A tale of two deaths (from the class war in New Zealand)

[Philip L Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From 'revolution' #12, April-June, 2000:


A TALE OF TWO DEATHS
The deaths of Christine Clarke and Frederick Evans, almost a century apart,
tell us a lot about the dire state of the remnants of the labour movement,
says Philip Ferguson



When Christine Clarke died in hospital on the last day of the last century,
she became only the second person to lose their life in an industrial
dispute in New Zealand's history.  Clarke was participating in a port
workers' picket line at Lyttelton (the port of Christchurch) on December
29, when a four-wheel drive attempting to burst through the picket line hit
her and knocked her unconscious.  She never regained consciousness and on
December 31 her family had her life support turned off.

While Clarke was on the picket line to show her solidarity with the port
workers against the port company which was trying to undermine wages and
conditions by contracting out coal handling, there was an immediate rush to
play down any idea that she was a labour martyr.  Her death was officially
recorded as a 'road accident', and entered the statistics for the New Year
holiday road toll!

All sides - from the port union to the employers to politicians, and even
her family - preferred to erase her role as a working class activist.
Instead, as Bruce Ansley rather oddly put it in the 'NZ Listener', "she was
allowed to be what she was: wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend,
innocent."

Yet Christine Clarke had been a member of the Labour Party and left it in
the 1980s in disgust at its 'new right' economics, and was later a
founder-member of Jim Anderton's NLP and Alliance.  She made a political
decision in all these matters, just as she made a political decision to be
on that picket that fateful day.  Why the rush to present her as anything,
and everything, other than a politically-minded woman who stood up for
workers?

Watching the rather sickening rush to depoliticise her death - and
therefore rob it of any social meaning and her of her politics - I thought
of that other death in the class struggle and how differently it had been
treated.

When young engine-driver Frederick Evans was batoned to death by a
policeman during the Waihi miners' strike in 1912, the response by his
friends and comrades - and by the other side - was very different indeed.

The Reform Party led by William Massey had just come to power, determined
to smash the labour movement, especially its left-wing, the syndicalist
'Red Feds'.  It gave massive assistance to the Waihi employers, sending
police reinforcements, prosecuting and imprisoning over 60 unionists and
registering a scab union.  The mines could only be re-opened thanks to this
government intervention.

The Waihi strike came to a bloody climax on November 12, when scabs stormed
the miners' hall and Frederick Evans, one of its defenders, had his life
taken by a police baton.  The victorious scabs and employers then drew up
lists of hundreds of strikers, forcing them to leave the town.

Boss, worker and government were in no doubt that Evans was a casualty in
the class war.  His substantial gravestone at Waikaraka Cemetery in
Auckland bore the words "He died for his class" and became a symbol of
militant working class struggle.

The following year saw the largest assembly yet of representatives of the
NZ working class.  That year also saw the crushing of the labour movement,
especially the 'Red Feds', in the maritime strike, complete with scenes of
'Massey's Cossacks' (mounted farmers with wooden batons) riding into ports
to re-open them.  The daily street fighting which followed was likened by
Liberal Party leader Sir Joseph Ward to scenes from the Mexican revolution.

Despite a week-long general strike, the workers lost.  As the left-wing
paper 'The Maoriland Worker' noted, the workers' organisation was "too
incomplete to meet the forces of the employers, the farmer scabs, and the
armed and legal power of the state."

Sadly, the outcome of this period of defeats was the establishment of the
Labour Party and a century of treachery.  Which brings us back to Christine
Clarke.

The practices of the port employers which led to the strike and picket line
in Lyttelton became the norm in the 1980s thanks to the last Labour
government.  That government's cut-throat attack on the working class
emboldened employers across the country to undermine long-established and
often hard-won employees' rights.  The Labour Party revealed that, without
a doubt, it is a weapon of capital against labour.

It was the continuation of the anti-working class offensive begun by Labour
that had Christine Clarke on that picket on that grim and tragic day.

But, of course, we are supposed to forget all this, now that Helen Clark -
a leading member of that last Labour government - is running a shining new
Labour government and has drawn in her former opponents in the Alliance to
help.

As Labour tries to make its record in the 1980s disappear, and proclaim the
bold new world of the 'Third Way', they want no embarassments, no reminders
of class conflict.  And so, particularly since the death of Christine
Clarke came *after* the formation of this government, we are supposed to
pretend she was a holiday road toll victim.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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