to me then. It just became a thing, like you had three meals a day. I had no interest in war because everyone said we were going to win in any case. But I thought the cost was too great.
The war changed our family. Somehow it changed from a nice happy family to a kind of remorseful family. There wasn't the happiness. There wasn't the laughter. There wasn't the birthday parties. When we, the family all got together, uncles, and aunts and everybody, there were too many cousins missing. Too many friends missing.
Feelings of happiness and pride, but also of loss, accompanied the ceremonies to welcome home the 800-strong 28th (Maori) Battalion to Wellington on 23 January 1946. Chiefs, elders and other tribal representatives assembled in a purpose-built marae on Aotea Quay, where a feast for 1500 guests awaited. The Dominion newspaper described the scene:
For six hours the people waited, and at last, just before 2 o-clock in the afternoon, the men of the Maori Battalion appeared ... At the gate of the marae they were met and challenged by Sergeant Anania Te Amohau, brother of the paramount chief of the Arawa tribe ...
The wero completed ... they were admitted to the marae. The kuias, the elderly women, greeted the men with the karanga, crying in unison in the traditional manner. Then the maidens and young warriors gave the powhiri, or welcome, and for some time afterward there followed the most solemn part of the ceremony, the tangihanga, or wailing for the soldiers who did not return but lay dead in other lands.
Mihipeka Edwards, who attended this event, later recalled:
I gazed at the serious men, no longer boys. I wondered to myself what terrible tragedies they had locked away in their minds. I looked at the sorrow, the tears, and the pain of many kuia, women, girls, wives, mothers, and sweethearts. They wept for sons, husbands and mokopuna who would never return to them. They mourned, broken and racked with pain. I saw young mothers with one or two little children clinging to their skirts. Maybe they would be the lucky ones, there to meet their daddies. But I looked at a lot of the others, and my heart filled with sorrow because they would have no one coming home to them.
The New Zealand soldiers fortunate enough to return home needed to reacquaint themselves with wives and children, and vice versa. The process was not always easy; the shadow of war darkened relationships and lives. Many men suffered physical disabilities, ranging from minor ailments to amputation and paralysis; others returned home physically unharmed but with invisible injuries. Some veterans readjusted quickly to civilian life; others found returning to the daily round of work and family responsibilities painful and fraught. Many ex-soldiers simply never talked about their emotional or psychological problems, even with their wives. As the author and war veteran Les Cleveland later observed: 'The problem is that the stiff upper lip business and the manliness and all that prevents you from facing up to this difficulty. So you don't go around airing your problems or asking anybody for assistance.' Alcohol provided an 'emotional anaesthetic', but drinking frequently exacerbated marital strains and had a negative impact on family life. Some veterans suffered years of depression and withdrawal, and many found it impossible to cope with working life. By 1985, 10,070 New Zealand World War II veterans received pensions for psychiatric disorders. During the hopeful, expansive post-war years, when individuals and governments looked determinedly forward, making plans for an era of peace and prosperity, a great many veterans and their families were still fighting the physical and psychic legacies of a debilitating war, engaged in a daily struggle to pretend that things were 'normal'.
Tank driver Tom May, for example, suffered numerous small breakdowns which he initially hid from medical authorities. Following a major breakdown, however, he was hospitalised. Feeling hopeless and suicidal, he 'couldn't explain to anybody what it was. I just went down to it properly. Of course you turn on your best friend. I turned on my wife with a lot of verbal abuse. And I couldn't explain it to myself, but I know very well it was the after-effects of the war.' Nightmares continued to plague him 50 years later. His wife Toni found it increasingly difficult to wake him from these persistent, terrifying dreams: 'The other night ... he starts to scream. I had him by both shoulders shaking him and yelling back. And he gives one big yell, and then another one, and he gets louder and louder and louder until he's really at screaming point, quite piercing ... It's very disturbing and I think, gosh, at seventy-two and you're still having these horrible things.'
Medical orderly Peter Fairlie was sent home in 1944 due to uncontrollable anxiety. After his return, his first marriage failed because of continuing anxiety and unpredictable outbursts of anger and irritability. Beth Fairlie, his second wife, whom he married in 1965, although angry and bitter at his irrational treatment of her and their daughter, was powerless to stop it: 'all of a sudden he'll go off pop about something he's just thought of ... anything out of the blue. He'd start bellowing about something perhaps [that] happened a week before.' Peter, aware of the negative effect his behaviour had, could not control it: 'You open up and then you realise what a mistake you've made. And once you've done the damage you have a job to repair it ... you think well, I won't do that again. But, it goes on and on and on, each day.'
Although for many veterans these sorts of problems made adjusting to peacetime far from peaceful, either for themselves or their families, from a practical perspective, state support helped to ease the transition to civilian life. The New Zealand government planned and worked hard to ensure that its positive vision for the future — wage-earning fathers and comfortably housed stay-at-home mothers and children — became a reality. Aware that returned soldiers deserved particular care and assistance, politicians lost no time introducing a raft of policies designed to help veterans enjoy a prosperous, productive post-war lifestyle.
Rehabilitation
After World War I, many New Zealand soldiers had returned from active service only to face unemployment and financial hardship. To prevent this from reoccurring, state planning began shortly after the outbreak of war. A newly created Rehabilitation Department aimed to match manpower and training with national needs. In 1941, anticipating the demand for houses, it set up training schools for carpentry. By 1948, 24 New Zealand towns and cities contained training centres, which now taught other skills such as bricklaying, joinery, painting and plastering.
The Rehabilitation Department also offered loans for houses, tools, businesses, farms and education. By March 1946, it had helped 1640 ex-servicemen and women into small and medium-sized businesses. The Department allocated 50 per cent of all state rental houses to returned servicemen, or lent money at 2 per cent to help them buy an existing state house or build a new one. By 1948, 8242 ex-servicemen lived in state houses, but 14,137 remained on the waiting list. By March 1955, 17,905 ex-servicemen were settled in state houses; 27,225 had received loans for purchase, and another 21,960 for building.
Many New Zealand veterans had struggled after World War I to farm marginal, often useless, land acquired through government loans. The Rehabilitation Department, determined not to repeat this scenario, granted suitable land and offered ongoing advice and assistance. It also stipulated that those who took up the offer to farm must have some knowledge of farm life or training. By 1955, the Department had settled 12,236 ex-soldiers on farms, and 1464 remained on the waiting list. When the journalist Nell Hartley visited a new farm settlement for former servicemen at Whangapoua in the Coromandel in the early 1950s, she found that:
The 12 ex-servicemen and their families could not believe their luck ... The balloted farms had been carved out of 2000 acres of scrubland, previously owned by three local farmers. Properties varied from a 111 acre dairy holding to a 350 acre mixed farm ... the settlers looked out onto gentle undulating land that sloped to the distant Whangapoua Harbour. Each valley, although still rough at the edges, was alive with industry ... while families watched the progress from temporary pre-fabricated huts.
When she returned several years later, the bush was gone and:
The valleys running back to the range were now shiny green, like fresh paint. For all I knew, Whangapoua could have been the most fertile spot in New Zealand. The farmhouses which had replaced the prefabs suggested it was. They were substantial, middle-class dwellings, the earlier ones having been demolished or refurbished for farm hands.
Although the combined impact of various government policies made the rehabilitation effort after World War II a success, returning to a comfortable life of plenty was not immediate, for either veterans or the general populace. Contrary to expectations, controls introduced during the war remained on almost everything — imports, foreign exchange, land sales, rents, retail prices, marketing, building and petrol. Shortages continued; electricity was rationed, as was clothing, sugar, tea, meat, butter and cream. Houses continued to be in short supply. In 1941 the state curtailed house building to divert building resources to the war effort. In 1944, when construction recommenced, 47,000 applications for state houses remained unsatisfied; 15,000 in Auckland alone, including more than 2000 from returned servicemen supposedly receiving priority. Consequently these people crowded into substandard central-city housing in slum conditions, or were housed in transit camps in Victoria Park and the Domain.
By the late 1940s, the public's post-war optimism had given way to disillusionment. Consumer goods remained scarce and retail prices rose. Unions, disgruntled with economic stabilisation and compulsory arbitration, undertook seemingly endless stoppages and go-slows. The public, disenchanted with the industrial unrest, accused the Labour government of prevaricating and kowtowing to unions' ceaseless demands. As the global Cold War grew warmer, Prime Minister Peter Fraser's fear of the threat posed by communist Russia caused him to reintroduce conscription in 1949. The peace so joyously welcomed in 1945 looked shaky and possibly short-lived. National's election slogan: 'Make the pound go further' attracted voters alienated by Labour's austere policies. National promised to increase freedom of choice, lift restrictions and import controls, reduce bureaucracy and state interference, tame militant unions and end compulsory unionism. This agenda obviously struck a responsive chord as the party won a twelve-seat majority in 1949. For the next 35 years (with the exception of two brief three-year intervals) National dominated New Zealand politics.
Despite the rhetoric, there was little difference between the two parties. Ormond Wilson, a former Labour MP, joked in 1953 about the parties' respective leaders: 'Q. What is the difference between Walter and Sid? A. Sid is a paler pink.' Both parties formed governments that were essentially conservative in the business of 'managing the economy'. National accused Labour of socialism when it introduced social welfare and vowed to reduce it, but once in power accepted and even added to it. Similarly, National won the 1949 election with promises of lifting controls and regulations. It did indeed start to deregulate, but reality (in the form of balance of payments deficits, inflation and the incipient threat of economic woes) saw it pull back and quickly reimpose some controls and taxes. Both National and Labour kept a tight grip on production and distribution. Keith Sinclair has noted that 'Under National, New Zealand was not noticeably nearer to free enterprise; the benefits of competition were not much in evidence ...' Most National politicians extolled 'free enterprise' on the hustings but were no less prepared to bestow the state's largesse on those they deemed deserving. Farmers and businessmen, for example, received help from the successive National ministries of Massey, Coates, Holyoake and Muldoon, all of which continued with state ownership and management of the many trading enterprises they inherited.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Changing Times by Jenny Carlyon, Diana Morrow. Copyright © 2013 Jenny Carlyon and Diana Morrow. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
