Sonja Davies dead

SONJA DAVIES, a life-long battler for women's rights, peace and social justice and whose life was described by Prime Minister Helen Clark as a triumph of the human spirit over adversity, died yesterday in Wellington, aged 81.
Until recently she was a familiar figure in Wairarapa, having retired to Masterton in 1994 after a life spent on the front lines of the labour movement.
She continued in her retirement to lend her energy and name to campaigns to improve the lot of everyday families and was a key supporter of Georgina Beyer's successful 1999 bid to win the Wairarapa electorate for the Labour Party.
Ms Davies left Wairarapa for Wellington towards the end of 2003 and until recently lived by herself in a flat on The Terrace.
Ms Davies was the first woman vice president of the Federation of Labour ? the predecessor of today's Council of Trade Unions ? between 1981-1987.
She also held office for the Nelson Hospital Board, Nelson City Council and was MP for Pencarrow from 1987 to 1993.
As a unionist, a feminist and an MP, Ms Davies fought for pay equity and equal opportunity. But Parliament was an iniquitous place. She found even when a law she had worked hard to introduce, such as pay equity, was passed, the National government was able to reverse it within weeks of taking over in 1990.
"I really wept the day pay equity was overturned," she said in 1993.
After retiring Ms Davies said she did not miss her time in Parliament. She devoted herself to her garden, her pets and to writing a second volume of her autobiography.
Her first autobiography Bread and Roses was made into a film in 1993 and traced her life as an activist and trade unionist until 1980.
One of the scenes in the film featured protests against the closure of the Nelson railway line in 1955. Ms Davies was at the heart of the the movement and became one of the organisers.
Women protesters sat on the tracks near Nelson and refused to move until they were arrested about a week later. Ms Davies was convicted of being on railway property without a ticket.
At one point during the protest, a locomotive was used to try to scare them off.
Ms Davies remembers being asked by Genevieve Picot, who played her in the film, how she managed to stay seated as the locomotive came steaming towards her.
"She said to me 'I knew it was going to stop, you didn't. How many sets of underwear did you go through'?" Ms Davies said.
"I told her I was just too angry to think about it at the time."
Ms Davies' deep convictions were evident ever since her first foray into industrial relations as a teenage nurse in Wellington Public Hospital in the 1940s.
She and her peers were bottom of the hospital pecking order and the hours were long and hard. Her first attempt to organise a union beached itself against the will of the hospital's formidable matron who evaporated support for the stillborn union.
Ms Davies was born Sonja Margaret Loveday Dempsey in Wallaceville, Upper Hutt, on November 11, 1923. She studied at King Edward Technical College and later worked as trainee nurse, a shop assistant and a library assistant.
She became involved in unions in her early 20s, when she and her second husband, trade unionist Charles Davies, were living and working in orchards near Nelson.
When they moved to Nelson, Mr Davies became a full-time union secretary for several unions. But after he suffered a heart attack, they swapped roles.
Ms Davies was awarded an honorary degree from Victoria University in 1987. She also received the country's highest honour, the Order of New Zealand.
She had two children ? a son and a daughter. Her daughter Penny died in 1994 after a long fight against motor neurone disease. Her father was an American marine whom Ms Davies had met while she was a nurse. They had been married for less than a year when he was killed in the war in the Pacific.
Ms Davies' son Mark died in a tunnelling accident in Turangi in 1978.
Ms Davies has had many escapes from serious illness. She contracted tuberculosis after her first marriage and spent years in and out of hospital conquering the disease and had frequent battles with pneumonia.