The rage cools 50 years after waterfront dispute

Veterans from both sides share with MATHEW DEARNALEY their memories of an industrial dispute that brought New Zealanders to the very brink of civil war.

For five long months in 1951, Detective Sergeant David Paterson's job was to stalk protesting wharfies and try to silence them by shutting down their printing presses.

Today, as survivors of the 151-day waterfront dispute prepare to commemorate its 50th anniversary in February, Mr Paterson recommends those wanting to know about that tumultuous event to consult a book by a man whose home he once raided.

The former Special Branch detective, now 86 and the life and soul of a Paraparaumu rest-home, was known to the wharfies as "Call Me Dave" for the persistently affable manner in which he tried to squeeze them for information.

One of his prime targets was Dick Scott, author of 151 Days, which bills itself as the official history of "the great waterfront lockout and supporting strikes, February 15-July 15, 1951."

The book is scarce these days, and Mr Paterson regrets lending out a copy which never came back, although he calls it "a bit left-wing" and remains part of that section of society which insists that the 8000 deregistered waterside workers were on strike.

Mr Scott was expelled from the Federation of Labour for refusing to retract statements in the book about its irascible president, Fintan Patrick Walsh, who helped the Holland Government to defeat the wharfies.

About 12,000 workers struck in their support, but most obeyed Walsh's call to stay at work while the Government drafted in more than 3000 troops to move the country's freight. The dispute is estimated to have cost New Zealand up to £150 million.

Mr Scott, now of Mt Eden and aged 77 but still writing books, is amused to hear that the man who once burst into his former Johnsonville home searching for an illegal printing press is recommending his work.

He ran the Waterside Workers' Union paper the Transport Worker in clandestine fashion as his official job was editing the Public Service Journal and moonlighting of any sort was frowned on - let alone for a banned organisation.

He had taken the precaution of moving his printing equipment ahead of Mr Paterson's raid, so nothing was found, but the policeman recalls confiscating a large press later in the dispute as well as seizing a safe from the Freezing Workers' Union.

Mr Paterson says the dispute was a tedious time in which he and his staff had to work long hours trying to coax information out of waterfront workers who were "friendly enough but told you nothing."

Unionists are planning commemorations in Auckland and Wellington, including a film show in both cities, but Mr Paterson says he is not mobile enough to make an appearance for old times' sake.

He describes a ban on supplying watersiders' families with food as "ridiculous" and doubts whether any police officers would have taken pleasure in enforcing it.

But he says the public had become fed up with interminable strikes and the aim of a sweeping set of emergency regulations was to protect the economy by shutting financial support to the waterside workers, from within New Zealand and overseas.

"We thought Moscow was behind it because the watersiders were full of praise for Joe Stalin - we didn't know in those days where communism was going because it had travelled right across Asia and we didn't know if it had aspirations towards the Western Pacific."

Former Auckland meat union president and 1951 waterfront worker Frank Barnard, who is organising a reunion at the Pt Chevalier RSA on February 25, denies doing Moscow's bidding.

"Definitely not. I was working for watersiders and their families against the monopolies."

But he concurs with Mr Paterson in his belief that the police had reservations about depriving watersiders of sustenance, citing a raid on an illegal meat depot he ran from the garage of his Ponsonby home.

A police sergeant, on being assured that the meat was not for sale but was being given away free, remarked that it was going to a good cause and drove off.

The officer might not have been so lenient had he known how Mr Barnard punished one "scab" worker by smearing steps in front of his house with dripping and then chasing him home.

"We saw him a week later with his leg in plaster," chuckles Mr Barnard, now aged 75.

Mr Scott, who has since published more than a dozen books, including The Parihaka Story and its sequel Ask That Mountain, does not doubt the Cold War dimensions of the dispute. He believes the Holland Government wanted to squeeze wages to build up funds for the Korean War effort, and saw the waterfront union as a threat to its militarism.

So did the United States, which he says diverted military planes from covert operations in Asia to fly cargo across Cook Strait.

He is more measured than 1951 waterfront union president Jock Barnes, who died in May still bitter at what he claimed was capitulation to fascism by a nation that only a decade earlier sacrificed thousands of young lives trying to stop its spread.

But Mr Scott believes New Zealand at least reached the brink of fascism, to a point where it became illegal even to voice opinions in support of waterside workers.

"It was not the New Zealand we knew - it was an incredible time - strange to live in a country where you could be breaking the law by being overheard speaking."

He says this was tolerated because of a propaganda offensive by the Government and mainstream press exposing the wharfies to public hatred by depicting them as bloated caricatures, while the Auckland Star urged the police to shoot street demonstrators.

The anniversary film exhibition will include rare footage of riotous scenes outside the Auckland Town Hall and a demonstration broken up by police batons in Queen St.

Filmed in 16mm by former dairy union secretary Lou Robertson, it disappeared for about 20 years before being found in canisters under an Auckland house by a new owner of the property.

Mr Robertson is dead, but Auckland playwright Dean Parker, who has used some of the footage in a limited-circulation documentary called Shattered Dreams, made inquiries with relatives of Mr Robertson as far away as Japan in a bid to find it.

The footage is now with the New Zealand Film Archive, which is working with the Trade Union History Project on the exhibition, to open in Wellington in February before being brought to Auckland around May.