Sue Green and I thought it would be a good idea to call an open meeting of Blackball women and anyone else interested in women’s role in the political history of the working class at the Blackball Working Men’s Club. We got a good turnout. The room was talkative, questioning and lively.
      I did a presentation arguing that active involvement by women was crucial to the history of unions, the Labour Party and the Communist Party. I also argued that the political history of the working class was more than just the history of those unions and parliamentary political parties. Working class women – and men – organised a powerful Prohibition movement which was in many ways in open conflict with unions and the left political parties. Working class women also set up or were important to other community organisations. Although we think of the mothers, wives and daughters of coal miners as toiling away all day and night in their kitchens, most of them were also busy in the streets, the shops, the halls, the pubs, the churches, the school and other centres of working class political life.
      I ended by suggesting that perhaps instead of eight huts a better plan might be for the Blackball Museum of Working Class History to build four huts telling the story of the men, and four lean-to kitchens telling the story of the women. Others in the room had a lot of other good ideas and it was clear that everybody thought equality for women goes without saying.
      The Museum of Working Class History committee when it meets again will tackle how to follow up.
 
pic: the leaders at the front of a Miners Union protest march, Blackball, 1931
 

​Opened in 2009, this little museum is unique in our country. No other museum is dedicated to telling the story of the working class. We owe a lot to the citizens of Blackball and the West Coast unions who came together to found the museum. We owe a lot, above all, to the commitment and energy of Paul Maunder, writer and filmmaker, who had the original vision for the museum and then worked long and hard to make it a reality.
 
The Ministry for Culture and Heritage has now offered $20,000 for the museum to start work on a project building eight huts modelled on the Blackball Coal Mine Company’s single men's huts. Great news! The museum when it asked for this funding said that the huts would ‘tell the full political history of the New Zealand working class from 1890-1935.’
 
I went along to a meeting of the museum committee – as I mentioned in an earlier post – where we talked about what steps to take next. Some of us were a bit startled to find the proposal is for six of the eight huts to portray the lives of working class men and only one to show the lives of working class women. The other is for working class kids. Two of us argued that half the huts should show the lives of women.
 Opened in 2009, this little museum is unique in our country. No other museum is dedicated to telling the story of the working class. We owe a lot to the citizens of Blackball and the West Coast unions who came together to found the museum. We owe a lot, above all, to the commitment and energy of Paul Maunder, writer and filmmaker, who had the original vision for the museum and then worked long and hard to make it a reality.
 
The Ministry for Culture and Heritage has now offered $20,000 for the museum to start work on a project building eight huts modelled on the Blackball Coal Mine Company’s single men's huts. Great news! The museum when it asked for this funding said that the huts would ‘tell the full political history of the New Zealand working class from 1890-1935.’
 
I went along to a meeting of the museum committee – as I mentioned in an earlier post – where we talked about what steps to take next. Some of us were a bit startled to find the proposal is for six of the eight huts to portray the lives of working class men and only one to show the lives of working class women. The other is for working class kids. Two of us argued that half the huts should show the lives of women.
 
Paul Maunder spoke most strongly against the idea. The museum, he says, ‘has always retained the Marxist consciousness’ which means that men were the key workers in the working class. Giving women and men equal numbers of huts as men, Paul argues, is ‘just plain silly.’
 
Watch this space!
Paul Maunder spoke most strongly against the idea. The museum, he says, ‘has always retained the Marxist consciousness’ which means that men were the key workers in the working class. Giving women and men equal numbers of huts as men, Paul argues, is ‘just plain silly.’
 
Watch this space!

This is one of the most dramatic mountains seen from Blackball. A few of my friends may remember that last year I was experimenting with low-res impressionistic photography. Here’s another of those experiments. What can we call this mountain that’s been smacking my gob since childhood? Although I’ve worked hard to be a wordsmith most of my life, I’ve always felt that it’s a bit of an impertinence to slap a label on something as big, as strong and so beyond us as this peak that humps itself nearly two thousand metres up into the sky. At the same time, whenever I look towards it – which I do every day – I feel a need to name it. The official name on maps is Mount Alexander. I don’t know why. The name used by Blackball people is The Lion. After a snowfall you’ll hear people saying: ‘I see there’s a mane on The Lion today.’ A far older name is Kaimata. The most likely meaning of Kaimata is ‘Raw Food.’ Which must have a story behind it. A group of travellers hundreds of years ago getting a bit desperate because they couldn’t make a fire and found themselves forced to eat things raw that they’d normally eat cooked? I like the fact that the peak has three names. Although Te Pāti Māori argues that only te reo names should be used for maunga – an argument I respect – I disagree. If our species is going to go around naming mighty massifs that are many millions of years old then a certain degree of linguistic instability is, maybe, apt? 

I've just finished re-reading this wonderful book. Norman Kirk was our most impressive prime minister in the whole of the twentieth century. Deeply intelligent. Warmly imaginative. He had his blind spots, of course, but I don't know of any other leader who had such a generous vision for a better society - together with the political acumen to make a strikingly good stab at bringing it about. Margaret Hayman needs to be given a big thank-you from posterity for the way her book lets us understand Norman Kirk so much in the round, and so empathetically. She was lucky to work with so remarkable a leader. He was lucky to work with so gifted a biographer.

The book's full of his dry sense of fun.

One example: Queen Elizabeth, meeting him on one occasion, said: 'We don't like Labour Governments - they're not reliable.'
​
Norman Kirk's response: 'Well, there's one here, and I'm not only Labour, but Socialist as well.'